Africa contains over one quarter of the languages currently used on the planet. The languages and the contexts in which they are used are diverse and therefore have much to teach us about language acquisition. However, African languages are chronically underrepresented in the language acquisition literature. This special issue of First Language contains 13 papers reporting new research findings on African languages, including studies investigating child-directed speech, phonological, prosodic, vocabulary, and morphosyntactic development, the development of narrative competence, and language assessment. In this introduction, we explain the motivation for the special issue, review past research on the acquisition of African languages, and introduce each of the 13 papers.

Abstract Transcripts are an integral part of documentary corpora, and transcription, conducted in close cooperation with a language’s speakers/signers, is central to fieldwork activities. Yet, transcription practices — involving decisions that reduce the complexity of an audio/video signal into a written form — remain surprisingly under-researched within the language documentation context. This contribution investigates variability and agreement among transcribers across three languages (Iha, Qaqet, Dëne Sųłıné), focusing on their phonemic and phonetic spellings of nasalization, and asks to what extent the observed transcription strategies provide a window into metalinguistic knowledge. The results paint a complex picture, partly corroborating the view that speakers are aware of phonemes, but also demonstrating that speakers are aware of considerable phonetic detail and automatic (morpho-)phonological processes.

Many languages exhibit some form of differential argument marking (DAM), where the same generalized argument role can be marked differently. Approaches explaining these phenomena have in common that they assume some form of ranking among linguistic elements of the same kind. While previous approaches emphasize this relative ranking based on semantic features (e.g., animacy, definiteness, transitivity) or information structure (e.g., topicality), several observations from the literature suggest that differential argument marking might also depend on discourse factors. In this contribution, we explore recent empirical work on differential argument marking in selected languages (Spanish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Tima, Yali) and illustrate the discourse sensitivity of these phenomena. In particular, we present evidence that discourse prominence, i.e., the dynamic ranking and keeping track of referents in discourse, interacts with the phenomena under discussion. This contribution offers new perspectives on the interplay of differential argument marking and discourse prominence, highlighting perspectives for future research.

Throughout the history of child language acquisition research, the study of child-directed language (CDL) has attracted significant attention. In particular, there has been considerable debate regarding the characteristic features of CDL and their universality/variability across the world's languages. Yet, although data from many languages have been analyzed, the totality of the crosslinguistic coverage is still poor. In this paper, we report on an analysis of CDL across five diverse languages and cultures: Murrinhpatha (Southern Daly, non-Pama-Nyungan), Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan), Qaqet (Baining), Tagalog (Western Austronesian), and Inuktitut (Inuit-Yupik-Unangan). Using data collected for the Acquisition Sketch Project, an initiative in which Barb was a core member, we find both striking commonalities and clear differences in CDL across our target languages. The findings are consistent with the argument that CDL emerges as a set of culturally mediated behavioural practices, with some features being more commonly observed than others. The findings underline the value of the Acquisition Sketch approach in widening the evidence base of the field of child language acquisition, one of Barb's major contributions to the field.

We live in an unprecedented era of language endangerment and loss. In the midst of this crisis, it is becoming more and more evident that the psychological and cognitive sciences know very little about how most of the world's languages are acquired, represented, and processed. Therefore, the opportunity to understand our most important and defining species-specific trait is being rapidly lost. In this Perspective, we highlight the extent of this problem, focusing on a key group at the heart of language transmission and loss-child language learners. We show that, due to sampling biases, very little is known about how children learn much of the vast corners of the linguistic design space, and that our opportunity to do so this is fast running out. We end by arguing for the greater integration of the academy, government, and community in addressing this problem.

Human language is unique among communication systems since many elements are learned and transmitted across generations. Previous research suggests that this process is best predicted by infant-directed communication, i.e., a mode of communication directed by caregivers to children. Despite its importance for language, whether infant-directed communication is unique to humans or rooted more deeply in the primate lineage remains unclear. To assess this, we investigated directed and surrounding vocal communication in human infants and infants of wild nonhuman great apes. Our findings reveal that human infants receive dramatically more infant-directed communication than nonhuman great ape infants. These data suggest that the earliest hominins likely relied more on surrounding communication to become communicatively competent, while infant-directed vocal communication became considerably more prominent with human language.

Negation is a cornerstone of human language and one of the few universals found in all languages. Without negation, neither categorization nor efficient communication would be possible. Languages, however, differ remarkably in how they express negation. It is yet widely unknown how the way negation is marked influences the acquisition process of first language learners. Here, we investigate whether universal or language-specific cues are more relevant for the acquisition process. We test to what extent frequency and salience features (morphosyntactic boundedness, position of the negation marker, allomorphy) influence the acquisition of negation. We use naturalistic longitudinal data from 17 children (age 24-36 months) learning nine typologically maximally diverse languages spoken in very diverse cultural contexts ranging from western urban to subsistence farming: Chintang, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Qaqet, Russian, Sesotho, Turkish, and Yucatec Mayan. Distributional analyses show that the amount and type of input of negation that children hear vary considerably across cultures. Despite significant differences in the input that children receive, we observe a universal pattern in the acquisition of negation: Children transition from relatively easy and salient free negators to less salient bound negator morphemes in their use of negation. Our results show that frequency and morphosyntactic boundedness explain the development of flexibility in the acquisition of negation across all of the nine languages. We further find that the developmental path is shaped by the interaction between frequency and language-specific parameters of salience that are contingent on grammatical features of negation marking in different languages, such as the position of the negation marker and allomorphic variation. Our language-specific findings highlight cross-linguistic variation, which reflects cross-cultural differences in the amount of input of negative utterances children receive. Taken together, this study provides cross-linguistic evidence for the acquisition of negation and emphasizes the interplay of universal and language-specific factors in the acquisition process.

