Looking for structure: Is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human children the same or different?
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Date
2014-10
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Zakład Filologii Angielskiej Wydział Pedagogiczno-Artystyczny Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Kaliszu
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Abstract
Previously published corpora of two-word utterances by three chimpanzees and
three human children were compared to determine whether, as has been claimed,
apes possess the same basic syntactic and semantic capacities as 2-year old children.
Some similarities were observed in the type of semantic relations expressed by the
two groups; however, marked contrasts were also uncovered. With respect to the
major syntactic mechanism displayed in two-word child language, namely word order, statistically significant differences were found in all three comparisons that were
tested. These results indicate that chimpanzees do not exhibit the linguistic capacities of 2-year old children.
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Keywords
language development, animal language, cross-species compari- son, semantic relations, word order
Citation
Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 2014, vol. 4, no. 3, pp.507-528