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Evidence from Art (History), perceptual psychology, and (psycho-)linguistics support the claim that in Western culture (or rather within left-to-right writing languages), people depict or visualize more important or salient figures to the left. However, linguistics studies investigating this topic almost exclusively use active sentences with standard Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) syntax as stimuli, where the subject takes the role of an agent. However natural language exhibits much more syntactical variation. To determine if this pattern is also present when the less common syntax is used, we asked native German, Spanish, and Czech speakers (N=300) to draw situations representing ten sentences varying in syntactic structure. These drawings, simplified versions of the mental representation of the situation, provide a glimpse into the conceptualization of the scenes. The spatial placement of the agent figures in the sentences was coded. Results show that although the asymmetrical effect is strong in prototypical SVO sentences, where the subject has the function of an agent and the object a function of a patient, the effect is weaker or disappears in passive sentences, where the subject at the first position is a patient and object on the second position is an agent, as well as in topicalized (OVS) sentences. Furthermore, we found cross-linguistic differences, which suggests that the character of the bias is language-specific. We postulate that placing the agent to the left is only one of the factors influencing spatial placement. The other factor playing an important role is the naming order.

Evidence from Art (History), perceptual psychology, and (psycho-)linguistics support the claim that in Western culture (or rather within left-to-right writing languages), people depict or visualize more important or salient figures to the left. However, linguistics studies investigating this topic almost exclusively use active sentences with standard Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) syntax as stimuli, where the subject takes the role of an agent. However natural language exhibits much more syntactical variation. To determine if this pattern is also present when the less common syntax is used, we asked native German, Spanish, and Czech speakers (N=300) to draw situations representing ten sentences varying in syntactic structure. These drawings, simplified versions of the mental representation of the situation, provide a glimpse into the conceptualization of the scenes. The spatial placement of the agent figures in the sentences was coded. Results show that although the asymmetrical effect is strong in prototypical SVO sentences, where the subject has the function of an agent and the object a function of a patient, the effect is weaker or disappears in passive sentences, where the subject at the first position is a patient and object on the second position is an agent, as well as in topicalized (OVS) sentences. Furthermore, we found crosslinguistic differences, which suggests that the character of the bias is language-specific. We postulate that placing the agent to the left is only one of the factors influencing spatial placement. The other factor playing an important role is the naming order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly and funny – boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics, and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense.

This article concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the "music" found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say "it is music in my ears"? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly and funny – boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics, and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a "musical" sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the way Italian children of different ages manage syntactic and narrative competence in Italian L1. The data were elicited by the story Frog, where are you?, created in 1969 by Mercer Meyer and extensively used in several L1 and L2 studies. The study aims at identifying the cognitive prerequisites on which linguistic development is founded at the ages investigated (4, 7 and 10) together with the language specific influence that Italian may have on the way children conceptualize and express information throughout a narrative text. Some crosslinguistic questions are finally considered in order to compare our results with those concerning languages other than Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Literatura y Lingüística is the property of Universidad Catolica Cardenal Raul Silva Henriquez and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper discusses hedges such as that I know of in The train is not late, that I know of, which form a hitherto undocumented polarity sensitive construction that can be found in a number of European languages. Internally, they resist negation, in ways reminiscent of parenthetical as-clauses, and other parenthetical constructions. On the basis of a small corpus of English and Dutch occurrences of the hedge construction, I outline the distributional properties and internal structure. A number of restrictions are uncovered regarding the subject of the hedge clause (in particular: universally quantified and indefinite subjects are ruled out, second person subjects are limited to questions), which point to a strong pragmatic effect of point of view, but still require further study. The polarity sensitive status of the hedge is derived from the interaction of strong verbs (know, be aware of, etc.) and the pragmatic requirement of hedges that they tone down a statement. Together, these require that the hedge be within the scope of negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the methods of consonant inventories and discriminant analysis to examine the variation in word-initial consonants produced by 24 children acquiring six Mayan languages. The range of variation in the consonants that children produce has significant implications for theories that predict children follow universal processes of consonant development as well as theories that predict individual children exhibit unique developments. The results show variation exists between children acquiring the same language as well as between children acquiring different languages. Both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the structure of the adult phonologies restricts the range of the children's variation within each language even though the children omit a variety of word-initial prefixes. The investigation of language acquisition in related languages reveals how children's attention to the adult language limits the operation of both universal and individual processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a free-listing task is used to elicit verbal concepts from a given semantic domain, it provides two indicators of the salience of each word for that linguistic community. These are the proportion of the subjects who include a word in their lists, and its average ranking priority position across the lists. The data also contain cues about the cognitive representation of the semantic domain, and in particular about the conceptual closeness among words. Closely associated words tend to prime each other and to appear in the lists in close succession. Clusters of mutually associated terms can be recognised, listed in one another's company, although with different priority for different subjects. We applied this approach to the domain of colour terms, converting lists for fourteen European languages into matrices of inter-term similarity, for analysis with multidimensional scaling (MDS) and hierarchical clustering. Two-dimensional MDS solutions or 'maps' were typically required to reflect two competing criteria by which terms were sequenced. Speakers of each language tended to follow a salience gradient, but also made separate clusters of fully-chromatic concepts - colour terms in strictu sensu - and unsaturated or desaturated concepts defined primarily by lightness rather than by hue. This and other features recurred across the languages despite their geographical and phylogenetic diversity, as cross-cultural universals in colour language, in addition to the well-known regularities governing basic colour terms and the stages of colour-lexicon development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study addresses the question of how the cross-linguistic differences between Greek and Italian impact the comprehension of relative clauses by typically developing children. Specifically, we tested the effect of overt morphological case marking on the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses by children in Greek and in Italian in a crosslinguistic perspective. We did this by carrying out two comprehension experiments. In the first, we compared the comprehension of relative clauses in Greek and Italian. To obtain comparable data, we neutralized case marking in Greek DPs, and we achieved the distinction between subject and object relatives through number agreement on the embedded verb in both languages. In the second experiment, performed only with Greek children, we employed overt case marking on DPs. The results indicate that in the absence of morphological cues the Greek children performed like the Italian ones; the effect of overt case marking contributed significantly to the increase of the Greek children''s performance on object relatives. We propose an account in terms of intervention on the dependency between the relative head and its copy (as in ), and of intervention on the AGREE relation between the agreement node and the subject in the thematic position. This double violation is responsible for the different acquisition path of different types of object relative clauses. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

