Oct 2026· Annual Review of Developmental Psychology· 0 citations
Abstract
The emergence of new languages offers a rare opportunity to observe how linguistic structure arises and evolves. We examine language creation through a developmental lens, focusing on how individuals at different life stages engage in complementary processes of invention, stabilization, and transmission. Drawing primarily on a new sign language [Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (LSN)] that has emerged over the past five decades, we highlight how child learners drive innovation by reanalyzing patterns in their environment, while adolescents and adults promote convergence, model established forms, and create the social conditions for transmission. We illustrate these dynamics closely in the emergence of grammatical devices that encode argument structure. Variation across the community today shows how a language encodes its history, synchronically reflecting cumulative contributions across generations. Viewing language creation as a developmental process thus underscores the joint influence of biological learning biases, social interaction, and cultural evolution in shaping human communication.
Frans de Waal transformed the study of animal cognition by showing that many capacities once regarded as uniquely human have deep evolutionary roots shared with other animals. Yet the success of this continuity perspective raises what this article calls the De Waal paradox: if human and nonhuman capacities largely di...
:Language socialization plays a fundamental role in shaping grammatical development by embedding linguistic structures within culturally and socially meaningful interactions. This study investigates the impact of language socialization on grammatical development, examining how interactions with teachers, peers, and dig...
B. Ali, P. Salih· Kirkuk University Journal: H...· 0 citations
Compositionality is the property of a representational system whereby complex meanings arise from the combination of simpler meaningful elements. Here we take a developmental perspective to understand the origins of compositional representational systems and their relation to language—an issue that bears on longstand...
Eulalie Pequay, I. Dautriche· Annual Review of Development...· 0 citations
Abstract The emergence of linguistic structure is shaped by interaction and cultural transmission as well as cognitive biases and social conventions. An important aspect of linguistic structure is reference distinction or “who did what to whom.” This paper explores how cross‐cultural differences in the conceptualizatio...
Danielle Naegeli, David Peeters, Emiel Krahmer et al.· Cognitive Sciences· 0 citations
: This study investigates the role of native language (L1) transfer in English language acquisition among Chinese learners, employing a questionnaire–based survey of 329 participants across different proficiency levels. The findings indicate that L1 influence operates across multiple domains, with the most substantial...
Jian Zhong· Proceeding in Humanities, Ed...· 0 citations
It is argued that contemporary linguistic proficiency depends on an individual's capacity for bidirectional code-switching between rapid digital vernaculars and formalized academic registers.
Aytan Pirmammadova· Science Bulletin· 2 citations
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