The development of English tense and agreement morphology in Welsh–English bilingual children with and without specific language impairment

Chondrogianni, Vasiliki; Kwon, Hyowon

doi:10.1017/s0142716418000772

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

(110 reference statements)

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“…As comes with most cultural phenomena, there are of course various ways of going about things. It should thus not be surprising that many languages have found different solutions to expressing thoughts and referring to the world that manifest in all structural aspects, including phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics as well as differences tied to modality (signed, spoken, written), social background, or pathological conditions, such as language impairments (see, e.g., Ammon et al 2004;Evans & Levinson 2009;Haspelmath 2010;Kirby et al 2016;Hammarström 2016;Chondrogianni & Kwon 2019). While our uniquely symbolic communication system has increased our ability to transmit and accumulate cultural knowledge (Tomasello 2008;Richerson & Boyd 2008), linguistic features themselves can be regarded as cultural 'replicators' that have even been found to approximate the phylogenetic tree of our species (Pagel 2009).…”

Section: Linguistic Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Language Adapts to the Environment: An Evolutionary, Experimental Approach

Nölle¹

2021

Preprint

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The aim of this thesis is to investigate experimentally whether cross-linguistic variation in the structure of languages can be motivated by their external environment. It has been sug-gested that variation does not only result from cultural drift and language-internal mecha-nisms but also from social or even physical factors. However, from observational data and correlations between variables alone, it remains difficult to infer the exact underlying mech-anisms. Here, I present a novel experimental approach for studying the relationship between language and environment under controlled laboratory conditions. I argue that to arrive at a causal understanding of linguistic adaptation, we can use a cultural evolutionary approach and simulate the emergence of linguistic structure with humans in the lab. This way, it can be tested which pressures shape linguistic features as they are used for communication and transmitted to new speakers. I focus primarily on cases where linguistic conventions emerge in referential communication games in direct face-to-face interaction. In these set-tings, I test whether specific conventions are more adaptive to solve the same problem un-der different conditions or affordances imposed by the environment. A series of silent-gesture experiments shows that systematicity (the design feature giving language its com-positional power) is sensitive to the communicative environment: Dyads creating novel ges-tural communication systems to communicate pictorial referents are more likely to system-atize traits and create categories that are functionally relevant in the given environment. Ad-ditionally, environmental features, such as the size of the meaning space and visibility of referents, affect the degree to which participants rely on systematic rather than simple ho-listic gestures. This ‘experimental semiotics’ approach thus models how environmental fac-tors could motivate basic linguistic structure.However, for complex real-world phenomena, such as the hotly debated relationship between spatial language and environment, it is difficult to design simple experiments that isolate variables of interest but retain the necessary level of realism. It has been proposed that topography (e.g., landmarks like rivers, slopes) and sociocultural factors (e.g., bilingual-ism, subsistence style, population density) can affect whether speakers rely on an egocentric or geocentric Frame of Reference (FoR) to encode spatial relations, but it remains hard to disentangle the exact contribution of these variables to the cross-linguistic variation we ob-serve.I tackle this issue with a novel paradigm: interactive Virtual Reality (VR) experiments that allow for an unprecedented combination of ecological validity and experimental con-trol. In networked VR settings, participants are immersed in realistic settings such as a for-est or a mountain slope. By having dyads solve spatial coordination games, I show that speakers of English, which is usually associated with an egocentric FoR, are less likely to use egocentric language (e.g., “the orb is to your left”) if there are strong environmental af-fordances that make geocentric language more viable (e.g., “the orb is uphill from you”). Further experiments address whether the cultural ‘success’ of egocentric left/right could be motivated by its applicability across environments. For this, I combine VR with the ‘exper-imental semiotics’ approach, where the game is solved via a novel visual communication channel. I show how the movement data in the 3D world can be correlated with invented signals to measure which FoR participants rely on. In contrast to the English data, I did not find an advantage for geocentric systems in the slope environment, and overwhelmingly egocentric systems emerged. I discuss how this could relate to task-specificity and native language background. More generally, I show how this new way of studying spatial lan-guage with interactive VR games can be used to test hypotheses about linguistic transmis-sion and material culture that could help explain the origins of the egocentric FoR system, which is regarded a fairly recent cultural innovation.Taken together, the thesis comprises several studies testing the relationship between linguistic and environmental variables. Additionally, VR is presented as a novel tool to study spatial language in controlled large-scale settings complementing more traditional fieldwork. More generally, I suggest that VR can be used to study the evolution of language in complex, multimodal settings without sacrificing experimental control.

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Section: Linguistic Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Language Adapts to the Environment: An Evolutionary, Experimental Approach

Nölle¹

2021

Preprint

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“…These kinds of tasks should be developed in different languages, according to their linguistic characteristics and particularities, and can be used afterwards with different populations. A number of studies with monolingual children who speak languages other than English, and with bi/multilingual participants with typical and non-typical language development have been carried out in recent years (see [ 13 ] for Hebrew-Russian; [ 14 ] for (European) Spanish; [ 15 ] for Welsh-English; [ 16 ] for Catalan; [ 17 ] for Arabic-German; [ 18 ] for Hungarian; [ 19 ] for Vietnamese; [ 20 ] for Czech; [ 21 ] for Cantonese; [ 22 ] for (Latino) Spanish-English; and [ 23 ] for Danish). However, drawing on the review in [ 13 ], until relatively recently, little work had focused on diagnostic accuracy of repetition tasks (SRTs and non-word repetition) in bilinguals with SLI that speak languages other than English.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentence Repetition Tasks to Detect and Prevent Language Difficulties: A Scoping Review

Rujas¹,

Mariscal

Murillo

et al. 2021

Children

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Sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) have been widely used in language development research for decades. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in studying performance in SRTs as a clinical marker for language impairment. What are the characteristics of SRTs? For what purposes have SRTs been used? To what extent have they been used with young children, in different languages, and with different clinical populations? In order to answer these and other questions, we conducted a scoping review. Peer reviewed studies published in indexed scientific journals (2010–2021) were analyzed. A search in different databases yielded 258 studies. Research published in languages other than English or Spanish, adult samples, dissertations, case studies, artificial models, and theoretical publications were excluded. After this exclusion, 203 studies were analyzed. Our results show that most research using SRT were conducted with English monolingual speakers older than 5 years of age; studies with bilingual participants have mostly been published since 2016; and SRTs have been used with several non-typical populations. Research suggests that they are a reliable tool for identifying language difficulties and are specifically suitable for detecting developmental language disorder.

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Using oral narratives to examine acquisition of English verb morphology among multilingual Arabic and monolingual Hebrew speakers: finding similarities with monolingual English-speaking SLIs

Zaretsky

Russak

2023

International Journal of Multilingualism

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The development of English tense and agreement morphology in Welsh–English bilingual children with and without specific language impairment

Cited by 3 publications

References 42 publications

How Language Adapts to the Environment: An Evolutionary, Experimental Approach

How Language Adapts to the Environment: An Evolutionary, Experimental Approach

Sentence Repetition Tasks to Detect and Prevent Language Difficulties: A Scoping Review

Using oral narratives to examine acquisition of English verb morphology among multilingual Arabic and monolingual Hebrew speakers: finding similarities with monolingual English-speaking SLIs

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