Linguistic input has an immediate effect on child language, making it difficult to discern whatever biases children may bring to language-learning. To discover these biases, we turn to deaf children ...who cannot acquire spoken language and are not exposed to sign language. These children nevertheless produce gestures, called homesigns, which have structural properties found in natural language. We ask whether these properties can be traced to gestures produced by hearing speakers in Nicaragua, a gesture-rich culture, and in the USA, a culture where speakers rarely gesture without speech. We studied 7 homesigning children and hearing family members in Nicaragua, and 4 in the USA. As expected, family members produced more gestures without speech, and longer gesture strings, in Nicaragua than in the USA. However, in both cultures, homesigners displayed more structural complexity than family members, and there was no correlation between individual homesigners and family members with respect to structural complexity. The findings replicate previous work showing that the gestures hearing speakers produce do not offer a model for the structural aspects of homesign, thus suggesting that children bring biases to construct, or learn, these properties to language-learning. The study also goes beyond the current literature in three ways. First, it extends homesign findings to Nicaragua, where homesigners received a richer gestural model than USA homesigners. Moreover, the relatively large numbers of gestures in Nicaragua made it possible to take advantage of more sophisticated statistical techniques than were used in the original homesign studies. Second, the study extends the discovery of complex noun phrases to Nicaraguan homesign. The almost complete absence of complex noun phrases in the hearing family members of both cultures provides the most convincing evidence to date that homesigners, and not their hearing family members, are the ones who introduce structural properties into homesign. Finally, by extending the homesign phenomenon to Nicaragua, the study offers insight into the gestural precursors of an emerging sign language. The findings shed light on the types of structures that an individual can introduce into communication before that communication is shared within a community of users, and thus sheds light on the roots of linguistic structure.
•Deaf children not exposed to sign language create linguistically structured homesigns.•These homesigns are not influenced by gestural input from hearing parents in the USA.•But hearing speakers gesture more often and more freely in Nicaragua than the USA.•Nevertheless, homesigners display more structural complexity than family members.•With no correlation between individual homesigners and families in either culture.
The Noun Phrase in English Ho-Cheong Leung, Alex; Wurff, Wim van der
2018, 2018-06-18, Letnik:
246
eBook
Building on a substantial earlier literature, the chapters in this volume further advance knowledge and understanding of properties of the noun phrase in English.
Comprehenders can use rich contextual information to anticipate upcoming input on the fly, but recent findings suggest that salient information about argument roles may not impact verb prediction. We ...took advantage of the word order properties of Mandarin Chinese to examine the time course with which argument role information impacts verb prediction. We isolated the contribution of argument role information by manipulating the order of pre-verbal noun phrase arguments while holding lexical information constant, and we examined its effects on accessing the verb in long-term semantic memory by measuring the amplitude of the N400 component. Experiment 1 showed when the verb appeared immediately after its arguments, even strongly constraining argument role information failed to modulate the N400 response to the verb. An N400 effect emerged in Experiment 2 when the verb appeared at a greater delay. Experiment 3 corroborated the contrast between the first two experiments through a within-participants manipulation of the time interval between the arguments and the verb, by varying the position of an adverbial phrase. These results suggest time is a key factor governing how diverse contextual information contributes to predictions. Here argument role information is shown to impact verb prediction, but its effect is not immediate.
On the basis of synchronic and diachronic data analysis, the volume takes a close look at the synchronic layers of binominal size noun and type noun uses (a bunch/a load of X; a sort of X; a Y type ...of X) and reconsiders the framework of grammaticalization in view of issues raised by the phrases under discussion. As a result, a construction grammar-approach to grammaticalization is developed which does justice to the syntagmatic lexical, or collocational, reclustering observed in the data within an eclectic cognitive-functional approach. Lieselotte Brems, University of Leuven, Belgium.
This paper aims to apply the dependent marking theory to shed light on the distribution of the information markers in Shilluk, which can be divided into two types: marked and unmarked. Focus belongs ...to the marked type, while Topic belongs to the unmarked type. This paper claims that information marking in Shilluk consists of two steps, with the marked type assigned in Step 1 and the unmarked type in Step 2. In Step 1, if an NP is c-commanded by another NP in a domain, it is assigned the feature FOC. In Step 2, if there is a remaining NP that has received no marking in Step 1, it is assigned TOP. Topic carries no marking, which gives rise to the pattern "no marking before the verb."
Glossa’s Special Collection New perspectives on the NP/DP debate brings together syntactic analyses of various phenomena of complex nominals, shedding light on the central problem of their syntactic ...category label. In this paper, we survey arguments and analyses offered in the Special Collection, classifying their underlying assumptions and highlighting their relevance to syntactic theory more generally.
Numerals in Akebu Makeeva, Nadezhda; Shluinsky, Andrey
Open Linguistics,
07/2020, Letnik:
6, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article presents an overview of the numeral system in Akebu, a Kwa language of Togo. The Akebu numeral system is a decimal one and contains simple numerals from ‘1’ to ‘9’ and decimal bases for ...‘10’, ‘100’, and ‘1,000’. The former have noun class agreement markers, while the latter do not. Only some noun classes are compatible with numerals, but among them there are both plural and singular classes.
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