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Publications (125)
Research has shown that first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers actively make predictions about upcoming linguistic information, though L2 speakers are less efficient. While prediction mechanisms are assumed to be qualitatively the same, quantitative prediction-driven processing differences may be modulated by individual differences We tested...
Bilinguals have been shown to adapt to syntactic innovations (i.e., structures that deviate from the standard grammar) either by producing such structures more or by processing them faster after repeated exposure. However, research on whether they adapt by increasing their acceptability ratings for innovations is limited. We consider this to be a c...
Research has found that both first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers make predictions about upcoming linguistic information, with predictive behaviour being impacted by individual differences and methodological factors. However, it is not clear whether a cost is incurred when a prediction is made, but not met. L2 speakers have less ex...
Long-distance dependencies such as relative clauses (RCs) are known to be vulnerable in heritage grammars (e.g., Montrul, 2008 ). Previous studies in RC comprehension have shown that heritage language (HL) children show similar comprehension to monolingual children ( Jia & Paradis, 2020 ), while differential performance has also been found ( Kidd e...
Nominal compounds are a structure commonly used in scientific texts. Despite their commonality, very little is known about how they are distributed in scientific articles. Based on the Uniform Information Density hypothesis, which states that speakers communicate information at a constant rate, avoiding peaks and troughs of information transmission...
The study investigates the role of constituent order in structural priming. We report the results from a PO/DO priming experiment in German, in which we experimentally manipulated verb position in primes and targets. Significant structural priming effects occurred irrespective of whether verb position was the same in prime and target or not. Howeve...
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers communicate by transmitting information close to a constant rate. When choosing between two syntactic variants, it claims that speakers prefer the variant distributing information most evenly, avoiding signal peaks and troughs. If speakers prefer transmitting information unifor...
The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of abstract representations for syntactic structures in children. In a structural priming experiment on the dative alternation in German, we primed children from three different age groups (3–4 years, 5–6 years, 7–8 years) and adults with double object datives (Dora sent Boots the rabbit)...
In a recent study, Fernandez et al. (2021) investigated parafoveal processing in L1 English and L1 German–L2 English readers using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). Unexpectedly, L2 readers derived an interference from a non-cognate translation parafoveal mask (arrow vs. pfeil), but derived a benefit from a German orthographic p...
This volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages, including English, Dutch, and German, but also Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, as well as lesser-studied ones such as...
Inuktitut is a polysynthetic agglutinative language of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family, with nearly 900 verbal inflections. Despite the complexity of its inflectional system, children acquiring Inuktitut as their native language start using inflections relatively early (Crago & Allen, 2001; Swift & Allen, 2002). One hypothesis is that careg...
When addressing young children, caregivers typically use a simplified mode of the
language — ‘child-directed speech’ (CDS). The most studied domains of CDS are the lexicon,
phonetics and phonology, and syntax (Snow 1995). Relatively less is known about the
morphological properties of CDS. In this study, we ask how caregivers morphologically simp...
In this study, we investigate the three-dot sign as a discourse marker (DM) with textual, subjective and intersubjective discourse functions. As a graphical marker that is used across languages, the three-dot sign is especially suitable for comparative studies and dynamics in language contact. Our corpus study targeting instant messages of differen...
Proficient first-language (L1) readers of alphabetic languages that are read left-to-right typically have a perceptual span of 3–4 characters to the left and 14–15 characters to the right of the foveal fixation. Given that second-language (L2) processing requires more cognitive resources, we hypothesize that L2ers will have a smaller perceptual spa...
This paper presents the first part of a guide for documenting and describing child language, child directed language and socialization patterns in diverse languages and cultures. The guide is intended for anyone interested in working across child language and language documentation, including, for example, field linguists and language documenters,...
Caregivers typically use a simplified mode of the language – child-directed speech (CDS) – when addressing young children. In this study, we investigate the use of complex morphological structures with a word class change within a single word in Inuktitut CDS. Inuktitut is a polysynthetic agglutinative language of the Inuit–Yupik–Unangan language f...
This study investigated the universality of emotional prosody in perception of discrete emotions when semantics is not available. In two experiments the perception of emotional prosody in Hebrew and German by listeners who speak one of the languages but not the other was investigated. Having a parallel tool in both languages allowed to conduct cont...
Previous cross-linguistic studies have shown that object relative clauses (ORCs) are typically harder to parse than subject relative clauses (SRCs). The cause of difficulty, however, is still under debate, both in the adult and in the developmental literature. The present study investigates the on-line processing of SRCs and ORCs in Greek-speaking...
This study focuses on the syntactic and pragmatic resources heritage speakers ( HS s) use to structure their discourse according to register. Drawing on a corpus of narratives produced by German HS s living in the United States, as well as by monolingually-raised speakers ( MS s) of English and German, we investigated HS s’ syntactic resources by a...
Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation betw...
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering br...
