Languages around the world share a number of commonalities known as language universals. We investigate whether the existence of some recurrent patterns can be explained by the learner’s preference to balance the amount of information provided by the cues to sentence meaning. In an artificial language learning paradigm, we expose learners to two languages with optional case-marking – one with f...

In the acquisition of a second language, numerous factors interact simultaneously, including the patterns of the first language (L1), the patterns of the target language (L2), universals of language acquisition, and the amount and type of exposure to the L2. English is learned as a second language in India, where the first languages of the English learners differ widely in the phonotactics of c...

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross-linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether th...

We explore the acoustics of Greek voiced stops produced by 2and 3year-old Greek-acquiring children and compare them with adult patterns, in order to understand developmental universals in the mastery of phonation-type contrast. A truly voiced stop (i.e., one realized with voicing onset before the burst), is a difficult sound because the buildup of supralaryngeal air pressure during stop closure...

One of the primary ways in which languages differ from one another is in the order of constituents, or, as it is most commonly termed, their word order. When people refer to the word order of a language, they often are referring specifically to the order of subject, object, and verb with respect to each other, but word order refers more generally to the order of any set of elements, either at t...

As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of order in linguistic sequences that give insights into two relevant aspects of language: the presence of statistical universals in word ordering, and the lin...