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Rhythmicity characterizes both interpersonal synchrony and spoken language. Emotions and language are forms of interpersonal communication, which interact with each other throughout development. We investigated whether and how emotional synchrony between mothers and their 9-month-old infants relates to infants' word segmentation as an early marker of language development. Twenty-six 9-month-old infants and their German-speaking mothers took part in the study. To measure emotional synchrony, we coded positive, neutral and negative emotional expressions of the mothers and their infants during a free play session. We then calculated the degree to which the mothers' and their infants' matching emotional expressions followed a predictable pattern. To measure word segmentation, we familiarized infants with auditory text passages and tested how long they looked at the screen while listening to familiar versus novel words. We found that higher levels of predictability (i.e. low entropy) during mother-infant interaction is associated with infants' word segmentation performance. These findings suggest that individual differences in word segmentation relate to the complexity and predictability of emotional expressions during mother-infant interactions.
Purpose: Coarticulatory effects in speech vary across development, but the sources of this variation remain unclear. This study investigated whether developmental differences in intrasyllabic coarticulation degree could be explained by differences in children's articulatory patterns compared to adults.
Method: To address this question, we first compared the tongue configurations of 3-to 7-year-old German children to those of adults. The observed developmental differences were then examined through simulations with Task Dynamics Application, a Task Dynamics simulation system, to establish which articulatory modifications could best reproduce the empirical results. To generate syllables simulating the lack of tongue gesture differentiation, we tested three simulation scenarios.
Results: We found that younger speakers use less differentiated articulatory patterns to achieve alveolar constrictions than adults. The simulations corresponding to undifferentiated control of tongue tip and tongue body resulted in (a) tongue shapes similar to those observed in natural speech and (b) higher degrees of intrasyllabic coarticulation in children when compared to adults.
Conclusions: Results provide evidence that differences in articulatory patterns contribute to developmental differences in coarticulation degree. This study further shows that empirically informed modeling can advance our understanding of changes in coarticulatory patterns across age.
Innate or acquired?
(2021)
In this chapter, some of the findings from sociolinguistic interviews with 25 speakers of Indian English and 26 speakers of Nigerian English are presented. Emanating from a larger research project concerned with conceptualizations of gender, the current analysis focuses on conceptualizations of homosexuality and makes use of the analytical tools provided by Cultural Linguistics and Cognitive Sociolinguistics. In particular, the notions of “cultural conceptualizations” (e.g., Sharifian, 2011, 2017) and “cultural model” (e.g., Wolf & Polzenhagen, 2009; also cf. Schneider, 2014) are addressed.
At the time of data collection, discriminatory legislation concerning homosexuality was in force in India and Nigeria. Opinion polls likewise echoed a negative stance towards homosexuality among the population of the two countries. This raised the expectation that similar conceptualizations of homosexuality might be found in Indian and Nigerian English, both in terms of their negative connotation and of how homosexuality would exactly be conceptualized. However, this expectation was not fulfilled. Firstly, the acceptance among the Indian participants to this study was generally greater. Secondly, homosexuality was predominantly conceptualized as an innate condition in the Indian English data, while it was prevalently understood as an acquired condition by the Nigerian informants. Drawing from earlier findings within the context of the same project (Finzel, 2021; fc.), I suggest that these differences can be explained with culture-specific models of gender that lend their logic to conceptualizations of homosexuality.
Развитие науки, общества и медицины ведет за собой неуклонный рост средней продолжительности жизни. В результате наука сталкивается с новыми задачами, в число которых входит предотвращение деменции и поддержание эффективной работоспособности мозга при старении человека. Одним из защитных факторов, предотвращающих ослабление когнитивных функций и поддерживающих нейропластичность мозга, является билингвизм.
Однако дебаты насчет нейропротекторных свойств двуязычия до сих пор являются актуальными. В данной статье рассмотрен феномен нейрокогнитивного резерва (НКР) и определена взаимосвязь между билингвизмом и такими составляющими НКР, как мозговой резерв, нейрональный резерв и нейрональная компенсация.
Кроме этого, в статье приведен обзор исследований, посвященных изучению нейронных и когнитивных механизмов влияния билингвизма на здоровое функционирование мозга при старении. В заключении мы вкратце остановились на том, каким образом двуязычие может защищать мозг от старения благодаря взаимодействию между мозговыми и когнитивными составляющими НКР.
The acquisition of clitics still remains a highly controversial issue in Greek acquisition literature despite the bulk of studies performed.
Object clitics have been shown to be early acquired by monolingual children in terms of production rates, whereas only highly proficient bilingual children achieve target-like performance.
Crucially, errors in gender marking are persistent for monolingual and bilingual children even when adult-like production rates are achieved.
