Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers. Here, we test these claims using a global dataset of grammatical structures, Grambank. We model the impact of the number of native speakers, the proportion of nonnative speakers, the number of linguistic neighbors, and the status of a language on grammatical complexity while controlling for spatial and phylogenetic autocorrelation. We deconstruct "grammatical complexity" into two separate dimensions: how much morphology a language has ("fusion") and the amount of information obligatorily encoded in the grammar ("informativity"). We find several instances of weak positive associations but no inverse correlations between grammatical complexity and sociodemographic factors. Our findings cast doubt on the widespread claim that grammatical complexity is shaped by the sociolinguistic environment.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 | DOI Listing |
Front Psychol
December 2024
Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States.
Introduction: Implicit statistical learning is, by definition, learning that occurs without conscious awareness. However, measures that putatively assess implicit statistical learning often require explicit reflection, for example, deciding if a sequence is 'grammatical' or 'ungrammatical'. By contrast, 'processing-based' tasks can measure learning without requiring conscious reflection, by measuring processes that are facilitated by implicit statistical learning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuroimage
January 2025
School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China. Electronic address:
Understanding how children acquire syntactic structures from a limited set of grammatical rules and use them creatively to convey meaning has been a longstanding interest for scientific communities. Previous studies on syntactic development have revealed its close correlation with the development of vocabulary and working memory. Our study sought to elucidate how the relations between syntactic processing, word processing, and working memory were instantiated in the brain, and how earlier neural patterns might predict language abilities one year later.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCortex
December 2024
Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, United States; Department of Neurology, Dell Medical School, University of Texas at Austin, United States.
Script training is a speech-language intervention designed to promote fluent connected speech via repeated rehearsal of functional content. This type of treatment has proven beneficial for individuals with aphasia and apraxia of speech caused by stroke and, more recently, for individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). In the largest study to-date evaluating the efficacy of script training in individuals with nonfluent/agrammatic primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA; Henry et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOpen Mind (Camb)
December 2024
Universidade de Lisboa, Centro de Linguística, Lisbon, Portugal.
Most natural languages have more than one linguistic form available to express disjunction. One of these forms is often reported by native speakers to be more exclusive than the other(s) and, in recent years, it has been claimed that some languages may in fact have dedicated exclusive disjunctions. In this paper, we report on a series of experiments testing this claim across five languages of primary interest.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Endocr Disord
December 2024
Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Iran University of Medical Sciences, P.O. Box: 1449614525, Tehran, Iran.
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