Language Bias

Clifton Pye

pyersqr (at) ku (dot) edu

Acquisition researchers make great efforts to avoid biasing their samples by subject features (e.g. age, gender, etc.), but show a major bias in language features. Languages are chosen by convenience rather than through a systematic survey of the world’s languages, and convenience samples will be skewed in the direction of the local languages. As a result, the dataset for research on language acquisition is biased toward languages that share a common set of features.

The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (Dryer & Haspelmath, eds.) is a good place to begin to understand the language biases of acquisition research. One dimension of language bias is the number of inflections a language typically uses on its verbs. Bickel and Nichols (2013) summarize data on the degree of inflectional synthesis of the verb. They provide the data in Table 1.

Table 1. Inflectional synthesis of the verb (Bickel and Nichols 2013)

0-1 category per word 5 3.4%

2-3 categories per word 24 16.6%

4-5 categories per word 52 35.9%

6-7 categories per word 31 21.4%

8-9 categories per word 24 16.6%

10-11 categories per word 7 4.8%

12-13 categories per word 2 1.4%

Bickel and Nichols claim that English has 2-3 categories per verb, and Spanish has 4-5 categories. They claim that the Athabaskan language Slave has 8-9 categories per verb. We know very little about how children cope with languages that have 8 or more inflectional categories on their verbs.

Related to the issue of synthesis is the position of the inflections on the verb. Acquisition research has focused on languages with inflectional suffixes and largely ignored languages with inflectional prefixes. Dryer (2013a) provides some data on the position of affixes in the world’s languages (Table 2).

Table 2. Prefixing vs. suffixing in inflectional morphology (Dryer 2013a)

Little affixation 141 14.6%

Strongly suffixing 406 41.9%

Weakly suffixing 123 12.7%

Equal prefixing and suffixing 147 15.2%

Weakly prefixing 94 9.7%

Strong prefixing 58 6.0%

English is a strongly suffixing language, as are most of the languages for which acquisition data is available. Very little acquisition data is available for prefixing languages.

Another bias in acquisition research is caused by the dominant word order that languages employ for the subject (S), verb (V) and object (O). Dryer (2013b) provides some data on word orders in the world’s languages (Table 3).

Table 3. Order of subject, object and verb (Dryer 2013b)

SOV 565 47.6%

SVO 488 41.1%

VSO 95 8.0%

VOS 25 2.1%

OVS 11 0.9%

OSV 4 0.3%

English, and many other European languages have a SVO word order. The Mayan language Mam has a VSO word order, and the Mayan language K’iche’ has a VOS word order.

The next time you design a study of language acquisition, look for a strongly prefixing language that marks its verb for 10 or more categories, and has a verb-initial or object-initial word order. For more fun, look for languages with ejective or implosive consonants or laryngealized vowels.

References

Balthasar Bickel, Johanna Nichols. 2013. Inflectional Synthesis of the Verb. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/22, Accessed on 2018-03-13.)

Matthew S. Dryer. 2013a. Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional Morphology. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/26, Accessed on 2018-03-13.)

Matthew S. Dryer. 2013b. Order of Subject, Object and Verb. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/81, Accessed on 2018-03-13.)

Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (http://wals).

Mar. 13, 2018

Page last modified 3/13/18