An influential claim in the child language literature posits that children use structural cues in the input language to acquire verb meaning (Gleitman, 1990). One such cue is the number of arguments co-occurring with the verb, which provides an indication as to the event type associated with the verb (Fisher, 1995). In some languages however (e.g. Hindi), verb arguments are ellipted relatively freely, subject to certain discourse-pragmatic constraints. In this paper, we address three questions: Is the pervasive argument ellipsis characteristic of adult Hindi also found in Hindi-speaking caregivers' input? If so, do children consequently make errors in verb transitivity? How early do children learning a split-ergative language, such as Hindi, exhibit sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic influences on argument realization? We show that there is massive argument ellipsis in caregivers' input to 3-4 year-olds. However, children acquiring Hindi do not make transitivity errors in their own speech. Nor do they elide arguments randomly. Rather, even at this early age, children appear to be sensitive to discourse-pragmatics in their own spontaneous speech production. These findings in a split-ergative language parallel patterns of argument realization found in children acquiring both nominativeaccusative languages (e.g. Korean) and ergative-absolutive languages (e.g. Tzeltal, Inuktitut). #

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was previously observed only for related languages (English-Dutch; French-Spanish). We now report three experiments in which speakers of Telugu, a Dravidian language unrelated to Japanese but similar to it in crucial aspects of rhythmic structure, heard speech in Japanese and in their own language, and Japanese listeners heard Telugu. For the Telugu listeners, detection of target sequences in Japanese speech was harder when target boundaries mismatched mora boundaries, exactly the pattern that Japanese listeners earlier exhibited with Japanese and other languages. The same results appeared when Japanese listeners heard Telugu speech containing only codas permissible in Japanese. Telugu listeners' results with Telugu speech were mixed, but the overall pattern revealed correspondences between the response patterns of the two listener groups, as predicted by the rhythmic similarity hypothesis. Telugu and Japanese listeners appear to command similar procedures for speech segmentation, further bolstering the proposal that aspects of language phonological structure affect listeners' speech segmentation.

This paper offers an account of variation in iconicity within and between ideophones and Full Word Reduplications (FWRs) in Telugu texts. Some of this variation is connected to differences in the grammatical classes to which these structures belong, the types of constructions in which they participate, and the semantic functions they encode. Adverbial ideophones, occurring largely as optional elements in quotative and collocational constructions have more iconicity than interoceptive ideophones in predicate-verbal constructions. Fully reduplicated regular and verbal adverbs with an augmentation function have higher levels of iconicity than adjectival FWRs serving multiple functions including evaluative meanings associated with diminution or attenuation. Based on these observations, a tentative scale of iconicity is proposed for Telugu. This scale should be elaborated and validated in future research by making use of multimodal corpora of ideophones and all varieties of reduplicative structures.

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