ABSTRACT
Crosslinguistic research is becoming increasingly popular in both linguistics and psycholinguistics, especially since the advent of generative theories of language competence and the models of language acquisition and performance they inspired. There is a twofold interest in crosslinguistic comparisons from the perspective of language performance models. One is in their helping us to focus on a number of language-specific properties so that we may single out and refine particular details of the processing apparatus involved in language understanding and production. Here, the issue is to clarify the contribution of certain language particulars to the processes of speech perception, word recognition, sentence parsing, and sentence planning, to find out whether the reported processing differences among languages might be traced to differences in the structural properties of particular languages or language families. Alternatively, one may concentrate on a range of conceptual or structural characteristics shared by different languages, with the aim of exploring crosslinguistic commonalities in terms of the processing strategies employed in various performance domains. In either case, the major concern of crosslinguistic studies is to gather empirical evidence to validate hypotheses regarding the organization of linguistic knowledge and/or the mechanisms by which this knowledge is put to use in a diversity of linguistic tasks.
