Looking for structure: Is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human children the same or different?
Journal cover Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, volume 4, no. 3, year 2014, title Special issue: Age and more
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Keywords

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

How to Cite

Patkowski, M. (2014). Looking for structure: Is the two-word stage of language development in apes and human children the same or different?. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 4(3), 507–528. https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.7
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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.
https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.7
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