Stop contrast acquisition in child Kriol: Evidence of stable transmission of phonology post Creole formation.

Many Aboriginal Australian communities are undergoing language shift from traditional Indigenous languages to contact varieties such as Kriol, an English-lexified Creole. Kriol is reportedly characterised by lexical items with highly variable phonological specifications, and variable implementation of voicing and manner contrasts in obstruents (Sandefur, 1986). A language, such as Kriol, characterised by this unusual degree of variability presents Kriol-acquiring children with a potentially difficult language-learning task, and one which challenges the prevalent theories of acquisition. To examine stop consonant acquisition in this unusual language environment, we present a study of Kriol stop and affricate production, followed by a mispronunciation detection study, with Kriol-speaking children (ages 4-7) from a Northern Territory community where Kriol is the lingua franca. In contrast to previous claims, the results suggest that Kriol-speaking children acquire a stable phonology and lexemes with canonical phonemic specifications, and that English experience would not appear to induce this stability.

Grounded Cognition, Linguistic Relativity, and Abstract Concepts.

Kemmerer's paper convincingly claims that the grounded cognition model (GCM) entails linguistic relativity. Here, we underline that tackling linguistic relativity and cultural differences is vital for GCM. First, it allows GCM to focus more on flexible rather than stable aspects of cognition. Second, it highlights the centrality of linguistic experience for human cognition. While GCM-inspired research underscored the similarity between linguistic and nonlinguistic concepts, it is now paramount to understand when and how language(s) influence knowledge. To this aim, we argue that linguistic variation might be particularly relevant for more abstract concepts-which are more debatable and open to revisions.

Linguistic Variation in Iranian University Student Graffiti: Examining the Role of Gender.

Research on the discursive features of graffiti in institutional settings is in its infancy and few studies have investigated the phenomenon and its implications in educational contexts. In this paper, we report on a study in which we employed systemic functional linguistics (Halliday in Learning how to mean, Edward Arnold, 1975). to probe communicative functions and gender differences in Iranian university student graffiti that appeared in all-male and all-female locations. The data comprised authentic instances of graffiti generated by students, analysis of which suggests that male and female university students each have their own distinctive motives for using graffiti, as realised in significant differences observed in the context-specific functions they perform. Graffiti pieces represented a distinctive and meaningful way of communicating, and its most salient features were creativity, simplicity and variation. Indications are that university students' graffiti reflects psychological and social challenges, and the thoughts, attitudes and feelings expressed through it serve students' personal and interactional purposes.

Changes in Native Sentence Processing Related to Bilingualism: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

The native language changes as a result of contact with a second language, and the pattern and degree of such change depend on a variety of factors like the bilingual experience or the linguistic level. Here, we present a systematic review and meta-analysis of works that explore variations in native sentence comprehension and production by comparing monolinguals and bilinguals. Fourteen studies in the meta-analysis provided information regarding the bilingual experience and differences at the morphosyntactic level using behavioral methods. Overall, we observed that first language processing is subject to small transformations in bilinguals that occur in sentence comprehension and production. The magnitude of the changes depended on bilingual experiences, but only length of residence in an L2 setting predicted the degree of change, where shorter length of residence was associated with larger changes. Results are discussed and related to the cognitive processes that potentially cause the transformations in the first language. The present work reveals some limitations in the field that should be addressed in future studies to better understand the mechanisms behind language attrition.

Does morphological complexity affect word segmentation? Evidence from computational modeling.

How can infants detect where words or morphemes start and end in the continuous stream of speech? Previous computational studies have investigated this question mainly for English, where morpheme and word boundaries are often isomorphic. Yet in many languages, words are often multimorphemic, such that word and morpheme boundaries do not align. Our study employed corpora of two languages that differ in the complexity of inflectional morphology, Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) and Japanese (in Experiment 1), as well as corpora of artificial languages ranging in morphological complexity, as measured by the ratio and distribution of morphemes per word (in Experiments 2 and 3). We used two baselines and three conceptually diverse word segmentation algorithms, two of which rely purely on sublexical information using distributional cues, and one that builds a lexicon. The algorithms' performance was evaluated on both word- and morpheme-level representations of the corpora. Segmentation results were better for the morphologically simpler languages than for the morphologically more complex languages, in line with the hypothesis that languages with greater inflectional complexity could be more difficult to segment into words. We further show that the effect of morphological complexity is relatively small, compared to that of algorithm and evaluation level. We therefore recommend that infant researchers look for signatures of the different segmentation algorithms and strategies, before looking for differences in infant segmentation landmarks across languages varying in complexity.

