LINGUIST List 32.1039
Mon Mar 22 2021
Disc: Measuring Relatedness among Languages
Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everettlinguistlist.org>
Date: 18-Mar-2021
From: Karen Pennesi <pennesi
uwo.ca>
Subject: Measuring Relatedness among Languages
E-mail this message to a friend I received an inquiry from a colleague in psychiatry who works with immigrants. He is asking if there is a way to measure the "distance" between languages in order to generate hypotheses about cognitive effort required to learn L2 when L1 is very different (i.e. from a different language family). Can anyone recommend literature on L2 acquisition that compares the grammatical, phonological etc. features of L1 and L2 to inform this potential argument that the more different two languages are, the more difficulty learners face?
Thank you for any leads. I will pass them on.
Linguistic Field(s): Genetic Classification
Historical Linguistics
Language Acquisition
Typology
Page Updated: 22-Mar-2021