Word Order Rules: Parsing Sentences in a “Free” Word Order Language

In fixed word order languages like English, word order is highly predictive of a noun\u27s thematic and grammatical role, and a large body of research has shown that speakers of fixed word order languages tend to rely on word order when they parse and interpret sentences. In flexible word order languages like Turkish, word order is less predictive of nouns\u27 thematic and grammatical roles, and less is known about the types of cues adult speakers use to determine the meaning of sentences. How do speakers of free word order languages determine the grammatical role of nouns? To answer this question, we presented 28 adult speakers of Turkish 48 stimuli sentences where the word order was varied between SOV and OVS. The cues to aid the grammatical roles were word order, casemarking on the object noun, and when a casemarker was not present an indefinite determiner. The results suggest that, of the three morphosyntactic cues (word order, overt-casemarking, and determiner), word order is the primary cue that Turkish speakers use to assign grammatical and thematic roles, overt object casemarking is a strong secondary cue, and the indefinite determiner is a weaker tertiary cue

The Relationship between Phoneme Production and Perception in Speech-Impaired and Typically-Developing Children

One of the central questions that Eric Lenneberg raised in his seminal book, Biological Foundations of Language is: What is the relationship between language comprehension and language production? This paper reviews Lenneberg’s case study of a child with congenital anarthria and then presents the results of two studies that investigate the relationship between phoneme perception and production. The first study investigates the phoneme identification skills of a child with developmental apraxia who, like the anarthric child studied by Lenneberg, had essentially no speech yet had no difficulty understanding speech. The second study investigates the extent to which 28 typically-developing children’s ability to identify phonemes is related to their ability to produce phonemes. The results of both studies support Lenneberg’s conclusion that children’s ability to perceive speech is not dependent on their ability to produce speech. Thus, Lenneberg’s original case study and the two studies presented in this paper argue against gestural theories of speech perception such as the Motor Theory

Comprehending Turkish sentences using word order, thematic roles, and case

A core aspect of sentence comprehension is assigning thematic roles such as agents and patients to nouns. Turkish, a flexible word order language with accusative case-marking, allows us to compare the relative effect of word order, case-marking, and thematic reversibility in sentence comprehension. We conducted two spoken language comprehension experiments to investigate the relationships among these factors. Native Turkish-speaking adults were faster and more accurate in comprehending sentences with default word order than those with scrambled word order; case-marked sentences than non-casemarked sentences; and sentences with thematically irreversible nouns than those with reversible nouns. The effect of word order depended on the reversibility of the nouns, and case-marking had little-to-no effect on comprehension when the nouns were thematically irreversible. Our results suggest that while Turkish speakers use multiple cues to map thematic roles onto nouns, there are diminishing returns of facilitation with each additional source of information. These results give support to race-based models of sentence comprehension

The Relationship between Phoneme Production and Perception in Speech-Impaired and Typically-Developing Children

One of the central questions that Eric Lenneberg raised in his seminal book, Biological Foundations of Language is: What is the relationship between language comprehension and language production? This paper reviews Lenneberg’s case study of a child with congenital anarthria and then presents the results of two studies that investigate the relationship between phoneme perception and production. The first study investigates the phoneme identification skills of a child with developmental apraxia who, like the anarthric child studied by Lenneberg, had essentially no speech yet had no difficulty understanding speech. The second study investigates the extent to which 28 typically-developing children’s ability to identify phonemes is related to their ability to produce phonemes. The results of both studies support Lenneberg’s conclusion that children’s ability to perceive speech is not dependent on their ability to produce speech. Thus, Lenneberg’s original case study and the two studies presented in this paper argue against gestural theories of speech perception such as the Motor Theory

Genetics of Spoken Language Disorders

If language is the result of specialized structures in the brain and if these language-specific structures are genetically encoded, one would expect to find evidence of the heritability of language. In this article I review the results of family aggregation, pedigree, sex ratio, commingling, and segregation studies of spoken language disorders. The results of these studies provide evidence that, although spoken language disorders are genetically and behaviorally heterogeneous, genetic factors may play a substantial role in many cases of developmental spoken language disorders

Learnability and the acquisition of auxiliaries

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 1990.Title as it appears in the M.I.T. Graduate List: The acquisition ofverbal categories.Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-276).by Karin J. Stromswold.Ph.D

Innateness, Evolution, and Genetics of Language

Our goal in this article is to review a debate over the evolution of language and to suggest some keys to its resolution. We begin with a review of some of the theoretical and empirical evidence for the innateness of language that has caused renewed interest in the evolution of language. In a second section we review some prominent theories of the evolution of language, focusing on the controversy over whether language could have been adapted for some purpose. We argue that for evolutionary studies of language to advance, theorists must make more persuasive arguments for the purpose of language, and, furthermore, linguists must continue to develop a detailed theory of syntax. Finally, we suggest ways that behavioral and population genetics could help to inform studies of the evolution of language

A META-ANALYSIS OF FUNCTIONAL PROSODY IN AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by atypical interests, body movements, social interactions and language (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are common, with the current estimate of the prevalence of ASD births in the United States being 1 in 54 (Maenner et al., 2020). While early research on ASD language focused on the linguistic abilities of severely affected people with ASD, more recent research (e.g., Globerson et al., 2015) has focused on the linguistic abilities of people with ASD who do not have cognitive deficits (i.e., “high functioning” people with autism). Children, adolescents, and adults in this category have well-developed linguistic abilities in phonological (speech sounds), syntactic (grammatical) and lexical/semantic (words and word meanings) aspects of language; however, they often show impairments in pragmatic and prosodic aspects of language (e.g., Shriberg et al., 2001; Stone & Caro- Martinez, 1990; Tager-Flusberg, 2003). The paper focuses on the prosodic abilities of autistic people who do not have cognitive deficits and people with Asperger Syndrome