The cognitive basis for linguistic structures1

Bever, Thomas G.

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199677139.003.0001

Cited by 524 publications

(302 citation statements)

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“…11 The well-known discrepancy between eventive and psychological passives has already been reported for both TD and SLI populations (Bever 1970;Maratsos et al 1985;Marchman et al 1991;Pinker et al 1987;Babyonyshev et al 2005). This pattern of performance fits with the predictions of all accounts of passives, whether they claim that children resort to an adjectival analysis for eventive passives, while such a strategy would not be available to psychological passives (Borer & Wexler 1987, 1992Hirsch & Wexler 2006), or whether the claim is that semantic coercion is necessary for passivization of psychological verbs and is computationally costly, thus emerging later in development (Gehrke & Grillo 2008;Belletti & Guasti 2015;Snyder & Hyams 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

The comprehension of passives in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Durrleman

Delage

Pelletier

et al. 2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This study investigates the comprehension of passives in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Subsets of children with ASD have been previously found to present linguistic profiles reminiscent of Specific Language Impairment (SLI), a condition including difficulties with certain constructions displaying noncanonical word orders. However, research on one such construction, passives, is sparse and remains inconclusive. Furthermore, studies on typical development of passives in French are lacking. Twenty French-speaking children with ASD (mean age 9;3), including children with both normal and delayed nonverbal levels, were compared to 20 age-matched typically-developing (TD) children and to 65 younger TD children split into groups of children aged 4-5, 6-7 and 8-9 years. Various passive types were assessed via a sentencepicture matching task: eventive versus psychological, and short versus long. Most children with ASD showed difficulties on passive constructions as compared to age controls, although with the same basic pattern of performance. More subtle delay on passives was evident in a subgroup who was otherwise unimpaired on standardized assessments of vocabulary and morphosyntax, while a pronounced delay on passives was detectable in another subgroup also displaying more general lexical and morphosyntactic impairment. Difficulties with passives were dissociated from nonverbal abilities and working memory. The findings reveal that the syntax of passives is delayed in ASD, not deviant. This delay was attested even in the subgroup with seemingly intact general language skills as revealed by standardized assessments, suggesting that subtle difficulties with this construction may be present and go undetected by global language tests. Performance on passives was unrelated to nonverbal abilities, in line with work suggesting that the linguistic phenotype of some children with ASD resembles SLI. This underscores the importance of careful assessment of the language abilities of children with ASD, including those within normal IQ range.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

The comprehension of passives in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Durrleman

Delage

Pelletier

et al. 2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…A second view argues that languages are shaped over time by constraints on human cognitive mechanisms and pressures associated with language acquisition and use. A variety of such cognitive pressures have been proposed to constrain the space of possible language structures, such as learnability (3)(4)(5), memory limitations (6), constraints on processing and perception (7,8), and considerations of efficient communication (9)(10)(11). On this view, language structures that increase the learnability of a language, reduce its processing complexity, or ensure efficient communication are more likely to be observed cross-linguistically (for a review, see ref.…”

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confidence: 99%

Language learners restructure their input to facilitate efficient communication

Fedzechkina¹,

Jaeger

Newport

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

159

194

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Languages of the world display many structural similarities. We test the hypothesis that some of these structural properties may arise from biases operating during language acquisition that shape languages over time. Specifically, we investigate whether language learners are biased toward linguistic systems that strike an efficient balance between robust information transfer, on the one hand, and effort or resource demands, on the other hand, thereby increasing the communicative utility of the acquired language. In two experiments, we expose learners to miniature artificial languages designed in such a way that they do not use their formal devices (case marking) efficiently to facilitate robust information transfer. We find that learners restructure such languages in ways that facilitate efficient information transfer compared with the input language. These systematic changes introduced by the learners follow typologically frequent patterns, supporting the hypothesis that some of the structural similarities found in natural languages are shaped by biases toward communicatively efficient linguistic systems.language universals | learning biases | efficient information transmission | communicative pressures

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“…by relying on electronic resources, such as WordNet (De Belder et al, 2010) or word frequency lists (Drndarevic et al, 2012 -Verbal voice: to signal the transformation of a passive sentence into an active or vice versa. Within both the corpora very few examples of the latter were found; this result was expected since passive sentences represent an instance of non-canonical order: they are acquired later by typically developing children (Maratsos, 1974;Bever, 1970) (for Italian, (Cipriani et al, 1993Ciccarelli, 1998)) and have been reported as problematic for atypical populations, e.g. deaf children (Volpato, 2010).…”

Section: Smentioning

confidence: 78%

Proceedings of The 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2015

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The cognitive basis for linguistic structures1

Cited by 524 publications

References 0 publications

The comprehension of passives in Autism Spectrum Disorder

The comprehension of passives in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Language learners restructure their input to facilitate efficient communication

Proceedings of The 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

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