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This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else. Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults. Gathering co...
This volume is a collection of papers presented at the 12th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference held at the University of Nantes, France, in 2015. Language acquisition, a field of inquiry that has witnessed continuous growth during the past four decades, is central to building a detailed understanding of the human amazing capacity to develop language. The papers gathered here reflect the current research in the field of first, second and heritage language acquisition, addressing a variety of topics in syntax, semantics, phonology and their interfaces, from a wide range of languages such as Tashlhiyt Berber, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, European Portuguese, Heritage Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Heritage Sign Language, and Yudja. This volume will thus serve as a valuable reference guide to all scholars interested in (first/second/bilingual) language acquisition, multilingualism, heritage languages, sign language, language pathology and impairment, and experimental research in linguistics.
The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabrück in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshop developed from the observation that children's production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.
The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages.
Word storage and processing define a multi-factorial domain of scientific inquiry whose thorough investigation goes well beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplinary taxonomies, to require synergic integration of a wide range of methods, techniques and empirical and experimental findings. The present book intends to approach a few central issues concerning the organization, structure and functioning of the Mental Lexicon, by asking domain experts to look at common, central topics from complementary standpoints, and discuss the advantages of developing converging perspectives. The book will explore the connections between computational and algorithmic models of the mental lexicon, word f...
The relationship between diachronic change and synchronic variation at the articulatory, auditory, acoustic and social level is one of the greatest puzzles in the study of language. Even though plentiful examples exist to suggest that dynamics of synchronic variation and diachronic change are tightly interconnected, a unified theory to account for language change in its relationship to all layers of synchronic variation remains a desideratum. This volume compiles new evidence from articulatory, acoustic, auditory, sociolinguistic, and phonological analyses of segmental and prosodic data and computational modelling, and offers a refreshing theoretical angle on the ongoing debates in language ...
This edited collection contains 34 papers originally presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA) conference in 2013, held in Oldenburg, Germany. It represents theoretically guided, high quality work, and provides impressive insights into state-of-the-art research in the fields of first and second language acquisition and developmental impairments. The studies brought together here cover a wide variety of different (mainly European) languages, focusing on the areas of phonology, morpho-syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces. Since their first publication, the proceedings of GALA have become an invaluable reference for cutting-edge research in First and Second Language Acquisition and its impairments – and this volume continues that tradition.
This volume presents original up-to-date research in the field of language acquisition. The contributions reflect experimental work guided by linguistic theory, covering different populations of learners, a wide range of linguistic phenomena, a variety of empirical methods, and a rich set of typologically different languages. The studies investigate first and second language acquisition, as well as acquisition in children with developmental language disorder or hearing impairment. The different chapters address various phenomena in the areas of morpho-syntax, phonology, and semantics. This edited collection of papers is a valuable reference for researchers who are interested in language acquisition research and its multifaceted nature. The book highlights the fruitful connection between empirical research and linguistic theory, making it interesting to both psycholinguists and theoretical linguists. The experimental studies collected in this book contribute to our understanding of how different types of learners acquire and process language and can offer novel insights to theoretical linguistics as well.
Bidirectional Optimality Theory (BiOT) emerged at the turn of the millennium as a fusion of Radical Pragmatics and Optimality Theoretic Semantics. It stirred a wealth of new research in the pragmatics-semantics interface and heavily influenced e.g. the development of evolutionary and game theoretic approaches. Optimality Theory holds that linguistic output can be understood as the optimized products of ranked constraints. At the centre of BiOT is the insight that this optimisation has to take place both in production and interpretation, and that the production-interpretation cycle has to lead back to the original input. BiOT is now generally interpreted as a description of diachronically stable and cognitively optimal formmeaning pairs. It found applications beyond the semantics-pragmatics interface in language acquisition, historical linguistics, phonology, syntax, and typology. This book provides a state of the art overview of these developments. It collects nine chapters by leading scientists in the field.
The first comprehensive textbook on regression modeling for linguistic data offers an incisive conceptual overview along with worked examples that teach practical skills for realistic data analysis. In the first comprehensive textbook on regression modeling for linguistic data in a frequentist framework, Morgan Sonderegger provides graduate students and researchers with an incisive conceptual overview along with worked examples that teach practical skills for realistic data analysis. The book features extensive treatment of mixed-effects regression models, the most widely used statistical method for analyzing linguistic data. Sonderegger begins with preliminaries to regression modeling: assu...