Annual Review of Linguistics - Volume 7, 2021

Natural sign languages of deaf communities are acquired on the same time scale as that of spoken languages if children have access to fluent signers providing input from birth. Infants are sensitive to linguistic information provided visually, and early milestones show many parallels. The modality may affect various areas of language acquisition; such effects include the form of signs (sign phonology), the potential advantage presented by visual iconicity, and the use of spatial locations to represent referents, locations, and movement events. Unfortunately, the vast majority of deaf children do not receive accessible linguistic input in infancy, and these children experience language deprivation. Negative effects on language are observed when first-language acquisition is delayed. For those who eventually begin to learn a sign language, earlier input is associated with better language and academic outcomes. Further research is especially needed with a broader diversity of participants.

This article provides a critical review of the theoretical underpinnings of two core concepts in language socialization research: input and communicative competence. We organize our discussion along two major lines of inquiry: (a) the historical-local and (b) the language contact–globalization bodies of work. The first part of the article contests the persistent view that input reduces to vocabulary and grammatical structures. To this end, it provides evidence for a more multifaceted approach to input that involves multiparty participant frameworks and multimodality in culturally diverse language socialization ecologies. In this vein, it problematizes language gap studies that are based on middle-class language acquisition models of mother–child dyadic verbal input. The second part of the article challenges monolingual, developmental, and speaker-based models of communicative competence that assume a linear evolution from lesser to greater communicative competence and from more peripheral to more central community membership. It also offers evidence for how communicative competence is socioculturally constructed and, sometimes, interactionally distributed.

Unlike many species, song learning birds and humans have independently evolved the ability to communicate via learned vocalizations. Both birdsong and spoken language are culturally transmitted across generations, within species-specific constraints that leave room for considerable variation. We review the commonalities and differences between vocal learning bird species and humans, across behavioral, developmental, neuroanatomical, physiological, and genetic levels. We propose that cultural transmission of vocal repertoires is a natural consequence of the evolution of vocal learning and that at least some species-specific universals, as well as species differences in cultural transmission, are due to differences in vocal learning phenotypes, which are shaped by genetic constraints. We suggest that it is the balance between these constraints and features of the social environment that allows cultural learning to propagate. We describe new opportunities for exploring meaningful comparisons of birdsong and human vocal culture.

Over the past decade, the idea of using corpus linguistics in legal interpretation has attracted interest on the part of judges, lawyers, and legal academics in the United States. This review provides an introduction to this nascent movement, which is generally referred to as Law and Corpus Linguistics (LCL). After briefly summarizing LCL's origin and development, I situate LCL within legal interpretation by discussing the legal concept of ordinary meaning, which establishes the framework within which LCL operates. Next, I situate LCL within linguistics by identifying the subfields that are most relevant to LCL. I then offer a linguistic justification for an idea that is implicit in the case law and that provides important support for using corpus analysis in legal interpretation: that data about patterns of usage provide evidence of how words and other expressions are ordinarily understood. I go on to discuss linguistic issues that arise from the use of corpus linguistics in disputes that involve lexical ambiguity and categorization. Finally, I point out some challenges that the growth of LCL will present for both legal professionals and linguists.

Whistled forms of languages are distributed worldwide and survive only in some of the most remote villages on the planet. They are not limited to a given continent, language family, or language structure, but they have been detected only sporadically by researchers and travelers, partly because they can be taken for nonlinguistic phenomena, such as simple signaling. Whistled speech consists of speaking while whistling to communicate at a long distance. The result is a melody that imitates modal speech and that remains intelligible for the interlocutors. This review proposes a typology of this special, little-known, natural speech type and takes socio-environmental and linguistic aspects into consideration. The amazing potential of this phenomenon to provide an alternative point of view into language diversity and speech offers a unique occasion to revisit human language with original insights embracing the adaptive flexibility that characterizes speech production and perception.