Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Three studies test the link between word order in binomials and psychological and demographic characteristics of a speaker. While linguists have already suggested that psychological, cultural and societal factors are important in choosing word order in binomials, the vast majority of relevant research was focused on general factors and on broadly…

This paper represents a multimodal analysis of the paraverbal (prosodic and gesture) features of expressive female political speech in Latin America and Spain. The language corpus consisted of public speeches delivered by Spanish-speaking female politicians Eva Peron, Christina de Kirchner and Manuela Carmena. The article includes an overview of…

This study aimed at investigating the preferred refusal strategies in Persian. 3047 refusals collected by 108 field workers as well as 376 refusals collected through face to face interviews were analyzed and classified according to the descriptions proposed by Liao (1994) and Liao and Bresnahan (1996). The frequencies of the resulting direct and…

Adjectives, like nouns and verbs, are one of the three major classes of lexical words. But, unlike nouns and verbs, they emerge late in acquisition. In Catalan, as in many other languages, their use is closely linked to the literate lexicon learned at school-age. Thus, the use of adjectives can be a good indicator of later language development.…

Despite the current importance given to L2 vocabulary acquisition in the last two decades, considerable deficiencies are found in L2 students' vocabulary size. One of the aspects that may influence vocabulary learning is word frequency. However, scholars warn that frequency may lead to wrong conclusions if the way words are distributed is ignored.…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…