Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form–frequency correspondences and predictability

This paper claims that a wide variety of grammatical coding asymmetries can be explained as adaptations to the language users’ needs, in terms of frequency of use, predictability and coding efficiency. I claim that all grammatical oppositions involving a minimal meaning difference and a significant frequency difference are reflected in a universal coding asymmetry, i.e. a cross-linguistic pattern in which the less frequent member of the opposition gets special coding, unless the coding is uniformly explicit or uniformly zero. I give 25 examples of pairs of construction types, from a substantial range of grammatical domains. For some of them, the existing evidence from the world’s languages and from corpus counts is already strong, while for others, I know of no counterevidence and I make readily testable claims. I also discuss how the functional-adaptive forces operate in language change, and I discuss a number of possible alternative explanations.

Risk factors cerebral palsy with symptomatic epilepsy

Palmer F.B., Hoon A.H. (1993) wrote that cerebral palsy (CP) - a violation of the motor functions of the cortex and lesion of the immature brain, including psychomotor retardation in combination with neurological disorders: cognitive, behavioral, sensory, orthopedic problems. The frequency of CP in the population is 2.5 per 1,000 live births. In recent years, the frequency of this disabling condition is constantly growing. Many studies show a significant frequency difference of 0.76 to 5.8 per 1,000 children, which varies by region and year (Badalyan LO et al, 1988, Suleimenova RA, 2001, Shipitsyna LM, Mamaychuk II, 2001).

Corpus-based research into the presumed effects of short EVS

The aim of this study, based on 32 French speeches simultaneously interpreted into Dutch at plenary sessions of the European Parliament in late 2008, was to ascertain whether short ear-voice span (EVS) affects the quality of the interpretation as is commonly stated in the literature. The speeches and interpretations were taken from the ‘EPIC Ghent’ corpus, which is in preparation at Ghent University. Three phenomena were identified as potential effects of a short EVS: syntactic transcodage (maintaining the right-branching French ‘noun+de+noun’ structure, not using a more natural left-branching structure, in the Dutch interpretation), use of cognates similar in sound to source language forms (‘glissement phonétique’), and certain self-repairs (Barik 1973; Gile 1995). Time tags were applied to both the source and target texts, so that EVS could be measured to the nearest second from the onset of a source language item to the onset of the target language equivalent. The hypothesis was that EVS would be shorter in contexts where these three phenomena occur than elsewhere in the subcorpus. This was borne out in only one case, i.e. use of cognates: short (2 secs.) and very short (1 sec.) EVS was significantly more frequent in contexts where cognates occurred than elsewhere. There was no statistically significant frequency difference in the context of transcodage or of the relevant self-repairs.

The Disfluent Speech of Bilingual Spanish–English Children: Considerations for Differential Diagnosis of Stuttering

PurposeThe primary purpose of this study was to describe the frequency and types of speech disfluencies that are produced by bilingual Spanish–English (SE) speaking children who do not stutter. The secondary purpose was to determine whether their disfluent speech is mediated by language dominance and/or language produced.MethodSpanish and English narratives (a retell and a tell in each language) were elicited and analyzed relative to the frequency and types of speech disfluencies produced. These data were compared with the monolingual English-speaking guidelines for differential diagnosis of stuttering.ResultsThe mean frequency of stuttering-like speech behaviors in the bilingual SE participants ranged from 3% to 22%, exceeding the monolingual English standard of 3 per 100 words. There was no significant frequency difference in stuttering-like or non-stuttering-like speech disfluency produced relative to the child's language dominance. There was a significant difference relative to the language the child was speaking; all children produced significantly more stuttering-like speech disfluencies in Spanish than in English.ConclusionResults demonstrate that the disfluent speech of bilingual SE children should be carefully considered relative to the complex nature of bilingualism.