Search

Classical quantifiers (like "all," "some," and "none") express relationships between two sets, allowing us to make generalizations (like "no elephants fly"). Devices like these appear to be universal in human languages. Is the ubiquity of quantification due to a universal property of the human mind or is it attributable to more gradual convergence through cultural evolution? We investigated whether classical quantifiers are present in a new language emerging in isolation from other languages, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). An observational study of historical data collected in the 1990s found evidence of potential quantifier forms. To confirm the quantificational meaning of these signs, we designed a production study that elicited, from three age cohorts of NSL signers (N = 17), three types of quantifiers: universal (all), existential (some), and negative (none). We find evidence for these classical quantifiers in the very first generation of signers, suggesting they may reflect a universal property of human cognition or a very rapid construction process.

Previous studies have found correlations between parent input and child language outcomes, providing prima facie evidence for a causal relation. However, this could also reflect the effects of shared genes. The present study removed this genetic confound by measuring English vocabulary growth in 29 preschool-aged children (21 girls) aged 31-73 months and 17 infants (all girls) aged 15-32 months adopted from China and Eastern Europe and comparing it to speech produced by their adoptive mothers. Vocabulary growth in both groups was correlated with maternal input features; in infants with mean-length of maternal utterance, and in preschoolers with both mean-length of utterance and lexical diversity. Thus, input effects on language outcomes persist even in the absence of genetic confounds.

Korean is a classifier language in which bare nouns are not obligatorily number-marked. Children learning other classifier languages like Japanese and Mandarin are late in learning the plural morpheme. In this paper, we present two datasets that suggest that Korean plural marker "-tul" is acquired much earlier, in contrast to what has been previously claimed. In a comprehension study, we find that Korean children begin acquiring this morpheme by age 3, showing adult-like performance by age 4. We suggest that the higher frequency of plural marking on both types and tokens of nouns and the consistent marking of plural in the domain of definite nouns may facilitate Korean plural acquisition.

Previous studies have found a processing difference between unaccusative sentences and unergative sentences. Theyargued that the difference is derived from a syntactic difference, i.e. an unaccusative sentence involves movement whereas anunergative sentence does not. In this study, we are going to show that those studies are uninterpretable due to uncontrolledstimuli and confounds in the materials. After examining their data anlysis, we argue that the effects they found does seem to bestable. This reopens the question whether there is a syntactic difference between unaccusative and unergative verbs.

Although there is compelling evidence for cascading activation in adult lexical planning, there is little research on how and when cascaded processing develops. We use a picture naming task to compare word planning in adults and five-year-old children. We manipulated image codability (name agreement) and name frequency, factors that affect lexical selection and phonological encoding, respectively. These factors had qualitatively similar influences on naming response time in both populations, suggesting similar underlying planning processes. Critically, we found an under-additive interaction between codability and frequency such that the frequency effect was attenuated when name agreement was low. This interaction generalises across experiments and languages and can be simulated in a planning architecture in which phonological forms become activated before lexical selection is complete. These results provide evidence for cascaded processing at an earlier age than previous studies, suggesting that informational cascades are a fundamental property of the production architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactic recursion is argued to be a key property of naturallanguages, allowing us to create an infinite number ofutterances from a finite number of words and rules. Somehave argued that recursion is uniquely human. There are atleast two possibilities for the origins of recursion: 1)Recursion is a property of the language faculty. 2) Recursionis an historical accomplishment and is culturally constructedover millennia. Here we ask whether an emerging signlanguage, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), exhibitssyntactic recursion by comparing the language of the firstthree age cohorts of signers. Signers (n=27) watched anddescribed vignettes designed to elicit relative clauses. Resultssuggest that signers from all three cohorts have strategies tofulfill the discourse function of relative clauses, picking outan individual from a set. The grammatical form of theutterances differs across cohorts, with signers from latercohorts clearly producing embedded structures.

How language represents meaning remains a central topic of debate in linguistics. On some accounts, the nounphrases in a sentence are identified semantically by a list of independent atomic labels (thematic roles), ordered relative to oneanother depending on the position of the nouns around the verb (e.g., AGENT-THEME-GOAL). Others instead capture suchinterdependencies with complex, non-atomic event structures (e.g., [x CAUSE [y TO-COME-TO-BE-AT z]]). Here, we usestructural priming to investigate the psychological reality of these two theories of semantic representation. On the thematicrole approach, we should expect to see priming between theme-first locatives and prepositional-object datives (both VP-NP-PPsyntactically) precisely because their thematic ordering is consistent across the two constructions. The event structure approachposits no such minimal semantic structural similarity, such that we should not see priming cross-constructionally. We find onlywithin-construction priming (N=52) and not across-construction priming (total N=344), in favor of event structures.