The manuscript provides readers with a basic methodological toolset for experimental psycholinguistic studies on translation. Following a description of key methodological concepts and the rationale behind experimental designs in psycholinguistics, we discuss experimental paradigms adopted from bilingualism research, which potentially constitute a...
In the current study we used the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm to directly compare the second language (L2) English perceptual span of two groups that speak languages with essentially the same lexicon and grammar but crucially with different writing directions (and scripts): Hindi (read left to right) and Urdu (read right to left). This is...
The category “native speaker” is flawed because it fails to consider the diversity between the speaker groups falling under its scope, as highlighted in previous literature. This paper provides further evidence by focusing on the similarities and differences between heritage speakers (HSs) and monolingually-raised speakers (MSs) of their heritage a...
In this study we investigated parafoveal processing by L1 and late L2 speakers of English (L1 German) while reading in English. We hypothesized that L2ers would make use of semantic and orthographic information parafoveally . Using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated six parafoveal masks in a sentence ( Mark found th*e wood for th...
How do production and comprehension processes interact in the bilingual brain during language interaction? Most experimental and theoretical research in psycholinguistics to date has focused on investigating the mechanisms that underlie language production and language comprehension separately. Only recently have researchers started emphasizing the...
In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to SVO or OVS sentences containing active accusative verbs ( küssen...
This poster focuses on referent introduction of heritage speakers and monolinguals.
This presentation focuses on the usage of three clause types (independent main clauses, coordinate main clauses, and subordinate clause) in various registers by heritage speakers of German in the USA.
Much reading research has found that informative parafoveal masks lead to a reading benefit for native speakers (see, Schotter et al., 2012). However, little reading research has tested the impact of uninformative parafoveal masks during reading. Additionally, parafoveal processing research is primarily restricted to native speakers. In the current...
Research has shown that suprasegmental cues in conjunction with visual context can lead to anticipatory (or predictive) eye movements. However, the impact of speech rate on anticipatory eye movements has received little empirical attention. The purpose of the current study was twofold. From a methodological perspective, we tested the impact of spee...
A unique overview of the human language faculty at all levels of organization. Language is not only one of the most complex cognitive functions that we command, it is also the aspect of the mind that makes us uniquely human. Research suggests that the human brain exhibits a language readiness not found in the brains of other species. This volume br...
The role of text characteristics like information density for the comprehension and future retrieval of academic texts is far from understood. For instance, complex concepts can be summarized in a concise but ambiguous way using complex nominal compounds or explained in more detail using propositions detailing the precise relationship between the c...
How does a child map words to grammatical categories when words are not overtly marked either lexically or prosodically? Recent language acquisition theories have proposed that distributional information encoded in sequences of words or morphemes might play a central role in forming grammatical classes. To test this proposal, we analyze child-direc...
In this chapter, I begin by briefly outlining the structure of Inuit (Eskimo) languages and the challenges they present for child language development. In the bulk of the chapter, I review the existing literature on the first language, impaired, and bilingual acquisition of Inuit languages (i.e. Inuktitut and West Greenlandic) from ages 1 through 1...
This handbook offers an extensive cross-linguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. These languages and the problems they raise for linguistic analyses have long featured prominently in language descriptions, and yet the essence o...
In this study, we started to investigate the impact of different layouts in scientific papers using eye tracking technology. At this step, we constrict our study to have a comparison between layout formats inside Computer Science Community. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) proceeding as the double-column format and Springer Lecture Notes i...
In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investigated the role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming. In both experiments, significant priming effects emerged only if prime and target were similar with regard to constituent order and also situated on the s...
Although virtually all Inuit children in eastern Arctic Canada learn Inuktitut as their native language, there is a critical lack of tools to assess their level of language ability. This article investigates how mean length of utterance (MLU), a widely-used assessment measure in English and other languages, can be best applied in Inuktitut. The aut...
This chapter reviews the literature on preschool children’s sensitivity to cognitive accessibility in selecting linguistic forms to realize referents in speech. Both spontaneous speech and experimental production studies are reviewed, encompassing thirteen languages for monolingual children and five different language pairs for bilingual children....
ABSTRACT The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persia...
This chapter reviews the literature on preschool children’s sensitivity to cognitive accessibility in selecting linguistic forms to realize referents in speech. Both spontaneous speech and experimental production studies are reviewed, encompassing thirteen languages for monolingual children and five different language pairs for bilingual children....
This book examines the issue of competing motivations in grammar and language use. The term “competing motivations” refers to the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules and which speakers and addressees need to contend with when expressing themselves, or when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on...
Previous research has demonstrated that children as young as 2;0 are sensitive to discourse-pragmatic context when selecting referring expressions. If a referent is present in the discourse context and/or jointly attended to by the listener, a child will be more likely to omit a referring expression or use a pronominal form. To date, most research...
