Gender and prestige preference in language

A literature in sociolinguistics asserts that women tend to adopt and use the speech of richer people more readily than men where the difference between the speech of rich and poor is a variant/variant, a standard language/dialect, or a standard language/creole difference. This generalization is not found to be true of second language learning. Learning a second language differs from learning a variant of one's own or a very closely related form in that it requires more exposure and motivation. If these factors are controlled for, the effect predicted by the Gender and Prestige Preference Theory ought to appear. It does not. Whatever female preference there may be for the language of the rich, it is very small.The authors thank Penelope Eckert and Robbins Burling for their comments, and Tom Wilkinson for programming assistance. A version of this paper was presented at the 1976 American Sociological Association meetings.     

Relationships between language structure and language learning: the suffixing preference and grammatical categorization

It is a reasonable assumption that universal properties of natural languages are not accidental. They occur either because they are underwritten by genetic code, because they assist in language processing or language learning, or due to some combination of the two. In this paper we investigate one such language universal: the suffixing preference across the world's languages, whereby inflections tend to be added to the end of words. A corpus analysis of child-directed speech in English found that suffixes were more accurate at cuing the grammatical category of the root word than were prefixes. An artificial language experiment found that there was a learning advantage for suffixes over prefixes in terms of grammatical categorization within an artificial language. The results are consistent with an account of language universals that originate in general purpose learning mechanisms.     

Primary or "specific" language impairment and children learning a second language

We review empirical findings from children with primary or "specific" language impairment (PLI) and children who learn a single language from birth (L1) and a second language (L2) beginning in childhood. The PLI profile is presented in terms of both language and nonlinguistic features. The discussion of L2 learners emphasizes variable patterns of growth and skill distribution in L1 and L2 which complicate the identification of PLI in linguistically diverse learners. We then introduce our research program, designed to map out common ground and potential fault lines between typically developing children learning one or two languages, as compared to children with PLI.     

Wordshape errors in language production

Errors in natural speech that crucially involve the shape of the target word, i.e. interact in some way with the number of consonants and vowels in the word and their relative positioning, are examined in detail. It is shown that context highly constrains the rate of such errors. The data implicate a distinction between a segment level that encodes fine phonemic distinctions and a wordshape level with a course encoding. Implications for the representation of language and cognitive processing in language production are explored.     

Syntactic priming in language production

People have a tendency to repeat the types of sentences they use during language production. Recent experimental work has shown that this phenomenon is at least partly due to ‘syntactic priming’, whereby the act of processing an utterance with a particular form facilitates processing a subsequent utterance with the same or a related form. In this review, we first provide an overview of the evidence for syntactic priming. The review will then explore the implications of this research for three different areas of language theory: the possible functional significance of syntactic priming in coordinating speakers during dialogue, the mechanisms underlying sentence production, and the nature of linguistic representation.     

On the effects of second language immersion on first language production

The present study was aimed at investigating how the effects of a second language (L2) immersion on first language (L1) production are modulated by lexical frequency and the cognate status of words. By means of a picture naming and a semantic fluency task, we longitudinally explored the changes in L1 performance of a group of immersed learners. Our results revealed slower naming latencies at the end than at the beginning of the immersion period but only for those pictures whose corresponding names were low frequency and non-cognates. Moreover, the semantic fluency task revealed a decrease in the percentage of non-cognate words produced at the end of the immersion period. The observed decline in the accessibility to L1 words after a short L2 immersion period is explained in terms of the general bilingual lexical access disadvantage and studies of L1 attrition in speech production. Specifically, the present findings are more in line with theoretical accounts that consider lexical difficulties to be the result of changes in the frequency of use of the L1 during a short L2 immersion period.     

Overt language production plays a key role in the Hebb repetition effect

When asked to recall verbatim a short list of items, performance is very limited. However, if the list of items is repeated across trials, recall performance improves. This phenomenon, known as the Hebb repetition effect (Hebb, 1961; Brain Mechanisms and Learning: A Symposium, pp. 37–51), is considered a laboratory analogue of language learning. In effect, learning a new word implies the maintenance of a series of smaller units, such as phonemes or syllables, in the correct order for a short amount of time before producing them. The sequence of smaller units is typically presented more than once. In the present study, we investigated the role of overt language production in language learning by manipulating recall direction. If the learning of a repeated list of items relies on overt language production processes, changing list production order by manipulating recall direction should impact the learning of the list. In Experiment 1, one list was repeated every third trial, and recall direction of the repeated list changed on the ninth repetition. In Experiment 1a, the repeated list changed from a forward to a backward order recall, where participants had to recall the items in reverse presentation order. In Experiment 1b, the repeated list changed from a backward to a forward order recall. Results showed a cost in recall performance for the repeated list when recall direction switched from forward to backward recall, whereas it was unaffected by the change from backward to forward recall. In Experiment 2, we increased the number of trials before introducing the change from a backward to a forward order recall. Results showed a decrement in recall performance for the repeated list following the change in recall direction, suggesting that language production processes play a role in the Hebb repetition effect.     

