Sabine Stoll
Biographic Data
| ID | 808387 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sabine Stoll |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sabine |
| FAMILY NAME | Stoll |
| SIGNATURE | STOLL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6328-5654 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Exploring Amazonian Cognitive Diversity at Chana Research Station
The Chana Research Station for Language Sciences and Interculturality is a scientific initiative dedicated to exploring the linguistic, cultural, and cognitive diversity of the Peruvian Amazon. Building on long‐standing local partnerships and collaborations, Chana facilitates research on cognition that extends beyond populations from industrialized democracies, traditionally overrepresented in behavioral sciences. Other populations—such as those …
Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach
Semantic roles, namely the agent (‘doer’) and patient (‘undergoer’) roles, are fundamental to language acquisition, as they enable learners to map meaning onto syntactic structure. Grammars typically impose a binary classification on how these roles map onto syntactic functions. These functions are encoded through features such as agreement, case marking and word order, which children gradually acquire through exposure to their linguistic environ…
Children Learn Causatives Despite Pervasive Ellipsis: Evidence from Turkish
In this study, we explore how children learn causatives from the language they are exposed to in their everyday lives. Previous research has argued that argument structure is a crucial facilitator for learning causatives. Here, we examine the role of argument structure in the acquisition of morphological and lexical causatives. We use Turkish as a test case which allows argument ellipsis and ask whether reliable argument expression is a key facto…
The Agent Preference in Ontogeny: Predictability of Agent and Patient Roles in Child‐Directed Utterances Across Languages
Language comprehension unfolds incrementally, requiring listeners to continually predict and revise interpretations. Comprehenders across very diverse languages show a consistent preference for agents, anticipating the agent (“the doer” of an action) more strongly than the patient (“the undergoer”). An unresolved question is how the preference develops in children given incomplete utterances and argument omission in their input. Here, we approach…
Children Learn Best From Their Peers: The Crucial Role of Input From Other Children in Language Development
Language input is crucial for language learning, with child-directed speech being a strong predictor of language development. Yet, in many non-industrialized rural societies, children are less exposed to this type of input. Instead, children encounter frequent child-surrounding speech from third-party interactions. Little is known about whether and how children learn language from this type of input. By analyzing naturalistic data from children g…
The road to negation: A comparative study of five typologically and culturally diverse languages
The acquisition of negation is a key milestone in early language development that enables children to express rejection, non-existence, and deny propositions. In this study, we ask whether the development of the functions of negation follows a universal trajectory or varies based on language-specific features and environmental input. We investigate the acquisition of negative functions in 10 children (age = 2;00-3;00) across five typologically ma…
Language‐Invariant Strategies of Navigating Transitions in Joint Activities: Forms and Functions of Coordination Markers
Goal‐directed tasks unfold in hierarchies of larger and smaller sub‐tasks, and pursuing them jointly implies that participants must agree on whether they are continuing an ongoing sub‐task (horizontal transition) or switching to the next sub‐task (vertical transition). Previous research indicates that humans employ short and efficient coordination markers as procedural conventions to distinguish horizontal (e.g., in English, with yeah and uh‐huh …
Negation in First Language Acquisition: Universal or Language‐Specific
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 rel…
Do typological differences in the expression of causality influence preschool children’s causal event construal
This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in causal expressions influence the mapping of causal language on causal events in three- to four-year-old Swiss-German learners and Turkish learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed syntactically with lexical causatives (e.g., ässe ‘to eat’ vs. füettere ‘to feed’). In Turkish, causality is expressed both syntactically and morphologically – with a verbal suffix (e.g., yem…
Does morphological complexity affect word segmentation? Evidence from computational modeling
Detecting structured repetition in child-surrounding speech: Evidence from maximally diverse languages
Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation between utterances is necessary to support acquisition of a fully productive grammar. When individual wo…
Does morphological complexity affect word segmentation? Evidence from computational modeling
How can infants detect where words or morphemes start and end in the continuous stream of speech? Previous computational studies have investigated this question mainly for English, where morpheme and word boundaries are often isomorphic. Yet in many languages, words are often multimorphemic, such that word and morpheme boundaries do not align. Our study employed corpora of two languages that differ in the complexity of inflectional morphology, Ch…
Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking: Supplementary Material
Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking
Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesi…
Early Communicative Development in Two Cultures: A Comparison of the Communicative Environments of Children from Two Cultures
The nature of young children's communicative environment has been central to theoretical debates about the importance of innate and environmental factors in the development of communication and language. In this paper, we explore aspects of the communicative development and environment of young children growing up in two very different cultures, one in a village of eastern Nepal and the other in a rural area of Western Germany. We analysed longit…
