The Optional Infinitive (OI) phenomenon in children’s speech has attracted a great deal of attention due to its occurrence in a variety of languages (including English, Dutch and German), and its apparent absence in other languages (such as Spanish and Italian). Wexler (1998) explains this pattern of results in terms of a Unique Checking Constraint that interacts with cross-linguistic differenc...

Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross-linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross-linguistic analysis will very ra...

Approaches in Visual Analytics have so far been developed for a wide array of research areas, mainly with a focus on industrial or business applications. The field of linguistics, however, has only marginally incorporated visualizations in its research, e.g. using simple tree representations, attribute-value matrices or network analyses. This paper suggests a new interesting field of applicatio...

Infants begin to vocalize very soon after birth, and they begin to babble about six months after they are born (Oller, 1980). The babbling stage is distinct from the previous phase of vocalizations in that sounds – or gestures in infants acquiring sign language – are now clearly organized in a syllabic structure. As such, these utterances are the infant’s first linguistic productions. In the wo...

Recent advances in the field of speech processing indicate that speakers of differing languages process speech relying on units that are appropriate to the rhythmical properties of their maternal tongue. Studies with young infants suggest that the acquisition of these processing routines takes place before the end of the first year of life. Further evidence shows that the left hemisphere initia...

This paper presents the results of an investigation of voicing in utterance-initial and intervocalic stops in monolingual Russian speakers. Prevoicing was found in over 97% of the lenis stops; over 97% of the intervocalic stops were fully voiced. Utterance-initial fortis stops were pronounced as voiceless unaspirated and had short positive VOT. Intervocalic fortis stops were completely voiceles...

A particular meaning can be realized by morphosyntactically distinct expressions across languages. One of the challenges for cross-linguistic research is to account for convergence in meaning in light of morphosyntactic variation. This paper examines cross-linguistic variation in the distribution and interpretation of tense in temporal adjunct clauses (TACs, e.g. English John crossed the street...

A comparison is made of the language of Broca's aphasics in English, Russian, Japanese, Turkish, and Zulu. The purpose of the £ltudy is to determine whether a particular aphasic syndrome should be analyzed in terms of the grammar of a particular language or as a unitary phenomenon that cuts across these particular _ grammars. Since the language output of Broca's aphasics is remarkably uniform a...