Early Basque Research Articles

Length of Utterance, in Morphemes or in Words?: MLU3-w, a Reliable Measure of Language Development in Early Basque.

The mean length of utterace (MLU), which was proposed by Brown (1973) as a better index for language development in children than age, has been regularly reported in case studies as well as in cross-sectional studies on early spontaneous language production. Despite the reliability of MLU as a measure of (morpho-)syntactic development having been called into question, its extensive use in language acquisition studies highlights its utility not only for intra- and inter-individual comparison in monolingual language acquisition, but also for cross-linguistic assessment and comparison of bilinguals' early language development (Müller, 1993; Yip and Matthews, 2006; Meisel, 2011). An additional issue concerns whether MLU should be measured in words (MLU-w) or morphemes (MLU-m), the latter option being the most difficult to gauge, since new challenges have arisen regarding how to count zero morphemes, suppletive and fused morphemes. The different criteria have consequences, especially when comparing development in languages with diverging morphological complexity. A variant of MLU, the MLU3, which is calculated out of the three longest sentences produced (MLU3-w and MLU3-m), is included among the subscales of expressive language development in CDI parental reports (Fenson et al., 1993, 2007). The aim of the study is to investigate the consistency and utility of MLU3-w and MLU3-m as a measure for (morpho-)syntactic development in Basque, an agglutinative language. To that end, cross-sectional data were obtained using either the Basque CDI-2 instrument (16- to 30-month-olds) or the Basque CDI-3 (30- to 50-month-olds). The results of analyzing reports on over 1,200 children show three main findings. First, MLU3-w and MLU3-m can report equally well on very young children's development. Second, the strong correlations found between MLU3 and expressive vocabulary in the Basque CDI-2 and CDI-3 instruments, as well as between MLU3 and both nominal and verbal morphology scales, confirm the consistency not only of MLU3 but also of the two Basque CDI instruments. Finally, both MLU3-w and MLU3-m subscales appear sensitive to input after age 2, which emphasizes their utility for identifying developmental patterns in Basque bilinguals.

Does listening to non-native speech impair speech perception?

Previous research with highly fluent, very early, Catalan–Spanish bilinguals has shown that L1 Spanish bilinguals accept certain mispronounced Catalan words at extremely high rates, and even L1 Catalan bilinguals do so at surprisingly high rates. Using similarly highly fluent, very early Basque–Spanish bilinguals, we investigate why this occurs. We test three possibilities: (1) There could be a failure to distinguish two similar sounds at the phonetic level, (2) Listeners might store exemplars they have heard in their lexical representations, with one accurate and one mispronounced version, or (3) Listeners might map two different phonetic codes to a lexical representation, either during perception or in a developed representation. A discrimination test showed that the problem is not due to a failure in acoustic-phonetic processing. To test the dual-exemplar representation versus dual mapping alternatives, we taught our subjects new Basque words under conditions that only allowed for a single lexical representation. Listeners showed the same tolerance for erroneous pronunciations in these uniquely learned items, ruling out the dual lexical representation option and supporting dual mapping. In regions in which bilinguals routinely hear accented versions of their language, it is a useful adaptation to the resulting variation to treat certain sounds as allophonic for purposes of lexical access. Looked at this way, accepting a “wrong” pronunciation is really not an error at all – it is an efficient adaptation to the prevailing linguistic environment.

Zooarchaeology of the Historic Cod Fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

Allometry and growth-increment aging of archaeological fish remains has the potential to reveal much about past fishing strategies, fish processing and trade, and fish populations. This paper documents the age and size characteristics of four samples of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) bones from early European contexts at Red Bay, Ferryland, Bay Bulls, and Crouse, which collectively span the middle 16th to early 19th centuries AD. The samples, which document the size structure of the “fished” population (the death assemblage), allow for a comparison of fishing strategies and techniques between the early Basque, French, and English commercial operations. At the same time, the samples, derived from multiple fishing regions around Newfoundland and Labrador, provide an important record of cod populations during early stages of the commercial fishery and thus offer a critical baseline record against which to compare modern handlined cod population data.

