The use of complex structures with a word class change in Inuktitut child-directed speech.

Caregivers typically use a simplified mode of the language - child-directed speech (CDS) - when addressing young children. In this study, we investigate the use of complex morphological structures with a word class change within a single word in Inuktitut CDS. Inuktitut is a polysynthetic agglutinative language of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family spoken in arctic Quebec, which allows more than 10 morphemes per word and in which the meaning of an entire sentence can be expressed in one word.

Processing emotional prosody in a foreign language: the case of German and Hebrew.

Unlabelled: This study investigated the universality of emotional prosody in perception of discrete emotions when semantics is not available. In two experiments the perception of emotional prosody in Hebrew and German by listeners who speak one of the languages but not the other was investigated. Having a parallel tool in both languages allowed to conduct controlled comparisons.

Detecting structured repetition in child-surrounding speech: Evidence from maximally diverse languages.

Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children.

Deconstructing the Native Speaker: Further Evidence From Heritage Speakers for Why This Horse Should Be Dead!

The category "native speaker" is flawed because it fails to consider the diversity between the speaker groups falling under its scope, as highlighted in previous literature. This paper provides further evidence by focusing on the similarities and differences between heritage speakers (HSs) and monolingually-raised speakers (MSs) of their heritage and majority languages. HSs are bilinguals who acquire a family (heritage) language and a societal (majority) language in early childhood.

Cross-linguistic differences in parafoveal semantic and orthographic processing.

In this study we investigated parafoveal processing by L1 and late L2 speakers of English (L1 German) while reading in English. We hypothesized that L2ers would make use of semantic and orthographic information parafoveally. Using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated six parafoveal masks in a sentence (Mark found th*e wood for the fire; * indicates the invisible boundary): identical word mask (wood), English orthographic mask (wook), English string mask (zwwl), German mask (holz), German orthographic mask (holn), and German string mask (kxfs).

The impact of uninformative parafoveal masks on L1 and late L2 speakers.

Much reading research has found that informative parafoveal masks lead to a reading benefit for native speakers (see 1). However, little reading research has tested the impact of uninformative parafoveal masks during reading. Additionally, parafoveal processing research is primarily restricted to native speakers.

The development of the causative construction in Persian child language.

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e.

Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual acquisition: subject omission in learners of Inuktitut and English.

This study investigates subject omission in six English-Inuktitut simultaneous bilingual children, aged 1;8-3;9, to examine whether there are cross-language influences in their language development. Previous research with other language pairs has shown that the morphosyntax of one language can influence the development of morphosyntax in the other language. Most of this research has focused on Romance-Germanic language combinations using case studies.