Production–comprehension asymmetries and the acquisition of evidential morphology

Non-Native Raters and Native Speech: Other Perspective for the Research on Comprehensibility of Second Language Input

“…A third argument: the existent rapid period for phonetic learning [17] in the first years of life might not be explaining why the youngest learners have mastery for different phonetic features in decoding, but on the other hand contribute to explain how children produce nativelike discourse (accent) contrary to their competency to understand multiple phonetic features (the dialect in second language, produced by a native speaker). These data are congruent to other systematic research [26] that discovered that a specific sample of native speakers developed language in the first years of life in a reverse order expected for the development stages of first language (s) acquisition where comprehension precedes the production ability [27][28]. However Werker and Byers-Heinlein [28] concluded that monolinguals and bilinguals are different in language development and the processes of production and comprehension could be more overlapped stages than expected for a bilingual brain.…”

Same, different, or closely related: What is the relationship between language production and comprehension?

“…Two paper focus on the role of domain-general processes during speaking and listening. The first of these papers, by Ünal and Papafragou (2016), is a developmental study and concerns the acquisition of evidential morphology markers (i.e., morphemes specifying the source of knowledge, i.e., direct or indirect experience). In a series of experiments, the authors demonstrate that children produce the appropriate morphological forms before they can correctly interpret them in utterances they hear.…”

The relation between language and mental state reasoning

“…Instead, both learners and mature speakers of languages with and without grammaticalized evidentiality perform similarly on nonlinguistic source-monitoring tasks (Papafragou et al, 2007;Ünal & Papafragou, submitted;Ünal et al, 2016). Furthermore, linguistic evidentiality is acquired later than conceptual representations of information sources by young learners (Ozturk & Papafragou, 2016;Papafragou et al, 2007), and both linguistic and conceptual 1 6 4 development in this domain seem to follow similar principles (Ozturk & Papafragou, 2016;Papafragou et al, 2007;Ünal & Papafragou, 2016b). Finally, there is independent evidence that some aspects of human source-monitoring abilities may be shared with nonhuman primates (Hare, Call & Tomasello, 2001), suggesting that the ability to reason about sources of information develops independently of language.…”

“…This pattern parallels the self-other asymmetry that characterizes children's nonlinguistic source monitoring, whereby children are better at reasoning about their own compared with other people's sources of knowledge (see Papafragou et al, 2007;Ünal, 2016;Ünal & Papafragou, submitted). In the clearest demonstration of this parallel, Ünal and Papafragou (2016b) showed that the production-comprehension asymmetry tracked the self-other asymmetry in Turkish learners between the ages of three and six tested in otherwise-identical tasks. The conclusion was that the linguistic asymmetry reflects the conceptual presuppositions of two linguistic processes: production requires assessing one's own information sources, while comprehension requires reasoning about information sources in others.…”