Commentary on Larrañaga & Guijarro-Fuentes’s The linguistic competence of early Basque–Spanish bilingual children and a Spanish monolingual child

This article approaches the study of gender marking in early European Spanish and is based on the analysis of the determiners produced by three children, one monolingual and two bilinguals, in spontaneous interactions. Mastering gender marking in this language implies having acquired the knowledge of the features of the D head, the architecture of determiner phrases (DPs) and the DP internal agreement mechanisms that make the head, its adjuncts and its specifier share such features. Larranaga and Guijarro Fuentes (henceforth L & GF) assume that target-like DPs in Spanish are complex structures containing several functional projections between the DP projection and the noun phrase (NP), in which number and gender features are checked.The authors observe that children do not undergo any initial stage of default gender during the process of acquiring the structure of DP. As a first result, monolinguals and bilinguals behave similarly in this respect, as no exclusive overgeneralisation of the masculine gender is attested in any of the three children. In contrast, the higher amount of errors as well as the longer duration of the period of erroneous productions in the bilingual corpora are interpreted as evidence for a delayed acquisition of the internal architecture of the Spanish DP, attributable to some effect of the other language of the bilinguals, Basque, which lacks gender specification as well as DP internal agreement.The originality of this article lies basically in the detailed description and quantification of early gender marking production by children acquiring two languages for which not many longitudinal or cross-sectional studies on early DPs are available. Moreover, the approach to the contrastive description of DP architectures of both unrelated languages is a field few have explored from the theoretical perspective. Furthermore, the theoretical framework in which the results are discussed contrasts with most of the previous studies on early gender marking in Spanish, developed following non-generative or pre-minimalist models.In the introductory section, L & GF review the descriptive work dealing with the relation between grammatical and natural gender in Spanish. In addition to the examples of mismatch in natural versus grammatical gender mentioned, this section would also benefit from distinguishing between the so-called genero comun, 'common gender', in which the determiner is solely responsible for marking the difference between male and female (el/la pianista, 'the-M/the-F pianist'), and the genero epiceno, in which the N is indistinctively marked for the one gender option, regardless of the natural gender of their reference (F marking in la joven victima, 'the - male or female - young victim' or M in el bebe lloron, 'the - male or female - cry-baby'). Mention of grammatical mismatch such as the change of determiner in cacophonic contexts (*la agua clara, 'the-F water-F clear-F', vs. el agua clara, 'the-M water-F clear-F') would add cohesion to the text, as examples of this kind are reported in children's corpora. At this point, some discussion of the formal, inherent character and of the (un)interpretability of the gender feature in Spanish would not be redundant.An important topic in the argumentation on the (dis)similarities between monolingual and bilin- gual acquisition is the potential interlinguistic effect of the other language. Structurally different configurations of DP in Basque and Spanish turn out to be the central subject of the first section. L & GF adopt recent theoretical proposals on the complexity of DPs for Spanish and Basque languages, which allow the authors to delimit the field for their study of the potential interlinguistic influence in children's acquisition of gender and the structure of DP in Spanish. The presence (Spanish) versus the absence of Class P (Basque) as responsible for the corresponding feature checking by attracting N to Class in Spanish versus N remaining in situ in Basque constitutes an attractive field for testing interlinguistic influence. …

Overt subjects in early Basque and other null subject languages

This study focuses on person marking in early Basque and other null subject languages. From very early on, person marking on the verb and quite regular, adult-like, null subject rates are attested across early acquisition studies on genetically related and unrelated pro-drop languages. We survey several studies on bilingual children simultaneously acquiring two languages with the opposite value for the pro-drop parameter. The conclusion drawn is that children display a monolingual-like pattern in the production of person marking, overt subjects, and personal pronouns in the null subject language, whereas, in the non-null subject language, bilinguals evidence delayed target person marking and overt subject production. These data are compatible with the view that children correctly set the default parametric value at early stages and separate the languages being acquired. However, it is argued that accounts based on the lexical learning of features in the functional category T(ense) may better account for the crosslinguistic data. Moreover, the accuracy observed in overt person inflection production leads to the proposal that (the spelling out of) the [person] or [D] feature in T(ense) is the first subject feature available to the language acquirer, previous to other candidates such as number or case.

