1,721,090 research outputs found
Deriving verb-cluster variation in Dutch and German
Full text linkThe difference in West-Germanic V(erb)-clusters, right-branching (Dutch) and left-branching (German), follows from a difference in the acquisition of V-second. That decisive factor had already been acquired before any V-cluster appeared in the child’s speech. Longitudinal Dutch child data show that modals and aspectuals develop a rightward selection that carries over into the V-cluster. The German child data do not show such a development. Automatic phrasal formation by the acquisition procedure may yield the V-cluster without assuming V-movement from an underlying structure. The minor order variations in Dutch triple V-clusters can be accounted for given the previously acquired binary V-clusters. The general perspective is that the acquisition procedure is a discovery procedure. Typological effects are the outcome of early local string-determined licensing/selection
Do degree adverbs guide adjective learning cross-linguistically? A comparison of Dutch and Russian
No full textA fundamental question in language acquisition research is how language-specific input interacts with (pre-linguistic) universal concepts. In order to shed more light on this issue, the present paper reports the results of two experiments, set up as a modified version of Syrett, Kristen & Jeffrey Lidz. 2010. 30-month-olds use the distribution and meaning of adverbs to interpret novel adjectives. Language Learning and Development 6(4). 258–282. Their study has revealed that English-speaking 30-month-olds use degree adverbs for interpreting novel adjectives; the participants were more likely to assign a relative meaning (e.g., tallness) to a novel adjective if the adjective was modified by the booster very and to select an absolute interpretation (e.g., straightness) if the adjective was preceded the maximizer completely. The distribution in Dutch, although typologically similar to English, is obscured by phonological, morphological and semantic factors, which makes the Dutch degree adverbs heel ‘very’ and helemaal ‘completely’ less reliable cues to a language learner. In Russian, the booster očen’ ‘very’ is a reliable cue and the maximizer sovsem ‘completely’ is not, since it can be used with both absolute and negative-pole relative adjectives. The results demonstrate that children’s performance is related to the reliability of cues in their input. Russian-speaking toddlers only relied on the booster očen’, but not on the maximizer sovsem for assigning novel adjectives to semantic classes, and their Dutch-speaking peers did not show evidence of using degree adverbs for adjective learning at all. No evidence of interfering universal predispositions was found
The binary-to-ternary rhythmic continuum in stress typology: layered feet and non-intervention constraints
Full text linkThis article presents a novel OT analysis of ternary rhythm, using the restrictive format of McCarthy (2003)'s categorical alignment constraints, which we will refer to as ‘non-intervention constraints’, using the terminology of Ellison (1994), and argues for the rehabilitation of internally layered feet in metrical representations (i.e. feet with one layer of recursion). By means of a computer-generated factorial typology, we demonstrate that the constraint set proposed here generates the full typology of binary and ternary rhythm. The resulting typology suggests that there is no absolute boundary between binary and ternary systems; rather, a continuum emerges, such that binary and ternary feet may coexist in rhythmic stress systems
How do infants disaggregate referential and affective pitch?