English listeners categorize more of a [k-t] continuum as “t” after [ʃ] than [s] (Mann & Repp, 1981). This bias could be due to compensation for coarticulation (Mann & Repp, 1981) or auditory contrast between the fricatives and the stops (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). In Japanese, surface [ʃk, ʃt, sk, st] clusters arise via palatalization and vowel devoicing from /sik, sit, suk, sut/, and acoustic vestiges of the devoiced vowels remain in the fricative. On the one hand, compensation for coarticulation with the devoiced vowel would cancel out compensation for coarticulation with the fricative, and listeners would not show any response bias. On the other hand, if the stop contrasts spectrally with the fricative, listeners should respond “t” more often after [ʃi̥] than [su̥]. Experiment 1 establishes that [k] and [t] coarticulate with preceding voiced [i, u], voiceless [i̥, u̥], and [ʃ, s]. Experiment 2 shows that both Japanese and English listeners respond “t” more often after [ʃi̥] than [su̥], as predicted by auditory contrast. English listeners’ “t” responses also varied after voiced vowels, but those of Japanese listeners did not. Experiment 3 shows that this difference reflects differences in their phonetic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the Danish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), first language acquisition of 183 Danish children has been studied longitudinally on a monthly basis (8-30 months). Focussing on production, we study early lexical development from the very first word until roughly 100 words are produced, dividing this period into the stages of first-1, -10, -25, -50 and -100 words. We analyse Danish children's first words with respect to semantic-pragmatic content, sound structure, and composition of the early lexicon based on formal linguistic categories. Comparing Danish results crosslinguistically reveals both the overall typicality of Danish children's first words as well as striking differences for some single words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the semantic elements of Manner and Path onto syntactic units when both the Manner and the Path of the moving Figure occur simultaneously and are salient in the event depicted. Both universal and language-specific patterns were evident in our data. Children used the semantic-syntactic mappings preferred by adult speakers of their own languages, and even expressed subtle syntactic differences that encode different relations between Manner and Path in the same way as their adult counterparts (i.e., Manner causing vs. incidental to Path). However, not all types of semantics-syntax mappings were easy for children to learn (e.g., expressing Manner and Path elements in two verbal clauses). In such cases, Turkish- and Japanese-speaking children frequently used syntactic patterns that were not typical in the target language but were similar to patterns used by English-speaking children, suggesting some universal influence. Thus, both language-specific and universal tendencies guide the development of complex spatial expressions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Languages differ in how they categorize spatial relations: While German differentiates between containment ( in ) and support ( auf ) with distinct spatial words-(a) den Kuli IN die Kappe stecken ("put pen in cap"); (b) die Kappe AUF den Kuli stecken ("put cap on pen")-Korean uses a single spatial word ( kkita ) collapsing (a) and (b) into one semantic category, particularly when the spatial enclosure is tight-fit. Korean uses a different word (i.e., netha ) for loose-fits (e.g., apple in bowl). We tested whether these differences influence the attention of the speaker. In a crosslinguistic study, we compared native German speakers with native Korean speakers. Participants rated the similarity of two successive video clips of several scenes where two objects were joined or nested (either in a tight or loose manner). The rating data show that Korean speakers base their rating of similarity more on tight- versus loose-fit, whereas German speakers base their rating more on containment versus support ( in vs. auf ). Throughout the experiment, we also measured the participants' eye movements. Korean speakers looked equally long at the moving Figure object and at the stationary Ground object, whereas German speakers were more biased to look at the Ground object. Additionally, Korean speakers also looked more at the region where the two objects touched than did German speakers. We discuss our data in the light of crosslinguistic semantics and the extent of their influence on spatial cognition and perception.