Emphatic variation of the labio-velar /w/ in two Jordanian Arabic dialects.

Much work on emphatic segments in Arabic dialects has focused on primary emphasis. However, secondary emphasis has been less of a target of study. Our research investigates the emphatic variation of the secondarily emphatic labio-velar /w/ between males and females in two Jordanian Arabic sub-dialects: Rural Jordanian Arabic and Urban Jordanian Arabic. Twenty-four native speakers from the two dialects (equally stratified according to their gender and dialect) were asked to read a carrier phrase that included fifteen tri-syllabic words having the sound /w/ in medial position. Our research confirmed that there is a variation in the degree of emphasis based on gender and dialect. More particularly, males produced stronger emphatic segments than females did, and Urban speakers produced weaker empathic segments than Rural speakers did. Results also revealed that the secondarily emphatic /w/ caused the neighboring vowels to have lowered F2 and raised F1 and F3. These findings suggest that emphasis, whether primary or secondary, tend to have the same acoustic correlates. In closing, the theoretical implications of these finding are discussed.

Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition.

Endeavors to computationally model language variation and change are ever increasing. While analyses of recent diachronic trends are frequently conducted, long-term trends accounting for sociolinguistic variation are less well-studied. Our work sheds light on the temporal dynamics of language use of British 18th century women as a group in transition across two situational contexts. Our findings reveal that in formal contexts women adapt to register conventions, while in informal contexts they act as innovators of change in language use influencing others. While adopted from other disciplines, our methods inform (historical) sociolinguistic work in novel ways. These methods include diachronic periodization by Kullback-Leibler divergence to determine periods of change and relevant features of variation, and event cascades as influencer models.

Personae in sociolinguistic variation.

While studies of sociolinguistic variation traditionally have focused on correlations between macro-social categories and the use of linguistic variants, sociolinguistic work examining social meaning-making at an interactional level views linguistic variation as a resource deployed by agentive speakers and listeners. The persona has become an important construct in understanding how on-the-ground interactional practice builds up to form larger-scale patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change. Rather than members of macro-social groups, personae are holistic, ideological social types that are recognizably linked with ways of being and speaking. This article reviews the theoretical foundations for the use of personae as a social construct in the study of linguistic variation. It then describes the ways in which the construct has enriched sociolinguistic theories of social categories, intra-speaker variation, stylistic practice, explicit performances, sociolinguistic perception, and sociolinguistic change. Taking up the study of personae helps sociolinguists better articulate how linguistic variation is contextualized socially, and how links between personae and linguistic styles are formed and disseminated through time and social space. Further, examining the nature of the social constructs linked with variation, including personae and other constructs aside from demographic categories, helps inform the growing body of work that has aimed to incorporate social information into theories of language processing, perception, production, and representation. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Psychology > Language.

Incrementality and efficiency shape pragmatics across languages.

To correctly interpret a message, people must attend to the context in which it was produced. Here we investigate how this process, known as pragmatic reasoning, is guided by two universal forces in human communication: incrementality and efficiency, with speakers of all languages interpreting language incrementally and making the most efficient use of the incoming information. Crucially, however, the interplay between these two forces results in speakers of different languages having different pragmatic information available at each point in processing, including inferences about speaker intentions. In particular, the position of adjectives relative to nouns (e.g., "black lamp" vs. "lamp black") makes visual context information available in reverse orders. In an eye-tracking study comparing four unrelated languages that have been understudied with regard to language processing (Catalan, Hindi, Hungarian, and Wolof), we show that speakers of languages with an adjective-noun order integrate context by first identifying properties (e.g., color, material, or size), whereas speakers of languages with a noun-adjective order integrate context by first identifying kinds (e.g., lamps or chairs). Most notably, this difference allows listeners of adjective-noun descriptions to infer the speaker's intention when using an adjective (e.g., "the black…" as implying "not the blue one") and anticipate the target referent, whereas listeners of noun-adjective descriptions are subject to temporary ambiguity when deriving the same interpretation. We conclude that incrementality and efficiency guide pragmatic reasoning across languages, with different word orders having different pragmatic affordances.

Conceptual relations predict colexification across languages.

In natural language, multiple meanings often share a single word form, a phenomenon known as colexification. Some sets of meanings are more frequently colexified across languages than others, but the source of this variation is not well understood. We propose that cross-linguistic variation in colexification frequency is non-arbitrary and reflects a general principle of cognitive economy: More commonly colexified meanings across languages are those that require less cognitive effort to relate. To evaluate our proposal, we examine patterns of colexification of varying frequency from about 250 languages. We predict these colexification data based on independent measures of conceptual relatedness drawn from large-scale psychological and linguistic resources. Our results show that meanings that are more frequently colexified across these languages tend to be more strongly associated by speakers of English, suggesting that conceptual associativity provides an important constraint on the development of the lexicon. Our work extends research on polysemy and the evolution of word meanings by grounding cross-linguistic regularities in colexification in basic principles of human cognition.