Full text linkInfants are faced with a challenge of disaggregating functions of pitch in the ambient language into affective, pragmatic or referential (the latter in tone languages only). This mini review discusses several factors that might facilitate the disaggregation of referential and affective pitch in infancy: acoustic characteristics of infant-directed speech, recognition of vocal affect, facial cues accompanying affective prosody, and lateralization of affective and referential prosody in the brain. It proposes two hypotheses concerning the role of audiovisual cues and brain lateralizatio
Listen to the beat: A cross-linguistic perspective on the use of stress in segmentation
No full textThe purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relation of word stress to word segmentation in a cross-linguistic perspective. While many studies have addressed this issue before, the current one takes a typologically broad cross-linguistic approach to the use of edge-aligned word stress in processing. The investigation is concerned with language-specificity, the direction of processing and the language-specific abstract nature of stress as a leading beat. The thesis concludes with an excursion into first language acquisition, regarding the issue of whether word stress can be inferred from the distribution of stress patterns in continuous speech. Word segmentation is the division of continuous speech into words. It is a non-trivial task, since spoken language is fast and words are not divided by pauses, despite listeners’ strong intuition to the contrary. This intuition originates in the listener’s use of language-specific means for segmentation. Word stress is likely one of these. The idea that stress can function to mark word boundaries dates back to a distinction made by Trubetzkoy (1939/1969) and the role of word stress in processing has been tested since some decades later (Taft 1984, Cutler & Norris 1988, and many more). However, the results do not disentangle language-specific from universal segmentation strategies. In the current thesis, a non-word-spotting experiment with a typologically broad selection of languages confirms the Language-Specific Metronome Hypothesis: listeners have unidirectional language-specific stress-based expectations in segmentation. An offline experiment in turn shows that the elimination of time pressure leads listeners to make bidirectional and optimized segmentation decisions, as articulated in the Language-Specific Metrical Grouping hypothesis. Word segmentation without any knowledge of words, as in first language acquisition, has a paradoxical relation to word stress. Word stress could be useful in the task, but how is the word stress system acquired without words? This part of the dissertation is concerned with the question whether it is in principle possible to acquire word stress from unsegmented speech. It is found that statistical relations between adjacent elements fail to capture word stress regularities and the relation of stress to the phrase boundary is more informative, although this differs between languages. Conservatively, it is difficult to acquire the word stress system from unsegmented speech
The Effects of Bilingualism on Infant Language Development: The Acquisition of Sounds and Words
No full textThis dissertation reports on the influence of bilingualism on infants’ sound and word acquisition in the first two years of life. It targets the question of whether mono- and bilingual infants follow the same developmental trajectory of language acquisition, it displays similarities and differences between mono- and bilingual infants, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages that are the consequence of receiving bilingual language input. Previous debate has focused on whether bilingual infants are delayed in their sound and word learning. Some studies present a (temporary) lag in bilingual sound (i.e., Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2003a) and word (i.e., Volterra & Taeschner, 1978) acquisition. However, other studies report no evident delay in bilingual sound (i.e., Sundara & Scutellaro, 2011) and vocabulary (Pearson et al., 1993) development. In the current dissertation, mono- and bilingual infants from 5 to 18 months were tested on their perception of consonants, vowels and tone contrasts, and their associative word learning ability. Parents filled in a questionnaire on the vocabulary of their children, and another questionnaire on the degree of exposure to each language if their children were exposed to more than one language. In the sound perception experiments, no evident/clear delay was observed between mono- and bilingual infants. For consonants, an early unstable perception pattern was observed in bilingual infants in the first year of life, leaving space for future research. Moreover, bilingual infants displayed more sensitivity than monolinguals in their perception of native vowels and non-native tones. In word acquisition, bilingual infants kept the same pace as monolinguals in their associative word learning performance, as well as total conceptual receptive and expressive vocabulary size. In the study of parental report of their bilingual infants, it was found that parents’ intuition of their infants’ degree of exposure of each language counts in not only the languages directly spoken to them, but also the linguistic input from the ambient environment. Two hypotheses were formed based on the current findings as well as on those in the previous literature. The first hypothesis, heightened acoustic sensitivity hypothesis, states that bilingual infants are more sensitive to the acoustic details in the input than are monolinguals. Heightened acoustic sensitivity brings bilingual infants advantages and disadvantages along the language developmental trajectory. On the one hand, heightened acoustic sensitivity may facilitate contrast detection. On the other hand, it may lead to a prolonged category formation process. The second hypothesis, the minimum threshold hypothesis, assumes a minimum input requirement (either absolute or relative based on frequency) for infants to acquire native sounds and words. Future research on infant bilingualism should study the relationship between language exposure and acquisition patterns
