Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

Sociolinguistic study of variation and change has a long-standing bias towards speech communities in Western and especially Anglophone societies. We argue that our field requires a much wider scope for variation studies, which puts more emphasis on culturally contextualised social meaning in the full range of human societies. The pursuit of understanding, generalizations, and even universals in the study of the social life of human language demands a global empirical base. In a meta-analysis of studies appearing in major sociolinguistic journals and conferences, we find little broadening of the language and cultural scope in the last 30 years. English alone and a few Western societies continually account for the great majority of studies. We propose several ways for going forward: testing and rethinking existing theories using data from understudied languages and regions, engaging with sociolinguistic scholarship in languages other than English, learning from other disciplines that incorporate cross-cultural approaches, engaging the dimensions of social organization and practice instantiated in cultures of the Global South, and moving towards research designs that compare different places and languages.

The theory of language change has worked primarily with four basic language change profiles: generational change, age-grading, communal change, and stability. This paper focuses primarily on age-grading, the process whereby each generation undergoes a specific language change at the same age-related stage within their lifespan. Despite the necessary influence of biological change on the ageing body, the explanations put forward to explain why and how age-grading occurs have been primarily social. Previous work also often relies on the study of adolescents. Following the distinction between chronological, social, and biological ageing, this study provides an overview of biological factors which may also provide explanatory power, with a focus on phonetic variation. Considering biological factors can be important in order to avoid interpreting cases of biological age-grading as (solely) social in nature, and as cases of generational change rather than age-grading.

Involving speakers in research on their linguistic practices has been at the core of sociolinguistics since the inception of the field. In contrast to social sciences, however, sociolinguists have rarely addressed the issues surrounding the participation of those involved and engaged in the research process. This paper aims at reviewing the state of the art and outlining critical dimensions and aspects with relation to participation. We explore previous studies and study designs with the help of the following questions: Who has been involved? How and with what impact have stakeholders participated in different strands of sociolinguistic research? Current developments are presented and reviewed with particular reference to language expertise of those outside academia, as manifested in everyday talk about language, and the link between the production of this knowledge and social inequalities. We point out that the interconnectedness of everyday language expertise and social (in)equality can only be interpreted in highly localised contexts, whose diverse understandings and conceptualisations provide and, at the same time, limit the possibilities of social transformation.

This article has two main purposes: (i) to review the placement and function of the tongue and suprahyoid muscles concerning speech articulation, and (ii) as a biomechanical simulation tool to study how those muscles are involved in articulation, to introduce a 3D tongue model distributed by a 3D modelling platform called ArtiSynth. The 3D tongue model can be combined with other structural models to provide the outline of the oral cavity. This article presents examples of muscular simulations for/i/and/ɑ/using the jaw-hyoid-tongue model in ArtiSynth.

This article introduces micro-prosody as the study of the duration and timing of speech events. We present a descriptive framework, formalising micro-prosody in terms of gestural landmarks and coordination relations between them, and we use the framework to illustrate different patterns of micro-prosody across languages. We show that potential ambiguity between coordination relations can be resolved by considering how they structure natural variation in speech. The framework presented here is intended to offer effective tools for phonetic documentation. We end with some considerations for a theory of micro-prosody, including how micro-prosody relates to other levels of phonological structure, and a brief discussion of different data types that can be used to infer aspects of micro-prosody.

This paper introduces Match Theory, an Optimality-Theoretic approach to the syntax–phonology interface proposed by Selkirk (2011). The theory states that a family of Match constraints favor syntax–prosody isomorphism, but that these can be outranked by constraints on prosodic wellformedness and/or information structure, resulting in certain principled mismatches. We compare Match Theory to previous OT approaches involving edge-alignment, and discuss several outstanding issues for Match Theory such as the proper treatment of asymmetries in syntax–prosody matching.

Infant-directed speech (IDS), a speaking style distinguished by its higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation, has been documented in speech directed towards infants across many cultures and languages. Previous research shows that IDS in the context of parent-infant interactions is associated with advances in children's language learning. While we have long known that fathers, like mothers, produce IDS, most research on IDS to this day has focussed exclusively on female (maternal) speech. In light of the recent societal changes which have increased fathers' time spent in hands-on activities with children, I argue that the research on IDS needs to move away from using the maternal template. I first describe why IDS plays a central role in language development. I then outline known similarities and differences between paternal and maternal IDS, and point to potential biases and challenges within the research that has been conducted so far. Finally, I outline why investigators should strive to include fathers in research on IDS, and conclude with recommendations for follow-up work that can help advance our understanding of fathers' contributions to children's linguistic development.

Research on language use has become increasingly interested in the multimodal and interactional aspects of language – theoretical models of dialogue, such as the Communication Accommodation Theory and the Interactive Alignment Model are examples of this. In addition, researchers have started to give more consideration to the relationship between physiological processes and language use. This article aims to contribute to the advancement in studies of physiological and/or multimodal language use in naturalistic settings. It does so by providing methodological recommendations for such multi-speaker experimental designs. It covers the topics of (a) speaker preparation and logistics, (b) experimental tasks and (c) data synchronisation and post-processing. The types of data that will be considered in further detail include audio and video, electroencephalography, respiratory data and electromagnetic articulography. This overview with recommendations is based on the answers to a questionnaire that was sent amongst the members of the Horizon 2020 research network ‘Conversational Brains’, several researchers in the field and interviews with three additional experts.

For decades word frequency has been one of the most important variables in psycholinguistics. Frequent words are more easily recognized and processed more efficiently than rare words. In the fields of word recognition and psycholinguistics, all researchers are reminded to statistically control for word frequency. But is that advice still correct? Are other variables which are correlated with word frequency more important for human language processing? These questions have arisen because of the recent construction of text corpora of billions of words. Also important is the growing practice of archiving word recognition data in databases accessible for anyone to mine. A key result is that words that typically appear in restricted contexts are processed less efficiently than words appearing in diverse contexts. But the new variable of contextual diversity hasn't simply replaced word frequency. This paper traces the history of contextual diversity findings, including the twists and turns towards a more sophisticated understanding of what makes words easy to learn and process. Myriad findings of the last 20 years are discussed: the rational theory of memory, spacing effects in learning, phrase frequency effects, the neural basis of repetition suppression, and why reverse frequency effects are observed in semantic aphasia. Methods reviewed include artificial language learning, event-related potentials, and eye movement studies. The result is a new appreciation that word processing skills emerge from complex brain networks which include information about words' typical contexts of occurrence.

Count data is prevalent in many different areas of linguistics, such as when counting words, syntactic constructions, discourse particles, case markers, or speech errors. The Poisson distribution is the canonical distribution for characterising count data with no or unknown upper bound. Given the prevalence of count data in linguistics, Poisson regression has wide utility no matter what subfield of linguistics is considered. However, in contrast to logistic regression, Poisson regression is surprisingly little known. Here, we make a case for why linguists need to consider Poisson regression, and give recommendations for when Poisson regression is more appropriate compared to logistic regression. This tutorial introduces readers to foundational concepts needed to understand the basics of Poisson regression, followed by a hands-on tutorial using the R package brms. We discuss a dataset where Catalan and Korean speakers change the frequency of their co-speech gestures as a function of politeness contexts. This dataset also involves exposure variables (the incorporation of time to deal with unequal intervals) and overdispersion (excess variance). Altogether, we hope that more linguists will consider Poisson regression for the analysis of count data.