Conceptual clusters in figurative language production

Although most prior research on figurative language examines comprehension, several recent studies on the production of such language have proved to be informative. One of the most noticeable traits of figurative language production is that it is produced at a somewhat random rate with occasional bursts of highly figurative speech (e.g., Corts & Pollio, 1999). The present article seeks to extend these findings by observing production during speech that involves a very high base rate of figurative language, making statistically defined bursts difficult to detect. In an analysis of three Baptist sermons, burst-like clusters of figurative language were identified. Further study indicated that these clusters largely involve a central root metaphor that represents the topic under consideration. An interaction of the coherence, along with a conceptual understanding of a topic and the relative importance of the topic to the purpose of the speech, is offered as the most likely explanation for the clustering of figurative language in natural speech.     

Long term maintenance of language and social skills

This paper discusses long‐term maintenance issues as they relate to the language and social skills of individuals with developmental disabilities and autism. Long‐term follow‐ups of echolalic and appropriate speech (upwards to 57 months) and social skills (8 years) will be presented as examples of what can be learned about maintenance from long‐term follow‐ups. A maintenance strategy will be presented that employs characteristics of early parent–typical toddler interactions as a means for prompting language impaired individuals to use physical/natural cues. The paper concludes with some recommendations regarding the study of maintenance. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Co-activation of syntax in bilingual language production

We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals’ production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek–English and English–Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated whether participants produced completions in the same language as the subject (the source language; one-language production) or the other language (the non-source language; two-language production), and whether they used only one language or both languages within the experimental session. The results demonstrated that the grammar systems of both languages were activated during both one-language and two-language production. The effects of the non-source language were particularly enhanced in two-language utterances, when both languages were used in the experiment, and when it was the bilinguals’ native language. We interpret our results in terms of a model of bilingual sentence production.     

"A picture's worth a thousand words": language use in the autophotographic essay

The authors applied Pennebaker's Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program to autophotographic essays addressing the question, "Who are you?" to test hypotheses about individuality and social connectedness. Specifically, the authors tested whether insight-oriented words would correlate with individuality ratings, defining essays that portray unique persons who creatively explore the self. Second, the authors tested whether connectedness, operationalized by photos of people-touching and self with others, would correlate with social process words. In 164 student photo essays, greater linguistic cognitive complexity characterized individuality, even when controlling for needs for cognition and uniqueness, and verbal intelligence. Connectedness predicted social words. These findings show that autophotography essays do capture complex self-reflective thought and suggest LIWC may be a valuable tool for understanding the expression of individuality and relatedness.     

Variation in the speech signal as a window into the cognitive architecture of language production

The pronunciation of words is highly variable. This variation provides crucial information about the cognitive architecture of the language production system. This review summarizes key empirical findings about variation phenomena, integrating corpus, acoustic, articulatory, and chronometric data from phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. It examines how these data constrain our current understanding of word production processes and highlights major challenges and open issues that should be addressed in future research.     

Lateralization of prosody during language production: a lesion study

To examine brain lateralization of prosody during speech, the sentence production of six right-hemisphere-lesion patients and five left-hemisphere-lesion patients was compared to that of seven normal controls using a question-answer paradigm. The task required the prosodic realization of two different syntactic structures under conditions of wide and narrow focus. Acoustical analyses were carried out on F0 and time structure. These analyses revealed a preserved ability in patients to express differences in syntactic structure via prosody. However, there were deficits in distinguishing narrow focus from wide focus. Whereas both right- and left-hemisphere lesions caused impairments in the realization of F0, time structure was mainly impaired in left-hemisphere patients. Therefore, the present results from language production support functional as well as cue-dependent hypotheses of the lateralization of prosodic processing in the brain.     

Psychology and "ordinary language"—a critique of Smedslund

This article takes up methodological issues of the kind raised by Jan Smedslund in earlier issues of this journal, concerning the status of psychological enquiry as a discipline. Arguments are presented which aim to show that Smedslund has failed to establish the thesis that all generally valid theoretical statements in psychology are explications of conceptual relationships embedded in ordinary language, i.e., analytic statements. Some specific examples of what Smedslund takes to be "ordinary language theorems" are examined. Doubts are expressed concerning the validity of the proof procedure Smedslund employs in the "demonstration" of a number of his alleged theorems. Finally, it is argued that the results produced by the situation-bound and culture-bound empirical research of the psychologist need not be viewed as "arbitrary" in Smedslund's sense of that term.     

Stages of lexical access in language production.

We describe two primary stages in the top-down process of lexical access in production, a stage of lemma access in which words are retrieved as syntactic-semantic entities, and a stage of phonological access in which the forms of the words are fleshed out. We suggest a reconciliation of modular and interactive accounts of these stages whereby modularity is traceable to the action of discrete linguistic rule systems, but interaction arises in the lexical network on which these rules operate. We also discuss the time-course of lexical access in multi-word utterances. We report some initial production priming explorations that support the hypothesis that lemmas are buffered in longer utterances before they are phonologically specified. Because such techniques provide a relatively direct way of assessing activation at the primary stages of lexical access they are an important new resource for the study of language production.