Acquisition of Pitjantjatjara Clause Chains

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE IPA Pitjantjatjara

Pitjantjatjara is a dialect of the Western Desert Language (WDL) of central Australia (Douglas 1958). The Western Desert Language is a member of the south-west Pama-Nyungan group. Together with Warnman, it forms the Wati sub-group. It is spoken by 4000–5000 people, and covers the widest geographical area of any language in Australia, stretching from Woomera in central northern South Australia, ...

False belief reasoning and the acquisition of relative clause sentences.

Perner (1991) has claimed that the linguistic structures and reasoning tasks mastered by 4-year-olds share a requirement to handle metarepresentation. In contrast, de Villiers (2000) has argued that they share a requirement to handle misrepresentation. In the current study, a correlation is observed between success on false belief tasks and the acquisition of relative clause sentences. This cor...

The acquisition of complement clause constructions : A sentence repetition study

The presence of complement clause constructions in child speech marks the beginning of the child’s entrance into the more complex aspects of grammar. Since complement clauses are lexically-specified, individual complement taking verbs (CTVs) must be tagged with information about the kinds of complements they can license; their acquisition suggests that children are beginning to elaborate the ar...

Relative Clause Acquisition in Hebrew: Towards a Processing-Oriented Account

A Spectral Analysis of Stop Bursts in Pitjantjatjara

This study examines stop burst spectra for the three coronal stops of Pitjantjatjara: /t/, /ʈ/ and /c/. It is shown that the two apical consonants /t/ and /ʈ/ have a broad, high-energy spectral peak in the region of 1-5 kHz, with the drop-off in energy occurring at a lower frequency for /ʈ/ as compared to /t/. The laminal /c/ has a much flatter spectrum in comparison to the apicals. However, gr...