Sabine Stoll

Exorcising Grice's ghost: an empirical approach to studying intentional communication in animals

Languages intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production of communicative acts requires mental‐state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans.

Lexically restricted utterances in Russian, german, and english child-directed speech.

This study investigates the child-directed speech (CDS) of four Russian-, six German, and six English-speaking mothers to their 2-year-old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word-order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the initial strings of English CDS by Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003) would not be found in Russian or German CDS. However, despite differences between the three corpora that clearly derive from typological differences between the languages, the most significant finding of this study is a high degree of lexical restrictiveness at the beginnings of CDS utterances in all three languages.

Early Communicative Development in Two Cultures: A Comparison of the Communicative Environments of Children from Two Cultures

The nature of young childrens communicative environment has been central to theoretical debates about the importance of innate and environmental factors in the development of communication and language. In this paper, we explore aspects of the communicative development and environment of young children growing up in two very different cultures, one in a village of eastern Nepal and the other in a rural area of Western Germany. We analysed longitudinal video recordings of 6 children from each culture in naturalistic settings, at age-matched time points over a period of 8 months. Four children were 8 months old at the outset of the study, 4 were 2 years and 2 months old, and 4 were 3 years old. There were major differences between cultures in the number of adults and children present during the recordings, with other children playing an increasingly important role for the older children in the Nepal recordings. We found no difference between cultures in the onset of pointing and imitation or of reaching, requesting and offering, indicating that these behaviours may be part of a human-specific timetable for socio-cognitive development. We also found that imitation by both the target children and those around them was strictly limited to the youngest group in both cultures. This suggests that imitation may be very important for early development in the prelinguistic phase, while around the age of 2, with the childs developing competence, other ways of interacting take over. The theoretical implications of our results are discussed with reference to the roles of child-intrinsic and environmental factors in the developmental process.

Beginning and end in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian

The goal of this research is to determine the relevant factors that aid in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian. Results confirm the findings of previous research, which say that aspect is not learned as a uniform category, but rather interrelates with the acquisition of Aktionsarten. This study focuses on the factors responsible for the difference in the rate of the acquisition of two complementary Aktionsarten in the perfective aspect: telic verbs (verbs including a result/goal of the denoted event) and ingressive verbs (verbs including the beginning of the event). Since the usage of Aktionsarten strongly depends on the surrounding discourse, two experiments that varied in their discourse complexity were conducted. One study looked at the production of isolated utterances (thirty-nine children aged 3;0 to 6;11) and the other study focused on complex texts (fifty-two children aged 3;0 to 6;11). It was found that while telics are used independently of discourse context, ingressives depend strongly on contextual information. These results suggest that discourse complexity and narrative competence define the acquisitional process for ingressives, yet are irrelevant in the acquisition of telics.

Finding Developmental Groups in Acquisition Data: Variability-based Neighbour Clustering

Abstract This article introduces a quantitative, data-driven method to identify clusters of groups of data points in longitudinal data. We illustrate this method with examples from first-language acquisition research. First, we discuss a variety of shortcomings of current practices in the identification and handling of stages in studies of language acquisition. Second, we explain and exemplify our method, which we refer to as variability-based neighbour clustering, on the basis of mean length of utterance (MLU) values and lexical growth in two different corpora. Third, we discuss the methods advantages and briefly point to further applications both in language acquisition and in diachronic linguistics.

How to Measure Development in Corpora? An Association Strength Approach.

In this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating co-occurrence data. We exemplify the implementation of these proposals with data on the acquisition of the patterning of tense and grammatical aspect of four Russian children. The method, however, is suitable for a wide range of other acquisition questions as well.

Syntactic mixing across generations in an environment of community-wide bilingualism

A quantitative analysis of a trans-generational, conversational corpus of Chintang (Tibeto-Burman) speakers with community-wide bilingualism in Nepali (Indo-European) reveals that children show more code-switching into Nepali than older speakers. This confirms earlier proposals in the literature that code-switching in bilingual children decreases when they gain proficiency in their dominant language, especially in vocabulary. Contradicting expectations from other studies, our corpus data also reveal that for adults, multi-word insertions of Nepali into Chintang are just as likely to undergo full syntactic integration as single-word insertions. Speakers of younger generations show less syntactic integration. We propose that this reflects a change between generations, from strongly asymmetrical, Chintang-dominated bilingualism in older generations to more balanced bilingualism where Chintang and Nepali operate as clearly separate systems in younger generations. This change is likely to have been triggered by the increase of Nepali presence over the past few decades.

Compositionality in animals and humans

A key step in understanding the evolution of human language involves unravelling the origins of language’s syntactic structure. One approach seeks to reduce the core of syntax in humans to a single principle of recursive combination, merge, for which there is no evidence in other species. We argue for an alternative approach. We review evidence that beneath the staggering complexity of human syntax, there is an extensive layer of nonproductive, nonhierarchical syntax that can be fruitfully compared to animal call combinations. This is the essential groundwork that must be explored and integrated before we can elucidate, with sufficient precision, what exactly made it possible for human language to explode its syntactic capacity, transitioning from simple nonproductive combinations to the unrivalled complexity that we now have.

A universal cue for grammatical categories in the input to children: Frequent frames

Highlights • Data from typologically diverse languages shows common distributional patterns.• Discontinuous repetitive patterns in the input provide cues for category assignment.• Morphological frames accurately predict nouns and verbs in the input to children.

Language Transition(s): School Responses to Recent Changes in Language Choice in a Northern Dene Community (Canada)

This chapter presents the efforts of two Dene Sųline communities in Northern Saskatchewan and their respective schools to keep the aboriginal language vital in the face of growing bilingualism between Dene and English. The Dene transitional immersion program is introduced, as well as community reactions to its implementation at school. The changing language ecologies of the communities and especially the young generation are discussed, mentioning youth language and code-mixing as part of current language choice.