The linguistic competence of early Basque–Spanish bilingual children and a Spanish monolingual child

In this article, we sought to investigate the acquisition of gender features by two Basque–Spanish bilingual children when compared to a Spanish monolingual child. Basque is a language that lacks gender features and nominal agreement, whereas Spanish classifies nouns into two classes, that is, masculine and feminine, and has determiner phrase internal agreement. The internal architecture of Basque and Spanish differ on two crucial ways: the presence or absence of agreement and the presence or absence of the syntactic projection ClassP. Hence, the acquisition of gender sheds some light on the internal architecture of the determiner phrase. The studies on gender acquisition by Spanish monolinguals or bilinguals of any combination are not numerous. For this reason, we provide a detailed description of gender development and a thorough analysis of gender errors by a monolingual Spanish child and two Basque–Spanish bilinguals. This study shows that the masculine is not the default gender, neither for the monolingual child analysed nor for bilinguals because both groups overgeneralize masculine as well as feminine. Moreover, none of the children exclusively use the masculine with all nouns at a first stage to converge to target grammar in a subsequent stage. Basque–Spanish bilinguals use masculine determiners with feminine nouns in the majority of contexts from the outset of language acquisition, whereas the monolingual child performs the opposite way. Interestingly, bilinguals require more time to acquire the intricacies of Spanish gender. In other words, they make gender errors even at advanced stages of development, when the monolingual Spanish child studied in this article presents a target-like gender performance. The analysed data show that Basque influences Spanish, resulting in language delay because of the internal architecture of the determiner phrase and to a minor extent by the surface overlap between Spanish and Basque. However, our interpretation is cautious because of the scarcity of such examples and the limited corpus available.

The (in)consistent ergative marking in early Basque: L1 vs. child L2

This paper attempts to describe the (in)consistency of the ergative morphology in Basque as a possible explanation for the difficulty generally observed in mastering ergative case marking. Basque is an ergaccusative language which distinguishes Subjects (S) of transitive verbs (V) from Ss of unaccusative Vs morphologically – the latter marked similarly to Direct Objects – in both the nominal (-k/zero suffix) and the verbal domain (suffix/prefix). Early language acquisition data evidenced an asymmetry in the very early acquisition of ergativity in the verbal domain (around 2;6) which contrasts with a delayed consistent marking in the nominal domain (some months later). Neither language internal inconsistency nor interlinguistic influence seems to account properly for this asymmetry. Moreover, the fact that the delay lasts less in early monolingual (L1) and bilingual first language acquisition (2L1) than in child L2 (cL2) contrasts with models that minimize L1/L2 differences. Furthermore, 2L1 and cL2 production data supports the relevance of the input and the degree of exposure to the language in early processes of language acquisition, in addition to UG and learning mechanisms.

Colonial Encounters, European Kettles, and the Magic of Mimesis in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Indigenous Northeast and Great Lakes

Copper kettles, in high demand among indigenous communities of the Northeast/Great Lakes, became prominent items in the exchange repertoires of early Basque, French and Dutch traders. Kettles’ origin with these “Others” and its connection to a medium (copper) that had held symbolic significance for millennia led them to be used in an indigenous ‘metaphorical’ value regime influencing trade during the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century. An artisan living on the threshold of colonial encounter in Northern Michigan between 1470 and 1660 CE—having seen European goods but not having access to them—harnessed the mimetic faculty to make a small, miniature, ceramic imitation or skeuomorph of a European trade kettle. Rather than the sincerest form of flattery, I suggest this imitation was made to acquire the power of the original to fend off the colonial danger and to connect to this symbolic value regime. I suggest the “magic” of mimesis offered personal and organizational power in the indigenous Northeast/Great Lakes during early contact. This specific case speaks more broadly to how mimesis can provide a robust framework for exploring the material cultures of colonial encounter.