New referents are typically introduced into adult discourse with lexical nouns. This makes new referents maximally clear for listeners, and helps the listeners direct their attention appropriately. A different trend is observed in child language, where new referents may be realised with demonstratives or pronouns, or they may be omitted altogether....
Previous research has shown that children attend to discourse-pragmatics (e.g. newness, joint attention) when they produce referential forms in both languages that permit subject omission and those that do not. However, studies in languages that do not permit subject omission have been limited to only one or two discourse-pragmatic features, biling...
One potential challenge for children learning Inuktitut comes from the ergative case marking system, because of the contrast between the ergative system in morphology and the accusative system governing syntax. However, no studies have yet been published focusing on how Inuktitut-speaking children acquire ergativity. In this chapter, we investigate...
This work is comprised of a set of papers focussing on the extreme polysynthetic nature of the Eskaleut languages which are spoken over the vast area stretching from Far Eastern Siberia, on through the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and Canada, as far as Greenland. The aim of the book is to situate the Eskaleut languages typologically in general linguis...
The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and Englis...
Gestures that accompany speech are known to be tightly coupled with speech production. However little is known about the cognitive processes that underlie this link. Previous cross-linguistic research has provided preliminary evidence for online interaction between the two systems based on the systematic co-variation found between how different lan...
Inuktitut, the Eskimo language spoken in Eastern Canada, is one of the few Canadian indigenous languages with a strong chance of long-term survival because over 90% of Inuit children still learn Inuktitut from birth. In this paper I review existing literature on bilingual Inuit children to explore the prospects for the survival of Inuktitut given t...
Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the seman...
Children who are native speakers of minority languages often experience stagnation or decline in that language when exposed to a majority language in a school or community situation. This paper examines such a situation among the Inuit of arctic Quebec. All 18 participants in the study were native speakers of Inuktitut, living in home environments...
A presentation on language acquisition in Inuktitut-English bilinguals.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
The focus of this collection is on important themes in L2 acquisition, the nature of grammatical systems developed by language learners in L1 acquisition, third language acquisition, and bilingualism and language attrition. The chapters present an interesting mix of theoretical contributions, overview studies, and experimental designs exploring var...
What are the relations between linguistic encoding and gestural representations of events during online speaking? The few studies that have been conducted on this topic have yielded somewhat incompatible results with regard to whether and how gestural representations of events change with differences in the preferred semantic and syntactic encoding...
This study investigates subject omission in six English-Inuktitut simultaneous bilingual children, aged 1;8-3;9, to examine whether there are cross-language influences in their language development. Previous research with other language pairs has shown that the morphosyntax of one language can influence the development of morphosyntax in the other...
We examined the development of linguistic and gestural expressions of direct causation (where a direct relation exists between the causer and the causee) in motion events in two typologically different languages. 120 American and Turkish adults and children (aged 3, 5 and 9) narrated clips of direct causation. Linguistic descriptions of causal even...
Research into gestures represents a multifaceted field comprising a wide range of disciplines and research topics, varying methods and approaches, and even different species such as humans, apes and monkeys. The aim of this volume (originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture 5:1/2 (2005)) is to bring together the research in gestural communi...
In his review of Crain & Thornton's (C&T) (1998) Investigations in Universal Grammar (IUG), Drozd raises many substantial concerns that call into question the correctness and usefulness of the Modularity Matching Model, and the adequacy of the experimental designs put forth to support it. My comments will focus on Modularity Matching. First, I elab...
KARMILOFF, K. & KARMILOFF-SMITH, A., Pathways to language: from fetus to adolescent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. ix+256. - Volume 30 Issue 1 - SHANLEY E. M. ALLEN
Preferred Argument Structure offers a profound insight into the relationship between language use and grammatical structure. In his original publication on Preferred Argument Structure, Du Bois (1987) demonstrated the power of this perspective by using it to explain the origins of ergativity and ergative marking systems. Since this work, the genera...
L'inuktitut est une langue eskimo-aleut parlee dans les parties nord-est du Canada. L'A. presente des donnees empiriques de cette langue inuit du Quebec arctique, pour mettre en valeur l'usage conversationnel des structures verbales elliptiques dans lesquelles il manque la base verbale. Ces structures elliptiques consistent seulement en une base po...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
The importance of discourse-pragmatics in acquisition - Volume 4 Issue 1 - Shanley Allen
A stage of optional infinitive (OI) production has been identified in typically devel-oping (TD) children learning languages that do not permit null subjects (Wexler (1994; 1998; 1999)), and this stage has been shown to be extended in at least Eng-lish-and German-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI; Rice, Noll, and Grimm (1997)...
This paper assesses discourse pragmatics as a potential explanation for the production and omission of arguments in early child language. It employs a set of features that characterize typical situations of informativeness (Greenfield and Smith 1976; Clancy 1993, 1997) to examine argument status in data from four children aged 2;0 through 3;6 learn...