Nouns and verbs in Chintang: Children's usage and surrounding adult speech
Analyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in terms of a universal noun bias; instead, a likely cause is that Chintang verb morphology is polysynthetic and difficult to learn. This hypothesis is supported by the fac…
Studies in Ditransitive Constructions: A Comparative Handbook
This rich volume deals comprehensively with cross-linguistic variation in the morphosyntax of ditransitive constructions: constructions formed with verbs (like give) that take Agent, Theme and Recipient arguments. For the first time, a broadly cross-linguistic perspective is adopted. The present volume, consisting of an overview article and twenty-odd in-depth studies of ditransitive constructions in individual languages from different continents…
How to measure development in corpora? An association strength approach
In this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating co-occurrence data. We exemplify the implementation of these proposals with data on the acquisition of the…
Free Prefix Ordering in Chintang
This article demonstrates prefix permutability in Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) that is not constrained by any semantic or morphosyntactic structure, or by any dialect, sociolect, or idiolect choice-a phenomenon ruled out by standard assumptions about grammatical words. The prefixes are fully fledged parts of grammatical words and are different from clitics on a large number of standard criteria. The analysis of phonological word domains suggest…
Beginning and end in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian
The goal of this research is to determine the relevant factors that aid in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian. Results confirm the findings of previous research, which say that aspect is not learned as a uniform category, but rather interrelates with the acquisition of Aktionsarten. This study focuses on the factors responsible for the difference in the rate of the acquisition of two complementary Aktionsarten in the perfective a…
On the Desinence {-t(,)} of the Early East Slavic Imperfect
The role of Aktionsart in the acquisition of Russian aspect
In contrast to what is often assumed in universalist approaches to language acquisition, this paper demonstrates that the acquisition of aspect in at least one language, namely in Russian, is not based on an innate primitive category. The results of a comprehension experiment run with Russian preschool children (age 2-6 years) show that Russian aspect is not acquired in a single step, but rather develops as a slow process. This development is fur…
Free Prefix Ordering in Chintang
This article demonstrates prefix permutability in Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) that is not constrained by any semantic or morphosyntactic structure, or by any dialect, sociolect, or idiolect choice-a phenomenon ruled out by standard assumptions about grammatical words. The prefixes are fully fledged parts of grammatical words and are different from clitics on a large number of standard criteria. The analysis of phonological word domains suggest…
Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking
Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesi…
The role of Aktionsart in the acquisition of Russian aspect
In contrast to what is often assumed in universalist approaches to language acquisition, this paper demonstrates that the acquisition of aspect in at least one language, namely in Russian, is not based on an innate primitive category. The results of a comprehension experiment run with Russian preschool children (age 2-6 years) show that Russian aspect is not acquired in a single step, but rather develops as a slow process. This development is fur…
On the Desinence {-t(,)} of the Early East Slavic Imperfect
Beginning and end in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian
The goal of this research is to determine the relevant factors that aid in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian. Results confirm the findings of previous research, which say that aspect is not learned as a uniform category, but rather interrelates with the acquisition of Aktionsarten. This study focuses on the factors responsible for the difference in the rate of the acquisition of two complementary Aktionsarten in the perfective a…
Free Prefix Ordering in Chintang
This article demonstrates prefix permutability in Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) that is not constrained by any semantic or morphosyntactic structure, or by any dialect, sociolect, or idiolect choice-a phenomenon ruled out by standard assumptions about grammatical words. The prefixes are fully fledged parts of grammatical words and are different from clitics on a large number of standard criteria. The analysis of phonological word domains suggest…
How to measure development in corpora? An association strength approach
In this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating co-occurrence data. We exemplify the implementation of these proposals with data on the acquisition of the…
Studies in Ditransitive Constructions: A Comparative Handbook
This rich volume deals comprehensively with cross-linguistic variation in the morphosyntax of ditransitive constructions: constructions formed with verbs (like give) that take Agent, Theme and Recipient arguments. For the first time, a broadly cross-linguistic perspective is adopted. The present volume, consisting of an overview article and twenty-odd in-depth studies of ditransitive constructions in individual languages from different continents…
Nouns and verbs in Chintang: Children's usage and surrounding adult speech
Analyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in terms of a universal noun bias; instead, a likely cause is that Chintang verb morphology is polysynthetic and difficult to learn. This hypothesis is supported by the fac…
Early Communicative Development in Two Cultures: A Comparison of the Communicative Environments of Children from Two Cultures