The concepts bring and take belong to a semantic domain that can be characterized as events of caused accompanied motion in a direction. This contribution investigates the expression of this domain in Katla (Niger-Congo; Sudan) within a corpus of naturalistic data, shows that Katla employs complex expressions (where motion, caused motion and possession verbs combine with venitive and comitative derivational extensions), and relates these findings to recent typological research in this domain. The contribution is set within a research tradition that investigates cross-linguistic lexicalization patterns.

This paper presents a survey of split case marking across the Nilotic languages of East Africa. Expanding on König’s (2008) original insights, the survey is set within Chappell and Verstraete’s (2019) typology on alternations and optionalities in case marking, taking into account all accessible descriptions. It confirms the prevalence – and traces the extent – of a construction-based split, whereby only postverbal A (split ergative) or S/A (marked nominative) arguments receive case marking. Split ergativity is overall very rare; case is marked morphologically and the languages have a default OVA order. Marked nominative systems are more common; tonal inflection is the main marking strategy, and the default order is typically verb-initial. Languages without case marking have the default orders AVO or AOV, and do not have postverbal S/A arguments. The survey furthermore reveals an interaction with referent-based splits for some languages (where postverbal S/A arguments are obligatorily case-marked if they are animate, highly agentive and/or definite), and assembles all available information on factors that condition the construction-based split. On the basis of this survey and preliminary corpus-based investigations, we suggest that the concept of discourse prominence opens up a fruitful line for future research.

Abstract The concepts bring and take belong to a semantic domain that can be characterized as events of caused accompanied motion in a direction. This contribution investigates the expression of this domain in Katla (Niger-Congo; Sudan) within a corpus of naturalistic data, shows that Katla employs complex expressions (where motion, caused motion and possession verbs combine with venitive and comitative derivational extensions), and relates these findings to recent typological research in this domain. The contribution is set within a research tradition that investigates cross-linguistic lexicalization patterns.

This paper presents the first part of a guide for documenting and describing child language, child-directed language and socialization patterns in diverse languages and cultures. The guide is intended for anyone interested in working across child language and language documentation, including, for example, field linguists and language documenters, community language workers, child language researchers or graduate students. We assume some basic familiarity with language documentation principles and methods, and, based on this, provide step-by-step suggestions for collecting, analyzing and presenting child data. This first part of the guide focuses on constructing a sketch corpus that consists of minimally five hours of annotated and archived data and which documents communicative practices of children between the ages of 2 and 4.

Qaqet is a non-Austronesian Baining language of Papua New Guinea, with a very small phoneme inventory of 16 consonants and four vowels, including the voiced stops /b d g/. These stops are often phonetically realized as prenasalized [(m)b (n)d (eta)g], and this feature is assumed to be a result of language contact with surrounding Oceanic languages. Our data consist of isolated word recordings from six female speakers of the language. Using a range of acoustic measures, we compare these phonetically prenasalized stops with non-prenasalized tokens of the same /b d g/ phonemes, and with the nasal phonemes proper /m n N/, as well as with the unaspirated voiceless stops /p t k/.& nbsp;In general we find that the nasal murmur of the phonetically prenasalized stop does not fully resemble the nasal murmur of the nasal consonant proper - instead the phonetically prenasalized stop patterns between the nasal consonant and the phonetically non-prenasalized voiced stop. However, there is a clear place effect, whereby the phonetically prenasalized velar stop patterns more closely with the nasal consonants, and the phonetically pre nasalized bilabial stop patterns more closely with the phonetically non-prenasalized voiced stops - with phonetically prenasalized alveolar in between the bilabial and the velar. This is particularly reflected in the distribution of energy below and above about 350 Hz. However, measures of voicing strength suggest that voicing for the velar is weaker across all manners of articulation, in line with the general difficulty of maintaining voicing at this place of articulation. We conclude that prenasalization of the voiced stops largely serves to maintain voicing for the velar place of articulation; and that if the feature of prenasalization was borrowed from neighbouring languages, it was to maintain voicing for long closure durations in a true voicing language, particularly at places of articulation where maintaining voicing is difficult. (c)& nbsp; 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Article Adpositions and their distribution: a reply to Zygmunt Frajzyngier’s ‘Toward a functional typology of adpositions: theoretical implications’ was published on August 1, 2022 in the journal Folia Linguistica (volume 56, issue 2).

Abstract This chapter proposes a typology of expressions of directed caused accompanied motion (directed CAM): it introduces and defines this semantic domain, presents the corpus-based methodology used by the authors of this volume, and gives an overview of the results. It shows that directed CAM expressions tend to be morphosyntactically complex and it identifies four distinct patterns based on the lexical core of the expression: first, with a directed CAM verb; second, with an intransitive motion verb; third, with a transitive verb of accompaniment or of caused (accompanied) motion; or fourth, with a combination of the second and the third options. The chapter discusses each pattern and addresses issues of universality and variability in the domain of directed CAM.

This grammar is a first detailed description of Qaqet, a non-Austronesian language spoken in the mountainous interior of East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. Qaqet belongs to the small Baining language family (comprising six languages), but its wider genetic affiliations remain unclear. It is included among the geographically-defined East Papuan languages. The grammar presents a synchronic description of the language. From a language family perspective, the Baining languages are structurally fairly similar, but there are considerable differences in detail that point to different language-internal developments and grammaticalization paths. From an East Papuan and areal perspective, Qaqet exhibits both typical East Papuan features (e.g., nominal classification, possessor/possessed order, highly compositional lexicon) as well as areal features (e.g., AVO ~ SV constituent order, articles and determiners, prepositions). The description is based on primary data collected during fieldwork (from 2011 onwards), including both natural and elicited data. The description thereby provides new analyses and insights that are relevant to our understanding of the genetic and areal relationships in this region.