Questions that are about the neurobiological and psychological factors that affect the acquisition, comprehension and utilisation of the language in human beings.
1
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0answers
47 views
To what extent do children adapt to a language which is not their mother-tongue?
In following when talking about 'native speaker' I refer to what is considered as 'mother tongue' rather than reaching a level of fluency.
For the purpose of this question think of an average person ...
4
votes
0answers
65 views
Does the phrase “thinking in a language” have empirical meaning?
In discussions of language learning, multilingualism, and related topics, I hear references to "thinking in a language." Two questions on this stack exchange list have referenced this, namely "What ...
0
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0answers
55 views
How to distinguish multilingualism from polyglotism?
What are defining criteria, and how can we decide whether a person speaking, say, ten languages is a multilingual or a polyglot?
1
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2answers
59 views
Do bilinguals and multilingual native speakers make language mistakes?
Suppose a person speaks several languages, occasionally making mistakes in grammar(s), using untypical patterns, clichés and/or calques.
Can such a level of language competence be defined as ...
3
votes
1answer
103 views
Does language influence thinking skills or cognition
I have an intuition, and Hypothesis, that the native language we speak is responsible for our cognition and thinking skills.
e.g. Hebrew speaking people would have poor spatial ability compared to ...
-1
votes
1answer
111 views
What are the job opportunities in linguistics? [closed]
I like learning new languages so I am curious in getting a degree in linguistics.
What kind of jobs are available as a linguist?
What are the opportunities available in this field?
From what I am ...
7
votes
5answers
119 views
In multilingual dialogues, which factors determine the language the speaker chooses for a given word or phrase?
As is the case in many households, my wife and I are both fluent in two languages to the degree that we speak to each other without a conscious thought as to which language we are using. We often ...
5
votes
1answer
95 views
Why does ambient conversation in the same language confuse me when I recite, but in another language not?
I pray in Hebrew. Many of my prayers have fixed wordings; as such, sometimes (alas) I wind up reciting them without wholly concentrating on what I'm saying.
When I'm doing so, I find that concurrent ...
2
votes
1answer
110 views
What kinds of maths to learn for understanding dynamical systems in cognitive linguistics?
A current trend in cognitive science is to view the mind as a dynamical system (e.g., Continuity of Mind by psycholinguist Spivey, in which cognition--including language comprehension and ...
2
votes
0answers
34 views
Is there a term for a mental prototype changing?
Years ago, if I heard the word bird I thought about a sparrow since I live in western Pennsylvania and there are sparrows everywhere. But now, if I hear the word bird I picture a blue, two-dimensional ...
1
vote
2answers
256 views
Is it possible to become a native speaker of another language for someone that already has a mother tongue?
Are there any studies/researches on fields like neurolinguistics(or any other fields) to allow people (can be via drugs, psycho training..whatever) to become a native speaker of another language? Is ...
4
votes
2answers
131 views
Is the body language and hand movements manifested by a person as they speak part of that person's idiolect?
By this, I mean do a person's body language and hand gestures as they speak manifest in a consistent and observable way? I'm a person who speaks with my hands very much; if I'm not moving my hands ...
4
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0answers
191 views
When you think one word, but write another, similar sounding word?
If you are writing or typing and you are thinking of one word, but then type another word made of the same phonemes, what is that called and what are the linguistic and /or psychological phenomena ...
5
votes
1answer
333 views
Hearing your name in a noisy crowd: what is this called and how might it work?
I can't really formulate it any more lucid than as it is in the title, so.... I'm reading a phonetics text now, but I haven't yet got to the chapter on 'speech perception' so maybe I'll come across at ...
0
votes
0answers
134 views
Understanding English deeply like native speakers
As I have noticed, a native speaker can actually judge the essence of person, the way he's feeling, even his personality through his writing or voice. Will it be possible for a non-native English ...
6
votes
4answers
190 views
Can one's native medium of language be written, rather than spoken or signed?
(This is probably a poorly-formed question, but I'm really just trying to find out if there's any research in this area.)
Most children pick up a spoken or signed language at an early age, and this ...
3
votes
0answers
255 views
What language has the longest word for 'no' and 'yes'?
I'm asking this because I'm learning Swahili now, for which the word 'yes' translates to 'ndiyo' and 'no' translates to 'hakuna.' It strikes me as strange that a language would have such long words ...
8
votes
4answers
1k views
What language, if any, do deaf people think in?
If a person is partially deaf, I think they would be able to acquire the language, and actually I've seen partially deaf people speak in addition to the use of a sign language. I suppose this means ...
13
votes
2answers
449 views
How does alcohol affect the ability to speak a second language?
From my own experience, drinking alcohol has both positive and negative effects to the ability of speaking a second language. On the one hand, it facilitates the process, mainly because one gets more ...
0
votes
1answer
62 views
measuring relative importance/social proximity of an addressee based on length of written explanation in letters with multiple addressees
I have a corpus of personal letters in which writers explain a tough decision to multiple addressees, each in its own section/paragraph of the letter (for the most part).
