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When a hypothesis has survived a sufficient number of tests, it may be promoted to a scientific theory. A theory is a hypothesis that has survived many tests and seems to be consistent with other established scientific theories. Since a theory is a promoted hypothesis, it is of the same 'logical' species and shares the same logical limitations.
The distributional hypothesis in linguistics is derived from the semantic theory of language usage, i.e. words that are used and occur in the same contexts tend to purport similar meanings. [ 2 ] The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth in the 1950s.
The Bottleneck Hypothesis [23] suggests that certain linguistic features in second-language acquisition (SLA) act as a bottleneck, limiting the progression of learners in acquiring the full grammatical system of the target language. According to this hypothesis, functional morphology is the most challenging aspect for adult L2 learners to acquire.
The language bioprogram theory or language bioprogram hypothesis [1] (LBH) is a theory arguing that the structural similarities between different creole languages cannot be solely attributed to their superstrate and substrate languages.
For example, spaces are symmetric. The distance between two points is the same regardless of which point you start from. However, psychological similarity is not symmetric. For example, we often prefer to state similarity in one direction. For example, it feels more natural to say that 101 is like 100 than to say that 100 is like 101.
The theoretical foundations for what became known as the contrastive analysis hypothesis were formulated in Robert Lado's Linguistics Across Cultures (1957). In this book, Lado claimed that "those elements which are similar to [the learner's] native language will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult".
The Contact Hypothesis has been supported by decades of research. Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp’s meta-analysis [4] of over 700 independent samples confirms the contact hypothesis for a variety of minority groups and conservatively estimates the average correlation between contact and prejudice as -.215 (N > 250,000, p < .0001).
Like speech accommodation theory, communication accommodation theory continues to draw from social psychology, particularly from four main socio-psychology theories: similarity-attraction, social exchange, causal attribution and intergroup distinctiveness. These theories help to explain why speakers seek to converge or diverge from the language ...