Testing the robustness of laws of polysemy and brevity versus frequency

The pioneering research of G.K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. Here we focus on a couple of them: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. Here we evaluate the robustness of these laws in contexts where they have not been explored yet to our knowledge. The recovery of the laws again in new conditions provides support for the hypothesis that they originate from abstract mechanisms.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Narrative skills in adolescents with a history of SLI in relation to non-verbal IQ scores

There is a debate about whether the language of children with primary language disorders and normal cognitive levels is qualitatively different from those with language impairments who have low or borderline non-verbal IQ (NVIQ). As children reach adolescence, this distinction may be even harder to ascertain, especially in naturalistic settings. Narrative may provide a useful, ecologically valid way in which to assess the language ability of adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) who have intact or lowered NVIQ and to determine whether there is any discernable difference in every day language. Nineteen adolescents with a history of SLI completed two narrative tasks: a story telling condition and a conversational condition. Just under half the group (n = 8) had non-verbal IQs of 85. The remaining 11 had NVIQs in the normal range or above. Four areas of narrative (productivity, syntax, cohesion and performance) were assessed. There were no differences between the groups on standardized tests of language. However, the group with low NVIQ were poorer on most aspects of narrative, suggesting that cognitive level is important, even when language is the primary disorder. The groups showed similar patterns of differences between story telling and conversational narrative. It was concluded that adolescents with a history of SLI and poor cognitive levels have poorer narrative skills than those with normal range NVIQ even though these may not be detected by standardized assessment. Their difficulties present as qualitatively similar to those with normal range NVIQ and narratives appear impoverished rather than inaccurate

Operationalising and measuring language dominance

The paper offers a new way to measure language ability in bilinguals, based on measures of lexical richness. The validity of proposed approach is tested in a variety of ways

Mothers' complex talk when sharing books with their toddlers: Book genre matters

This study investigated the influence of book genre (narrative or didactic) on mothers' language use during a book sharing interaction with their 18- to 25-month-olds. Mother-child dyads were videotaped sharing both a narrative and a didactic book, adapted from two commercially available books, and matched in terms of length, quantity of text, and target content. A greater proportion of mothers' talk was complex (i.e., predictions, text-to-life comparisons) during narrative book sharing than during didactic book sharing. Mothers also used a greater variety of verb tenses and referenced more mental states during narrative book sharing. These results differ from findings from previous studies with older children where it has been concluded that didactic books offer greater opportunities for complex talk than narrative books. The results also highlight the importance of taking situational factors into account when investigating parent-child communicative interactions. © The Author(s) 2013

Incidental changes in orthographic processing in the native language as a function of learning a new language late in life

Acquiring a second alphabetic language also entails learning a new set of orthographic rules and specific patterns of grapheme combinations (namely, the orthotactics). The present longitudinal study aims to investigate whether orthotactic sensitivity changes over the course of a second language learning programme. To this end, a group of Spanish monolingual old adults completed a Basque language learning course. They were tested in different moments with a language decision task that included pseudowords that could be Basque-marked, Spanish-marked or neutral. Results showed that the markedness effect varied as a function of second language acquisition, showing that learning a second language changes the sensitivity not only to the orthographic patterns of the newly acquired language, but to those of the native language too. These results demonstrate that the orthographic representations of the native language are not static and that experience with a second language boosts markedness perception in the first language

Profiling complex word usage in the speech of English preschool children: frequency patterns and transparency characteristics

This corpus-based study provides a baseline of complex word usage patterns in the spontaneous speech of English preschool children to ascertain the characteristics of their derivative vocabulary before literacy development affects language skills. Frequencies of suffixed derivatives produced by (N=243) children aged 2-5 and their caregivers were extracted for 58 suffix variants, yielding 558 types from the former and 1,364 from the latter. Between the youngest and oldest groups, 11 suffix categories increased significantly in type frequency, compared with 22 in the caregiver dataset. All derivative types were classified for transparency of meaning and simplicity of form on a 5-point analysability scale. Around 59% of both the child and caregiver derivative vocabulary sets were classified as transparent regardless of age, suggesting that the potential analysability of the preschool child’s input remains surprisingly invariant over time. The study provides baseline data for future studies on the development of morphological awareness in English-speaking schoolchildren

L1 transfer in the acquisition of manner and path in Spanish by native speakers of English

In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner