Looking for structure: Is the two-word stage of langugae development in apes and human children the same of different?

• Authors: Mark Patkowski
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

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.

Keywords

EN

language development; animal language; cross-species comparison; semantic relations; word order

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 507-528

Dates

cover

2014-10

Contributors

author

Mark Patkowski

• Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA

Identifiers

DOI

10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.7