The nature of young children's communicative environment has been central to theoretical debates about the importance of innate and environmental factors in the development of communication and language. In this paper, we explore aspects of the communicative development and environment of young children growing up in two very different cultures, one in a village of eastern Nepal and the other in a rural area of Western Germany. We analysed longit…
Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking: Supplementary Material
Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking
Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesi…
Does morphological complexity affect word segmentation? Evidence from computational modeling
How can infants detect where words or morphemes start and end in the continuous stream of speech? Previous computational studies have investigated this question mainly for English, where morpheme and word boundaries are often isomorphic. Yet in many languages, words are often multimorphemic, such that word and morpheme boundaries do not align. Our study employed corpora of two languages that differ in the complexity of inflectional morphology, Ch…
Do typological differences in the expression of causality influence preschool children’s causal event construal
This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in causal expressions influence the mapping of causal language on causal events in three- to four-year-old Swiss-German learners and Turkish learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed syntactically with lexical causatives (e.g., ässe ‘to eat’ vs. füettere ‘to feed’). In Turkish, causality is expressed both syntactically and morphologically – with a verbal suffix (e.g., yem…
Does morphological complexity affect word segmentation? Evidence from computational modeling
Detecting structured repetition in child-surrounding speech: Evidence from maximally diverse languages
Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation between utterances is necessary to support acquisition of a fully productive grammar. When individual wo…
Children Learn Best From Their Peers: The Crucial Role of Input From Other Children in Language Development
Language input is crucial for language learning, with child-directed speech being a strong predictor of language development. Yet, in many non-industrialized rural societies, children are less exposed to this type of input. Instead, children encounter frequent child-surrounding speech from third-party interactions. Little is known about whether and how children learn language from this type of input. By analyzing naturalistic data from children g…
The road to negation: A comparative study of five typologically and culturally diverse languages
The acquisition of negation is a key milestone in early language development that enables children to express rejection, non-existence, and deny propositions. In this study, we ask whether the development of the functions of negation follows a universal trajectory or varies based on language-specific features and environmental input. We investigate the acquisition of negative functions in 10 children (age = 2;00-3;00) across five typologically ma…
Language‐Invariant Strategies of Navigating Transitions in Joint Activities: Forms and Functions of Coordination Markers
Goal‐directed tasks unfold in hierarchies of larger and smaller sub‐tasks, and pursuing them jointly implies that participants must agree on whether they are continuing an ongoing sub‐task (horizontal transition) or switching to the next sub‐task (vertical transition). Previous research indicates that humans employ short and efficient coordination markers as procedural conventions to distinguish horizontal (e.g., in English, with yeah and uh‐huh …
Negation in First Language Acquisition: Universal or Language‐Specific
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 rel…
Exploring Amazonian Cognitive Diversity at Chana Research Station
The Chana Research Station for Language Sciences and Interculturality is a scientific initiative dedicated to exploring the linguistic, cultural, and cognitive diversity of the Peruvian Amazon. Building on long‐standing local partnerships and collaborations, Chana facilitates research on cognition that extends beyond populations from industrialized democracies, traditionally overrepresented in behavioral sciences. Other populations—such as those …
Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach
Semantic roles, namely the agent (‘doer’) and patient (‘undergoer’) roles, are fundamental to language acquisition, as they enable learners to map meaning onto syntactic structure. Grammars typically impose a binary classification on how these roles map onto syntactic functions. These functions are encoded through features such as agreement, case marking and word order, which children gradually acquire through exposure to their linguistic environ…
Children Learn Causatives Despite Pervasive Ellipsis: Evidence from Turkish
In this study, we explore how children learn causatives from the language they are exposed to in their everyday lives. Previous research has argued that argument structure is a crucial facilitator for learning causatives. Here, we examine the role of argument structure in the acquisition of morphological and lexical causatives. We use Turkish as a test case which allows argument ellipsis and ask whether reliable argument expression is a key facto…
The Agent Preference in Ontogeny: Predictability of Agent and Patient Roles in Child‐Directed Utterances Across Languages
Language comprehension unfolds incrementally, requiring listeners to continually predict and revise interpretations. Comprehenders across very diverse languages show a consistent preference for agents, anticipating the agent (“the doer” of an action) more strongly than the patient (“the undergoer”). An unresolved question is how the preference develops in children given incomplete utterances and argument omission in their input. Here, we approach…
Linguistics (16 works) · Language Development and Disorders (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Language acquisition (9 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (9 works) · Natural language processing (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works) · Morpheme (6 works)