Iconicity in English and Spanish and its relation to lexical category and age of acquisition

Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between iconicity ratings and age of acquisition. Words learned earlier tended to be more iconic, suggesting that iconicity in early vocabulary may aid word learning. Altogether these findings show that iconicity is a graded quality that pervades vocabularies of even the most “arbitrary” spoken languages. The findings provide compelling evidence that iconicity is an important property of all languages, signed and spoken, including Indo-European languages

Do as I say, not as I do:a lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition

Children overgeneralise verbs to ungrammatical structures early in acquisition, but retreat from these overgeneralisations as they learn semantic verb classes. In a large corpus of English locative utterances (e.g., the woman sprayed water onto the wall/wall with water), we found structural biases which changed over development and which could explain overgeneralisation behaviour. Children and adults had similar verb classes and a correspondence analysis suggested that lexical distributional regularities in the adult input could help to explain the acquisition of these classes. A connectionist model provided an explicit account of how structural biases could be learned over development and how these biases could be reduced by learning verb classes from distributional regularities

Elements, Government, and Licensing: Developments in phonology

Elements, Government, and Licensing brings together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology. It covers three principal domains of phonological representation: melody and segmental structure; tone, prosody and prosodic structure; and phonological relations, empty categories, and vowel-zero alternations. Theoretical topics covered include the formalisation of Element Theory, the hotly debated topic of structural recursion in phonology, and the empirical status of government. In addition, a wealth of new analyses and empirical evidence sheds new light on empty categories in phonology, the analysis of certain consonantal sequences, phonological and non-phonological alternation, the elemental composition of segments, and many more. Taking up long-standing empirical and theoretical issues informed by the Government Phonology and Element Theory, this book provides theoretical advances while also bringing to light new empirical evidence and analysis challenging previous generalisations. The insights offered here will be equally exciting for phonologists working on related issues inside and outside the Principles & Parameters programme, such as researchers working in Optimality Theory or classical rule-based phonology

The company that words keep: comparing the statistical structure of child- versus adult-directed language

Does child-directed language differ from adult-directed language in ways that might facilitate word learning? Associative structure (the probability that a word appears with its free associates), contextual diversity, word repetitions and frequency were compared longitudinally across six language corpora, with four corpora of language directed at children aged 1 ; 0 to 5 ; 0, and two adult-directed corpora representing spoken and written language. Statistics were adjusted relative to shuffled corpora. Child-directed language was found to be more associative, repetitive and consistent than adult-directed language. Moreover, these statistical properties of child-directed language better predicted word acquisition than the same statistics in adult-directed language. Word frequency and repetitions were the best predictors within word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives and function words). For all word classes combined, associative structure, contextual diversity and word repetitions best predicted language acquisition. These results support the hypothesis that child-directed language is structured in ways that facilitate language acquisition

The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture

Verb Production in Aphasia: Testing the Division of Labor Between Syntax and Semantics

Verb production is commonly impaired in aphasia, but it has been shown that not all verbs are impaired equally. Some individuals with aphasia have been shown to prefer semantically general "light" verbs, while others prefer semantically specific "heavy" verbs. The "division of labor" theory, that access to syntactic and semantic processes in language production influences the weight of verbs selected, was explored in this study by examining the verbs used in the narrative language of 166 neurologically healthy individuals and 164 individuals with aphasia. The proportions of light verbs used were compared to narrative language measures of syntactic and semantic ability as well as test scores. It was found that certain semantic and syntactic measures showed a significant relationship to the proportion of light verbs used for individuals with aphasia, supporting the "division of labor" model. For healthy individuals, one measure of syntactic complexity significantly predicted light verb use

Rethinking Reflexivity: SJA/SE-verbs in Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian

This dissertation is a comparative study of the class of verbs commonly termed “reflexive” in Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). These verbs occur with the affix -sja in Russian and with the clitic se in BCS. Despite the fact that they are commonly called reflexive, they do not necessarily refer to reflexive events in which the same entity is both agent and patient.. The analysis has an emphasis on semantics and uses Cognitive Grammar as a framework to determine the semantic prototypes for this group of verbs in each language. It uses as a starting point Suzanne Kemmer’s (1993) monograph on middle voice, which shows that Russian is a middle-marking language in which the light form -sja denotes middle voice and the heavy form sebja denotes true reflexivity. The study hypothesizes that Kemmer’s analysis is accurate for Russian, but not for some other Slavic languages, namely BCS. Quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that in Russian the semantic prototype for verbs with -sja is MIDDLE, while in BCS the prototype for verbs with se is REFLEXIVE. The study defines semantic types for this group of verbs including REFLEXIVE, POSSESSIVE REFLEXIVE, RECIPROCAL, IMPERSONAL, PASSIVE, MIDDLE and BENEFACTIVE and sets up diagnostic tests for determining REFLEXIVE, POSSESSIVE REFLEXIVE, and RECIPROCAL events. Quantitative analysis is based on data collected from the Parasol parallel corpus from three parallel texts and shows that both languages have MIDDLE as the most frequent semantic type for SE-verbs for both languages, but also that that Russian sometimes uses a heavy form for REFLEXIVE, POSSESSIVE REFLEXIVE, or RECIPROCAL semantic types where BCS has a light form SE-verb. Qualitative data shows that BCS SE-verbs occur in various situations unique to BCS and not in Russian, including across-the-board dependencies, past passive participles formed from SE-verbs, and se modified by adjectives as a noun or pronoun would be modified. The combined quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that BCS SE-verbs maintain the syntactic structure of REFLEXIVE verbs, pointing to the conclusion that the prototype for BCS SE-verbs is REFLEXIVE, while the prototype for these verbs in Russian is MIDDLE

Early Linguistic Interactions: Distributional Properties of Verbs in Syntactic Patterns

Honors (Bachelor's)LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120575/1/liamc.pd