Investigating Variation in Island Effects: A Case Study of Norwegian Wh-Extraction.

We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types: whether-, complex NP, subject, adjunct, and relative clause (RC) islands. We found clear evidence of subject and adjunct island effects on wh-extraction. We failed to find evidence that Norwegians accept wh-extraction out of complex NPs and RCs. Our participants judged wh-extraction from complex NPs and RCs to be just as unacceptable as subject and adjunct island violations. The pattern of effects in Norwegian paralleled island effects that recent experimental work has documented in other languages like English and Italian (Sprouse et al. 2012; Sprouse et al. 2016). Norwegian judgments consistently differed from prior findings for one island type: whether-islands. Our results reveal that Norwegians exhibit significant inter-individual variation in their sensitivity to whether-island effects, with many participants exhibiting no sensitivity to whether-island violations whatsoever. We discuss the implications of our findings for universalist approaches to island constraints. We also suggest ways of reconciling our results with previous observations, and offer a systematic experimental framework in which future research can investigate factors that govern apparent island insensitivity.

Language Separation in Bidialectal Speakers: Evidence From Eye Tracking.

The aim of this study was to find out how people process the dialectal variation encountered in the daily linguistic input. We conducted an eye tracking study (Visual Word Paradigm) that targeted the online processing of grammatical gender markers. Three different groups of Norwegian speakers took part in the experiment: one group of students from the capital Oslo, and two groups of dialect speakers of the Sogn dialect of Western Norway. One Sogn group was defined as "stable dialect speakers," and one as "unstable dialect speakers," based on a background questionnaire. The students participated in two eye tracking experiments each, one conducted in the their own dialect, and one in the other dialect (i.e., Sogn dialect for the Oslo students, and Oslo dialect for the Sogn students). The gender systems in the two dialects differ: the Sogn dialect makes an obligatory three-gender split (Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter) whereas the Oslo dialect only obligatorily makes a two gender distinction. The research question was whether speakers could use gender markers to predict the upcoming target noun in both local and non-local dialect mode, and furthermore, if they correctly could adjust their expectations based on dialect mode. The results showed that the Sogn speakers could predict upcoming linguistic material both in the local and Oslo dialect, but only the stable group were able to adjust their predictions based on the dialect mode. The unstable group applied a more general Oslo-compatible parsing to both the local and the non-local dialect. The Oslo speakers on the other hand were able to use gender markers as predictors only in their own dialect. We argue that the stable Sogn group should be treated as a bilingual group, as they show native-like skills in both varieties, while the unstable Sogn group can be seen as accommodated monolinguals, in that they treat the two varieties as sharing an underspecified grammar. The Oslo group on the other hand lacks sufficient competence in the other dialect to make use of grammatical markers to make predictions.

Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic sources of a handshape distinction expressing agentivity.

In this paper the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic bases for a pattern of conventionalization of two types of iconic handshapes are described. Work on sign languages has shown that handling handshapes (H-HSs: those that represent how objects are handled or manipulated) and object handshapes (O-HSs: those that represent the class, size, or shape of objects) express an agentive/non-agentive semantic distinction in many sign languages. H-HSs are used in agentive event descriptions and O-HSs are used in non-agentive event descriptions. In this work, American Sign Language (ASL) and Italian Sign Language (LIS) productions are compared (adults and children) as well as the corresponding groups of gesturers in each country using "silent gesture." While the gesture groups, in general, did not employ an H-HS/O-HS distinction, all participants (signers and gesturers) used iconic handshapes (H-HSs and O-HSs together) more often in agentive than in no-agent event descriptions; moreover, none of the subjects produced an opposite pattern than the expected one (i.e., H-HSs associated with no-agent descriptions and O-HSs associated with agentive ones). These effects are argued to be grounded in cognition. In addition, some individual gesturers were observed to produce the H-HS/O-HS opposition for agentive and non-agentive event descriptions-that is, more Italian than American adult gesturers. This effect is argued to be grounded in culture. Finally, the agentive/non-agentive handshape opposition is confirmed for signers of ASL and LIS, but previously unreported cross-linguistic differences were also found across both adult and child sign groups. It is, therefore, concluded that cognitive, cultural, and linguistic factors contribute to the conventionalization of this distinction of handshape type.

