Clifton Pye

Mayan Telegraphese: Intonational Determinants of Inflectional Development in Quiché Mayan

This is the publishers version, also available electronically from: http://www.dx.doi.org/10.2307/413905.

Higher pitch in BT is not universal: acoustic evidence from Quiche Mayan

Although higher pitch has been described as a universal feature of babytalk (BT) registers worldwide, analysis of a sample of three Quiche Mayan-speaking mothers addressing their infant children indicated that their BT register does not utilize this feature. Quiche mothers either make no pitch distinction in speech to young children, or actually lower pitch slightly in comparison with their Adult–Adult interaction style. A comparison group of American mothers raised pitch 35–70 Hz when addressing infants of the same age and language maturity. We posit that pitch-raising strategies may be sociolinguistically determined and may serve different functions across languages.

Refining transcriptions: the significance of transcriber ‘errors’

This work describes the importance of the transcription process in studies of speech and language acquisition. Using data collected from a hearing child of deaf parents, the three authors derived independent transcriptions of the same speech sample and systematically compared their transcripts with each other and with the best estimate of the speakers actual productions. The resultant transcripts were used to produce two descriptions of this childs phonological system, one based on a liberal estimate and one on a conservative estimate of the potential error in the transcripts. Discussion includes suggestions for deriving percentages of inter-transcriber agreement and the utility of such figures as a metric of transcription difficulty as well as transcriber ability.

Eliciting Verbs From Children With Specific Language Impairment

The focus of assessment and intervention is often aimed at increasing the lexical skills of young children with language impairment. Frequently, the use of nouns is the center of the lexical assess...

The Acquisition of Quiche (Mayan)

This is the publishers version, also available electronically from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2741972?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

The poverty of the Mayan stimulus

Poverty of the stimulus (POS) arguments have instigated considerable debate in the recent linguistics literature. This article uses the comparative method to challenge the logic of POS arguments. Rather than question the premises of POS arguments, the article demonstrates how POS arguments for individual languages lead to a reductio ad absurdum as POS arguments from genetically related languages are compared. Comparison leads to different contradictions for poverty of the negative stimulus (PONS) and poverty of the positive stimulus (POPS) arguments. Comparing PONS arguments leads to the conclusion that Universal Grammar contains language-specific versions of linguistic rules. Comparing POPS arguments leads to the conclusion that Universal Grammar may supply knowledge that is ungrammatical in the target language. The reductio shows that universal principles of grammar cannot be established on the basis of POS arguments from a single language.

Automating the analysis of child phonology

Ingram (1981, in press) introduced a set of procedures for phonological analysis of fundamental importance to research on phonological development and the clinical assessment of phonological disorders. Recent studies employing these procedures demonstrate their utility in research on the course of normal development in English (Ingram, 1981), phonological disorders (Ingram, 1986; Pye, Wilcox and Siren, in press) and cross-linguistic comparisons of phonological development (Ingram, 1981/2, 1983; Pye, Ingram and List, 1987) Despite such theoretical and practical successes, the procedures remain relatively unutilized in clinical practice. This is primarily due to the exhaustive analysis of language samples that the procedures demand. Most of the procedures can be automated, however, which should provide a greater incentive for their use in clinical settings. This report provides an overview of the analytic procedures and demonstrates how the procedures are performed in the PAL implementation. It also addresses the programming decisions which are an integral part of the implementation and which give the programme its flexibility and power.

Generally speaking, how children learn language

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A Tale of Two Mam Children: Contact- Induced Language Change in Mayan Child Language

Mayan languages have been in contact with Spanish for nearly 500 years and yet maintain much of their structural integrity. The arrival of bilingual schools and television has now altered the circumstance of language use within many Mayan households. This article compares children’s and mothers’ production of verb, existential, and negation constructions in Spanish and five Mayan languages, with a special focus on Mam. Mayan children may have vocabularies with up to 20% Spanish-derived lexemes and still not exhibit significant structural changes in their grammars. A two-year-old Mam child growing up with intense pressure to use Spanish exhibited changes to verb, existential, and negation constructions that were not evident in the language of other Mayan-speaking children. Verb use and negation appear to be especially sensitive indicators of such change. Contact-induced structural change shows how children’s emerging grammars accommodate new structural elements.

Island Constraints at Eighty

Sue Kemper and coworkers at the University of Kansas have documented marked age-related declines in the complexity of adults’ language. Studies of adults’ diary entries (Kemper, 1987a) reveal age-related declines in the complexity of elderly adults’ written language (cf. Figures 1–3). Elderly adults are significantly less likely to use complex structures such as multiply embedded sentences, THAT- and WH-clauses, gerunds, and participles. The age-related declines in the frequency of embedded clauses are more severe in subject position than in predicate position — suggesting a marked decline in the adults’ ability to process left-branching structures.