While most formal semantic accounts of focus-sensitive particles such as ‘only’ acknowledge that their interpretationrequires the integration of contextual information with the linguistic representation, it is less clear how this interaction playsout in real-time. Recent psycholinguistic work in this domain favors an incremental processing story, but divergent resultselsewhere complicate this picture. Our findings from two Visual World eye-tracking studies (n = 33, 32) help resolve thisconflict, and confirm the existence of an adult processing asymmetry: sentences in which ‘only’ associates with the subject(’Only John bought an apple’) take longer to process than object-only sentences (’John only bought an apple’). We find thatcurrent accounts of the representation and exhaustification of propositional alternatives invoked by ’only’ do not explain thiseffect. We suggest that differences at the event-structural level — which propositional alternatives arguably map onto — mightexplain the asymmetry.

The Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH) predicts that the subject of an unaccusative is mentally reactivated in the objectposition. Previous psycholinguistic studies have reported evidence of reactivation (Friedmann et al 2008, Koring et al 2012).However, these studies did not equate the unaccusative and unergative stimuli, resulting in confounds which jeopardize theirconclusions. We reexamined UH with two Visual World Paradigm experiments carefully controlled for the potential confoundsin the previous studies. On each trial, participants (n=40; n=52) saw 4 black-and-white drawings and heard a sentence. In thetest condition, but not the control condition, one image was semantically related to subject of the sentence. We measured theproportion of looks to the target image at three time regions after the verb onset and found a robust match-effect (p’s

Verbs may refer to the means (I bumped into the lamp) oroutcome (I broke the lamp) of an action (cf. Rappaport Hovav& Levin, 2010; Talmy, 1985). Do young children expectlanguage to encode this distinction? Children’s imitationpatterns suggest that they analyze nonlinguistic events inthese terms. When a head-touch is the simplest actionavailable, toddlers include just the outcome, not the means, intheir own imitation (Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002). Weask whether syntax influences this inference. An experimenterwith her hands occupied made a toy activate with a headtouch,using either Means-focused (I’m daxing to my toy) orOutcome-focused language (I’m daxing my toy). Toddlersthen imitated the action. Means- but not Outcome-focuslanguage encouraged children to include the distinctive headtouch,overriding the standard ‘rational imitation’ effect. Thissuggests that toddlers’ knowledge of argument structureincludes an understanding of a means/outcome divide in verbmeaning.

A well-known typological observation is the dominance of subject-initial word orders, SOV and SVO, across the world's languages. Recent findings from gestural language creation paradigms offer possible explanations for the prevalence of SOV. When asked to gesture transitive events with an animate agent and inanimate patient, gesturers tend to produce SOV order, regardless of their native language biases. Interestingly, when the patient is animate, gesturers shift away from SOV to use of other orders, like SVO and OSV. Two competing hypotheses have been proposed for this switch: the noisy channel account (Gibson et al., 2013) and the role conflict account (Hall, Mayberry, & Ferreira, 2013). We set out to distinguish between these two hypotheses, disentangling event reversibility and patient animacy, by looking at gestural sequences for events with two inanimate participants (inanimate-inanimate, reversible). We replicated the previous findings of a preference for SOV order when describing animate-inanimate, irreversible events as well as a decrease in the use of SOV when presented with animate-animate, reversible events. Accompanying the drop in SOV, in a novel condition we observed an increase in the use of SVO and OSV orders when describing events involving two animate entities. In sum, we find that the observed avoidance of SOV order in gestural language creation paradigms when the event includes an animate agent and patient is driven by the animacy of the participants rather than the reversibility of the event. We suggest that findings from gestural creation paradigms are not automatically linkable to spoken language typology.

How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3-4-year-old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verb learning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also inform children's interpretation of transitive verbs either with or without the causal/inchoative alternation ("She broke the lamp/the lamp broke"). In Experiment 1, we examined spatiotemporal continuity. Children saw scenes with puppets that approached a toy in a distinctive manner, and toys that lit up or played a sound. In the causal events, the puppet contacted the object, and activation was immediate. In the noncausal events, the puppet stopped short before reaching the object, and the effect occurred after a short pause (apparently spontaneously). Children expected novel verbs used in the inchoative transitive/intransitive alternation to refer to spatiotemporally intact causal interactions rather than to "gap" control scenes. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the temporal order of sub-events, holding spatial relationships constant, and provided evidence for only one verb frame (either transitive or intransitive). Children mapped transitive verbs to scenes where the agent's action closely preceded the activation of the toy over scenes in which the timing of the two events was switched, but did not do so when they heard an intransitive construction. These studies reveal that children's expectations about transitive verbs are at least partly driven by their nonlinguistic understanding of causal events: children expect transitive syntax to refer to scenes where the agent's action is a plausible cause of the outcome. These findings open a wide avenue for exploration into the relationship between children's linguistic knowledge and their nonlinguistic understanding of events.