Influência da variação linguística e da consciência morfossintática no desempenho em leitura e escrita / The influence of linguistic variation and morphological/syntactic awareness on reading and writing performance

O objetivo deste estudo foi investigar a influência da variação lingüística e da consciênciamorfossintática nas diferenças de desempenho em leitura e escrita de alunos da 2ª, 3ª e 4ª séries doensino fundamental. Participaram da pesquisa 36 alunos de escolas públicas de Curitiba/PR: 18crianças com dificuldades de aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita (grupo 1) e outras 18 semdificuldades de aprendizagem (grupo 2). Os instrumentos de coleta de dados avaliaram: a variação lingüística; a consciência morfossintática e o desempenho das crianças em provas de leitura e ditado. Tinha-se como hipótese que a consciência morfossintática se correlaciona positivamente com o desempenho em leitura e escrita, enquanto a variação lingüística se correlaciona negativamente. Essa hipótese foi confirmada. Destaca-se, entretanto, que 72,15% das formas lingüísticas não-padrão utilizadas pelos alunos do grupo 1 são empregadas pela maioria dos falantes do português brasileiro, portanto, são formas não-estigmatizadas. Infere-se que a utilização dessas formas lingüísticas pode estar dificultando a escrita correta por parte dessas crianças. Sugere-se que os professores aproveitem os episódios de variação lingüística para levar os alunos a refletir sobre os aspectos morfossintáticos da língua, garantindo-lhes uma capacidade de expressão, oral e escrita, cada vez mais adequada e competente.

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of linguistic variation and morphological/syntactic awareness on the different reading and writing performance levels shown by 1st -, 2nd- and 3rd-grade elementary-school students. The work included 36 students from public schools in Curitiba, PR: 18 children with reading and writing learning problems (Group 1), and another 18 children presenting no difficulties in that respect. The data-collection tools evaluated the following: linguistic variation; morphological/syntactic awareness; and the children?s performance in dictation and reading tests. The starting hypothesis was that the morphological/syntactic awareness relates positively to reading and writing performance, while the linguistic variation relates to it negatively. That hypothesis was confirmed. It should be pointed out, however, that 72.15% of the non-standard linguistic forms used by the students in Group 1 are commonly adopted by most Brazilian-Portuguese speakers, so they must be considered as non-stigmatized forms. It can thus be inferred that the use of these linguistic forms may be making proper writing difficult for these children. It is suggested that teachersshould take advantage of linguistic-variation episodes in order to lead students toward reflecting on the morphological-syntactic aspects of the language, so as to assure them of a written and oral ability to express themselves in an increasingly proper and competent way.

Linguagem oral na escola de educação infantil: desenvolvendo habilidades metanlinguísticas / Oral language in preschool: metalinguístical skills development

O presente trabalho visa oferecer subsídios para um debate sobre as habilidades metalingüísticas trabalhadas pelas professoras da classe imediatamente anterior à 1ª série do Ensino Fundamental e como essas habilidades metalingüísticas podem favorecer a automatização da linguagem padrão, facilitando a alfabetização. Para tanto foram entrevistadas três professoras, utilizando um questionário semi-estruturado, e observadas as atividades realizadas na sala de aula. Observou-se que as atividades metalingüísticas foram pouco trabalhadas.(AU)

This paper is to offer subsidies for a debate on metalinguistic skills worked by the teachers of the grade immediately previous to the lst year of basic school and how these skills can help the automatization of the standard language, making easier the process of learning how to read and write. Following these guidelines, three teachers were interviewed through open questionnaires and observed during their activities in the classroom. The authors observed that the metalinguistic resources were poorly used.(AU)

Linguagem oral na escola de educação infantil: desenvolvendo habilidades metanlinguísticas / Oral language in preschool: metalinguístical skills development

O presente trabalho visa oferecer subsídios para um debate sobre as habilidades metalingüísticas trabalhadas pelas professoras da classe imediatamente anterior à 1ª série do Ensino Fundamental e como essas habilidades metalingüísticas podem favorecer a automatização da linguagem padrão, facilitando a alfabetização. Para tanto foram entrevistadas três professoras, utilizando um questionário semi-estruturado, e observadas as atividades realizadas na sala de aula. Observou-se que as atividades metalingüísticas foram pouco trabalhadas.

This paper is to offer subsidies for a debate on metalinguistic skills worked by the teachers of the grade immediately previous to the lst year of basic school and how these skills can help the automatization of the standard language, making easier the process of learning how to read and write. Following these guidelines, three teachers were interviewed through open questionnaires and observed during their activities in the classroom. The authors observed that the metalinguistic resources were poorly used.