Publications

Abstract

The Romance counting system is numerical – with residues of earlier systems whereby each commodity had its own unit of quantification – and decimal. Numeral formations beyond ‘10’ are compounds, combining two or more numerals that are in an arithmetical relation, typically that of addition and multiplication. Formal variation across the (standard) Romance languages and dialects and across historical stages involves the relative sequence of the composing elements, absence or presence of connectors, their synthetic vs. analytic nature, and the degree of grammatical marking. A number of ‘deviant’ numeral formations raise the question of borrowing vs independent development, such as vigesimals (featuring a base ‘20’ instead ‘10’) in certain Romance varieties and the teen and decad formations in Romanian. The other types of numeral in Romance, which derive from the unmarked and consistent cardinals, feature a significantly higher degree of formal complexity and variation involving Latin formants and tend toward analyticity. While Latin features prominently in the Romance counting system as a source of numeral formations and suffixes, it is only in Romance that the inherited decimal system reached its full potential, illustrating its increasing prominence, reflected not only in numerals, but also in language acquisition, sign language, and post-Revolution measuring systems.

Abstract

Reprinted from: Bowerman, M. (1981). The child's expression of meaning: Expanding relationships among lexicon, syntax, and morphology. In H. Winitz (Ed.), Native language and foreign language acquisition (pp. 172 189). New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

Abstract

How are events framed in narrative? Speakers of English (a 'satellite-framed' language), when 'reading' Mercer Mayer's wordless picture book 'Frog, Where Are You?', find the story self-evident: a boy has a dog and a pet frog; the frog escapes and runs away; the boy and dog look for it across hill and dale, through woods and over a cliff, until they find it and return home with a baby frog child of the original pet frog. In Tzeltal, as spoken in a Mayan community in southern Mexico, the story is somewhat different, because the language structures event descriptions differently. Tzeltal is in part a 'verb-framed' language with a set of Path-encoding motion verbs, so that the bare bones of the Frog story can consist of verbs translating as 'go'/'pass by'/'ascend'/ 'descend'/ 'arrive'/'return'. But Tzeltal also has satellite-framing adverbials, grammaticized from the same set of motion verbs, which encode the direction of motion or the orientation of static arrays. Furthermore, vivid pictorial detail is provided by positional verbs which can describe the position of the Figure as an outcome of a motion event; motion and stasis are thereby combined in a single event description. (For example:  jipot jawal "he has been thrown (by the deer) lying­_face_upwards_spread-eagled". This paper compares the use of these three linguistic resources in Frog Story narratives from  Tzeltal adults and children, looks at their development in the narratives of children, and considers the results in relation to those from Berman and Slobin's (1996) comparative study of adult and child Frog stories.

Abstract

This is a German translation of Brown 1980, How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community.

Abstract

The most basic question for the study of morphology and the mental lexicon is whether or not words are _decomposed_: informally, this is the question of whether words are represented (and processed) in terms of some kind of smaller units; that is, broken down into constituent parts. Formally, what it means to represent or process a word as decomposed or not turns out to be quite complex. One of the basic lines of division in the field classifies approaches according to whether they decompose all “complex” words (“Full Decomposition”), or none (“Full Listing”), or some but not all, according to some criterion (typical of “Dual-Route” models). However, if we are correct, there are at least three senses in which an approach might be said to be decompositional or not, with the result that ongoing discussions of what appears to be a single large issue might not always be addressing the same distinction. Put slightly differently, there is no single question of decomposition. Instead, there are independent but related questions that define current research. Our goal here is to identify this finer-grained set of questions, as they are the ones that should assume a central place in the study of morphological and lexical representation.

Abstract

Lesion symptom mapping has revolutionized our understanding of the functioning of the human brain. Associating damaged voxels in the brain with loss of function has created a map of the brain that identifies critical areas. While these methods have significantly advanced our understanding, recent improvements have identified the need for multivariate and multimodal methods to map hidden lesions and damage to white matter networks beyond the lesion voxels. This article reviews the evolution of lesion-symptom mapping from single case studies to the human disconnectome.

Abstract

This chapter reviews the findings of 58 word production experiments using different tasks and neuroimaging techniques. The reported cerebral activation sites are coded in a common anatomic reference system. Based on a functional model of language production, the different word production tasks are analyzed in terms of their processing components. This approach allows a distinction between the core process of word production and preceding task-specific processes (lead-in processes) such as visual or auditory stimulus recognition. The core process of word production is subserved by a left-lateralized perisylvian/thalamic language production network. Within this network there seems to be functional specialization for the processing stages of word production. In addition, this chapter includes a discussion of the available evidence on syntactic production, self-monitoring, and the time course of word production.

Abstract

The configuration of a spatial layout has a substantial effect on the acquisition and the representation of the environment. In four experiments, we investigated navigation difficulties arising at oblique angled intersections. In the first three studies we investigated specific arrow-fork configurations. In dependence on the branch subjects use to enter the intersection different decision latencies and numbers of errors arise. If subjects see the intersection as a fork, it is more difficult to find the correct way as if it is seen as an arrow. In a fourth study we investigated different heuristics people use while making a detour around a barrier. Detour behaviour varies with the perspective. If subjects learn and navigate through the maze in a field perspective they use a heuristic of preferring right angled paths. If they have a view from above and acquire their knowledge in an observer perspective they use oblique angled paths more often.

Abstract

Recent studies of wh-question acquisition have tended to come from the nativist side of the language acquisition debate with little input from a constructivist perspective. The present work was designed to redress the balance, first by presenting a detailed description of young children's wh-question acquisition data, second, by providing detailed critiques of two nativist theories of wh- question acquisition, and third, by presenting a preliminary account of young children's wh-question development from a constructivist perspective. Analyses of the data from twelve 2 to 3 year old children collected over a year and of data from an older child (Adam from the Brown corpus, 1973) are described and three conclusions are drawn. First it is argued that the data suggest that children's knowledge of how to form wh-questions builds up gradually as they learn how to combine lexical items such as wh-words and auxiliaries in specific ways. Second, it is concluded that two nativist theories of grammatical development (Radford, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1996, Valian, Lasser & Mandelbaum, 1992) fail to account successfully for the wh-question data produced by the children. Third, it is asserted that the lexically-specific nature of children's early wh-questions is compatible with a lexical constructivist view of development, which proposes that the language learning mechanism learns by picking up high frequency lexical patterns from the input. The implications of these conclusions for theories of language development and future research are discussed.