Word frequency cues word order in adults: cross-linguistic evidence

Word frequency cues word order in adults: cross-linguistic evidence

One universal feature of human languages is the division between grammatical functors and content words. From a learnability point of view, functors might provide entry points or anchors into the syntactic structure of utterances due to their high frequency. Despite its potentially universal scope, this hypothesis has not yet been tested on typologically different languages and on populations o...

Diminutives facilitate word segmentation in natural speech: cross-linguistic evidence.

Final-syllable invariance is characteristic of diminutives (e.g., doggie), which are a pervasive feature of the child-directed speech registers of many languages. Invariance in word endings has been shown to facilitate word segmentation (Kempe, Brooks, & Gillis, 2005) in an incidental-learning paradigm in which synthesized Dutch pseudonouns were used. To broaden the cross-linguistic evidence fo...

Word Segmentation in Natural Speech. 1 Diminutives Facilitate Word Segmentation in Natural Speech: Cross-Linguistic Evidence

Cross Linguistic Transfer in Word Order: Evidence from L1 Forgetting and L2 Acquisition

The purpose of the present study was to bring together the evidence on possible cross-linguistic transfer in word order from two different perspectives: a transfer as an apparent obstacle in second language acquisition, and a transfer as a cause of attrition of the native language. The relationship between the same two languages in a contact situation was investigated. Since the majority of stu...

Word Order Acquisition in Persian Speaking Children

Objectives: Persian is a pro-drop language with canonical Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. This study investigates the acquisition of word order in Persian-speaking children. Methods: In the present study, participants were 60 Persian-speaking children (30 girls and 30 boys) with typically developing language skills, and aged between 30-47 months. The 30-minute language samples were audio...