Production-Comprehension (A)symmetry: Individual Differences in the acquisition of prosodic focus-marking
Full text linkPrevious work based on different groups of children has shown that four- to five-year-old children are similar to adults in both producing and comprehending the focus-toaccentuation mapping in Dutch, contra the alleged productionprecedes- comprehension asymmetry in earlier studies. In the current study, we addressed the question of whether there are individual differences in the production-comprehension (a)symmetricity. To this end, we examined the use of prosody in focus marking in production and the processing of focusrelated prosody in online language comprehension in the same group of 4- to 5-year-olds. We have found that the relationship between comprehension and production can be rather diverse at an individual level. This result suggests some degree of independence in learning to use prosody to mark focus in production and learning to process focus-related prosodic information in online language comprehension, and implies influences of other linguistic and non-linguistic factors on the production-comprehension (a)symmetricity
Categorical phonotactic knowledge filters second language input, but probabilistic phonotactic knowledge can still be acquired
Full text linkProbabilistic phonotactic knowledge facilitates perception, but categorical phonotactic illegality can cause misperceptions, especially of non-native phoneme combinations. If misperceptions induced by first language (L1) knowledge filter second language input, access to second language (L2) probabilistic phonotactics is potentially blocked for L2 acquisition. The facilitatory effects of L2 probabilistic phonotactics and categorical filtering effects of L1 phonotactics were compared and contrasted in a series of cross-modal priming experiments. Dutch native listeners and L1 Spanish and Japanese learners of Dutch had to perform a lexical decision task on Dutch words that started with /sC/ clusters that were of different degrees of probabilistic wellformedness in Dutch but illegal in Spanish and Japanese. Versions of target words with Spanish illegality resolving epenthesis in the clusters primed the Spanish group, showing an L1 filter; a similar effect was not found for the Japanese group. In addition, words with wellformed /sC/ clusters were recognised faster, showing a positive effect on processing of probabilistic wellformedness. However, Spanish learners with higher proficiency were facilitated to a greater extent by wellformed but epenthesised clusters, showing that although probabilistic learning occurs in spite of the L1 filter, the acquired probabilistic knowledge is still affected by L1 categorical knowledge. Categorical phonotactic and probabilistic knowledge are of a different nature and interact in acquisition
Hunting highs and lows: the acquisition of prosodic focus marking in Swedish and Dutch
No full textDuring the course of a conversation, speakers continuously shape their utterances in accordance with the knowledge state of the listeners. One way to do this is by prosodically highlighting important information (or focus). In order to master this linguistic skill, children not only need to assess the knowledge state of their listeners, they also need to know how such important information is to be prosodically marked in their language. The goal of this thesis is to determine whether and how the prosodic system a child is acquiring affects the acquisition of prosodic focus marking. The test cases are Dutch and (Central) Swedish. Whereas Swedish is a tonal language, where pitch is lexically distinctive, Dutch is not. In both languages pitch is used for marking focus, but in different ways; speakers of Dutch mark focus by means of a pitch accent, speakers of Swedish mark focus by means of a prominence-lending high tone (prominence H). Our initial hypothesis was that children learning a tonal language would be more sensitive to pitch contrasts than children learning a non-tonal language, possibly leading to an earlier mastery of prosodic focus marking in Swedish than in Dutch. Our main finding is that the Swedish-speaking children indeed reach adult proficiency in the use of prominence H for focus earlier than Dutch-speaking children reach adult proficiency in the use of accentuation for the same purpose. Even if tonal sensitivity may explain these results, data from adult Dutch and Swedish suggest that other factors may also be in play, such as the amount of tonal variation in the system, as well as the reliability of the mapping between certain prosodic categories and focus
Is mommy talking to daddy or to me? Exploring parental estimates of child language exposure using the Multilingual Infant Language Questionnaire
Full text linkLanguage input is a key factor in bi-/multilingual research. It roots in the definition of bi-/multilingualism and influences infant cognitive development since and even before birth. The methods used to assess language exposure among bi-/multilingual infants vary across studies. This paper discusses the parental report patterns of the amount/degree of exposure to their children and provides an algorithm-based Multilingual Infant Language Questionnaire (MILQ) targeting the amount of hours and degree of exposure an infant is exposed to each language. In the MILQ, parental feedback between general language input (languages spoken in the environment an infant resides in) and direct language exposure (languages spoken directly to an infant) are differentiated. Comparing the results drawn from general and direct perspectives, parental estimates of their children’s exposure match the general but not direct language input condition. Implications of these results are discussed
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