This study aims to readdress the acquisition of clitics in an innovative way, by entering the variable of gender in an experimental design targeting to assess production and processing by bilingual and monolingual children.
Moreover, we examined the role of language proficiency (in terms of general verbal intelligence and syntactic production abilities). The groups had comparable performance in both tasks (in terms of correct responses and error distribution in production and reaction times in comprehension).
However, verbal intelligence had an effect on the performance of the monolingual but not of the bilingual group in the production task, and bilingual children were overall slower in the comprehension task. Syntactic production abilities did not have any effect. We argue that gender marking affects clitic processing, and we discuss the implications of our findings for bilingual acquisition.
Das Erbe der Aufklärung
(2024)
Turkish 3rd person plural subjects are frequently used with verbs that are unmarked for number, with plural suffix omission influenced by semantic and word-order related constraints.
Previous findings from judgment tasks indicate that monolingual and heritage Turkish speakers differ in the way they are affected by these constraints.
This study builds and expands upon previous research by investigating the role of word order in more detail, and by examining whether the constraint weightings obtained from Uygun and Felser's (2021) acceptability judgment data are able to predict speakers' verb form choices in a timed sentence completion task.
Besides confirming that word-order related constraints are information-structural in nature, our results show that heritage speakers over-produce plural-marked verbs in comparison to monolingual speakers, indicating between-group differences in constraint ranking.
We interpret this as reflecting a tendency among Turkish heritage speakers to regularize the agreement system, which is not necessarily observed in metalinguistic judgment tasks.
In this paper, we take a cognitive-sociolinguistic perspective on texts from the colonial period. The texts stem from various agents in the colonial enterprise and include documents from missionaries, administrators and politicians, as well as legal and scientific texts. What we find and trace in these texts is a recurrent set of dominant systems of conceptualizations that are characteristic of the colonial mindset and the corresponding discourse at large. However, these conceptualizations were spelled out in quite different ways in discourse, depending on the ideological background and objectives of the authors and on the specific colonial setting they deal with. We will focus on two contexts, India and sub-Saharan Africa, and we will highlight conceptualizations related to the framing of the constellation between colonizers and colonial subjects in terms of, inter alia, a parent-child, an adult-child and a teacher-pupil relationship. We will then look into some examples of cultural practices among the colonized that were “disturbing” to the colonizers. The fact that they were betrays value systems as well as preoccupations and fears on the side of the colonizers. These practices triggered efforts at cultural engineering in the colonies which had lasting effects on the local culture in these settings. However, this impact was far from being one-directional. The experience with the “otherness” of the colonial subjects fueled debates on latent societal issues in the culture of the colonizers. We will consider this impact for the case of the discourse on homosexuality. The empire stroke back also in linguistic terms, most notably by a host of loan words that entered the lexicon of English. The way these loan words were “integrated” into the English language provides ample evidence of a cultural appropriation also in this direction, i.e., the process known as “contextualization” in traditional Kachruvian sociolinguistics is bi-directional as well.
This chapter presents an overview of Cognitive Sociolinguistic studies of African English. We discuss early applications of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the study of English in Cameroon (Wolf 1999, 2001; Wolf and Simo Bobda 2001) as well as the extensive and methodologically diverse body of Cognitive Sociolinguistic research on the cultural model of COMMUNITY expressed in West and East African English (e.g., Wolf 2006, 2008; Wolf and Polzenhagen 2007; Polzenhagen and Wolf 2007; Polzenhagen 2007). Moreover, the chapter illustrates how studies such as Finzel and Wolf (2017), Peters (2021), Finzel (forthcoming) and Peters and Polzenhagen (2021) extend the Cognitive Sociolinguistic approach to further sociocultural issues, such as gender identities and culture-specific strategies of advertising in different anglophone parts of Africa. Finally, we point out possible future applications of the paradigm to socio-pragmatic aspects of African English.
This chapter compares East and West African English as two distinct regional varieties of African English. First, the historical development of English in these two regions is briefly considered. It is argued that British colonial policy contributed significantly to the sociolinguistic and, indirectly, even structural differences these varieties exhibit. Then, the discussion moves on to give a short overview of the national sub-varieties. It is found that, although united by common linguistic features, West African English is far more heterogeneous than East African English, and some explanation is provided for this phenomenon. Focusing specifically on phonetic features, the chapter summarizes and contrasts the main diagnostic and distinctive features of each regional variety, with special reference to the peculiarities of the national varieties of West African English. However, despite their structural differences, West African, East African English and, for that matter, Southern African English are rooted in a shared “African culture.” Recent findings are introduced, in which common conceptual and linguistic patterns pertaining to witchcraft, expressed in the regional varieties in question, are highlighted.