I wonder if anybody has ...
1
vote
1answer
42 views
Have very many studies been done on the difficulties that people have in verbally describing faces and other visual stimuli?
On Scienceblogs.com, we find an article titled When crime-fighting tools go bad: Problems with the face-composite system that documents the difficulty that people have in describing faces.
The ...
2
votes
2answers
278 views
Limits on center-embedding in English
Consider the following extremely melodramatic story fragment (the sentences in the story, and its melodramatic character, set up context and motivation for the brain to parse an otherwise ...
7
votes
3answers
224 views
How do linguists deal with losing normal intuition?
Sometimes when I see an example sentence in a linguistics textbook which is supposed to be incorrect or unparseable, I get annoyed because the sentence seems just fine to me. Garden paths aren't the ...
2
votes
1answer
160 views
Do infants deliberately change the words when they omit the sounds and these words are minimal pairs?
While I was studying an infant's transcript, I realized that he deleted the [l] sound in "alma" [alma], a word in Turkish meaning "do not take". When he deleted the sound, the word became [a:ma]. ...
7
votes
2answers
222 views
What are the motivations for which direction syntactic trees are built in (top down or bottom up)?
When I learned x-bar theory, there seemed to be an implicit assumption that trees were built top-down, from IP or CP to the VP and its complement, etc. However, as I am learning more about Minimalism ...
7
votes
1answer
306 views
Why do languages not share a root for “butterfly”?
In the article The Elusive Butterfly. Iconicity in Language (2001), William O. Beeman draws attention to the fact that most languages do not share a root for their word for butterfly. In other words, ...
10
votes
4answers
1k views
Evidence for age cutoff in foreign accent acquistion
Steven Pinker in "The Language Instinct" claims that there is strong psychological evidence for the existence of a sharp age cutoff for the ability to acquire a flawless foreign accent (I may dig up ...
15
votes
4answers
317 views
Why do rhotics pattern together?
Looking at the IPA, many different types of sounds are given symbols based of of the Latin R,r: approximants, trills, taps/flaps; both coronal and uvular segments.
Sometimes, these sounds are ...
5
votes
5answers
1k views
Is it possible to change your mother-tongue by thinking in another language?
Once I heard from someone that your mother tongue is the language you talk in your thoughts. I've asked many people to verify the correctness of this proposition and to me, inductively this seems to ...
5
votes
1answer
123 views
Does one's ability to describe an object with words reflect his or her ability to identify the object visually?
Does one's ability to describe an object with words affect his or her ability to identify that object visually?
As a follow-up, does one's ability to describe an object with words affect his or her ...
6
votes
4answers
324 views
When and how do children learn to distinguish languages?
At what age range are children expected to be able to distinguish languages?
Are there any factors that aid children in learning this skill?
5
votes
2answers
151 views
What's the “state of the art” for methodology in syntactic/semantic experiments
I'm looking for good recent books or articles on experimental methodology in syntax or semantics. Ideally they'd be geared towards working formal linguists who don't know much about psycholinguistics ...
3
votes
1answer
237 views
Is our mental lexicon structured like a tag-cloud system or hierarchical?
Thinking about this discussion on meta i was reasoning about simple self-experiments you can do in psycholinguistics, where you dont need great background knowledge in Cognitive Psychology or ...
11
votes
5answers
821 views
What are some examples of recent studies investigating strong linguistic determinism?
One of the most controversial ideas put forth in linguistics is the idea of linguistic determinism. Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it states that people who speak different languages would ...
12
votes
1answer
252 views
Does capitalization of nouns aid reading comprehension?
German is the only widely used language prescribing capitalization of nouns in the written language. I speak English and German fluently myself, but I can read German texts significantly faster than ...
3
votes
2answers
382 views
How do we perceive and read words and sentences? Does the order of the inner letters play no significant role?
Try to read this texts, start with the most difficult one, if you cant read, skip to the next easier one:
all letters mixed
I onlucd't ieebvel ttah I udloc talyulac rsddetanun hwat I swa
...
10
votes
2answers
2k views
What's the 'official' term for when a word is at the tip of your tongue?
If I remember correctly from the half year I studied linguistics, there is a sort of official name for the situation or state your brain (or your speech center) is in when a word is at the tip of your ...
12
votes
2answers
255 views
Are similar languages easier for children to acquire than dissimilar ones?
When a child is first learning a language in a bilingual environment, is it easier or harder to properly acquire the two distinct languages if they are more similar? For example, is it easier for a ...
14
votes
2answers
299 views
Are there any fundamental differences in personal pronoun acquisition across languages?
I am interest in reversal errors in personal pronoun acquisition. My knowledge comes mostly from studies done with English-speaking children, and I was wondering if there is any languages where this ...
18
votes
5answers
305 views
Language acquisition without interactive contact with fluent speakers
Children raised in a multilingual environment learn all the languages that they are exposed to with no effort. Does the same thing happen if a child has only indirect contact with a language? For ...
