Title |
Word frequency cues word order in adults: cross-linguistic evidence
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Published in |
Frontiers in Psychology, January 2013
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DOI | 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00689 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Judit Gervain, Núria Sebastián-Gallés, Begoña Díaz, Itziar Laka, Reiko Mazuka, Naoto Yamane, Marina Nespor, Jacques Mehler |
Abstract |
One universal feature of human languages is the division between grammatical functors and content words. From a learnability point of view, functors might provide entry points or anchors into the syntactic structure of utterances due to their high frequency. Despite its potentially universal scope, this hypothesis has not yet been tested on typologically different languages and on populations of different ages. Here we report a corpus study and an artificial grammar learning experiment testing the anchoring hypothesis in Basque, Japanese, French, and Italian adults. We show that adults are sensitive to the distribution of functors in their native language and use them when learning new linguistic material. However, compared to infants' performance on a similar task, adults exhibit a slightly different behavior, matching the frequency distributions of their native language more closely than infants do. This finding bears on the issue of the continuity of language learning mechanisms. |
X Demographics
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United States | 2 | 29% |
United Kingdom | 1 | 14% |
Switzerland | 1 | 14% |
Unknown | 3 | 43% |
Demographic breakdown
Type | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Members of the public | 7 | 100% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Germany | 2 | 3% |
Indonesia | 1 | 1% |
France | 1 | 1% |
Iran, Islamic Republic of | 1 | 1% |
Spain | 1 | 1% |
United States | 1 | 1% |
Unknown | 61 | 90% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Student > Ph. D. Student | 19 | 28% |
Researcher | 14 | 21% |
Student > Master | 8 | 12% |
Lecturer | 4 | 6% |
Student > Postgraduate | 4 | 6% |
Other | 12 | 18% |
Unknown | 7 | 10% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Psychology | 23 | 34% |
Linguistics | 17 | 25% |
Social Sciences | 4 | 6% |
Neuroscience | 4 | 6% |
Computer Science | 3 | 4% |
Other | 5 | 7% |
Unknown | 12 | 18% |