Linguistic variation and micro-cues in first language acquisition

Sign Language Prosodic Cues in First and Second Language Acquisition

In this paper the prosodic structure of American Sign Language (ASL) narratives will be analyzed in three groups: two groups of native (L1) signers and one group of highly proficient, second language (L2) signers. The results of this study show that the performance in the native hearing, bilingual group is due to both to their ASL language experience, and, under certain conditions, to their exp...

native language acquisition in children (first language acquisition)

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Language variation and linguistic invariants

Human languages are diverse and so precise statements of common properties must abstract away from specifics of particular languages. We note several abstract and absolute ‘Type 1’ universals and present some new ones built on a notion of ‘structural invariant’ that applies equally to constituent structure and individual grammatical morphemes. Crucially, these universals may be realized in stru...

Linguistic Invariants and Language Variation

Since the publication of Noam Chomsky’s field founding Syntactic Structures in 1957, generative grammarians have been formulating and studying the grammars of particular languages to extract from them what is general across languages. The idea is that properties which all languages have will give us some insight into the nature of mind. A widely acknowledged problem to which this work has led i...

Linguistic rhythm and the acquisition of language