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First Language Vocabulary Acquisition
Abstract
Children produce their first words anywhere between 12 months and 24 months of age. And they add steadily to their vocabulary from then on, at a rate estimated at around nine words a day up to age six (Clark, 2009).
Keywords:
first language acquisition;
pragmatics;
interactionist language studies;
vocabulary
... A wide range of data in language acquisition states that children tend to acquire more objects (nouns) than actions (verbs) in their early lexical development (e. g. Clark, 1995Clark, , 2009Lust, 2006;Guijarro-Fuentes, Larrañaga, & Clibbens, 2008;Richards, Daller, Malvern, Meara, & Milton, 2009). To this end, we also know that 'language acquisition does not take place in a vacuum… [children] acquire a sign system which bears important relationships to both cognitive and special aspects of their life' (Hickmann, 1986, p. 9). ...
... To this end, we also know that 'language acquisition does not take place in a vacuum… [children] acquire a sign system which bears important relationships to both cognitive and special aspects of their life' (Hickmann, 1986, p. 9). Actually, several studies have been conducted accounting for children's vocabulary spurt, yet analysing this spurt in terms of word-class, frequency, occurrence, etc. (see Rowland, 2014;Clark, 1995Clark, , 2009Golinkoff et al., 2000;Leow & Lardiere, 2009). A language user associates forms with semantic features... [that is to say] children are not born with such associations' (Hogeweg, 2009, p. 4). ...
... Having presented word-classes, now the following part will be an account for the lexical categorisation of our data supported with the below calculated statistical results. It should be noted; however, our lexical analysis is based on previous studies, mainly those including (Clark, 1995(Clark, , 2009Golinkoff et al., 2000;Gökmen, 2005). 3) illustrates the categorisation of nouns' class which we divided into 15 categories. ...
This paper aimed at examining the claim that short-stories prepared for preschool children contain a theory-based system which could be reflected on early lexical development. Besides, we investigated the claim that word-class frequency and/or occurrence could be used as a predictor for a child's early lexical development based on views from behaviourism, the frequency hypothesis and ZIPF's law. The correlational approach was followed to measure the two identified variables, namely, simulated early lexical development (represented by preschool materials) as the dependent variable and word-class frequency and/or occurrence (with and without repetition/ frequency) as the independent variable. A series of short-story consisting of ten short-stories was analysed in terms of word-class into eight word-classes and then into different semantic categories. The use of Minitab (17th) version yet running both descriptive and inferential statistical tools indicated that the calculated percentage of the content words were clearly higher than those of the function words (43%, 5%, 6%, 26% and 6%) as compared to only (5%, 8% and 1%) respectively. Moreover, Pearson's product-moment correlation indicated a strong yet positive correlation between word-class frequency and/or occurrence and simulated early lexical development, r=0.965, p < .0005. Similarly, independent t-test result further indicated that word-class with repetition has statistically significantly higher early lexical development rate (378 ± 438) compared to word-class without repetition (99 ± 111), t(7) = 1.72, p = 0.130. Based on our presented results, it could be concluded that short-stories prepared for preschool children contained a theory-based system which could be reflected on early lexical development-supported by the fact that there was a clear word-class classification and systematised system for the distribution of word-class in terms of content words (over majority) and function words (minor representation) yet semantic categorisation. Also, word-class frequency and/or occurrence could be used as a predictor simulating child's early lexical development-supported with the reached strong positive correlation between the two correlated variables.
... Peccei (2006) expands the classification and outlines the alternative explanations for inappropriate uses of words as phonological avoidance, vocabulary gaps and retrieval problems, words as comments rather than labels, and playfulness and metaphor. Moreover, Clark (2009) ascribes the overextension errors of children to mostly communicative reasons stating that "they may well know that their word is not the right one, but they don't have or can't readily access the right word, so they make do with a term close by" (p. 83). ...
... This has underpinned many of the research and experiments so far, yet there is a lack of sound evidential data. Unlike Barrett's (1991) aforementioned hypothesis asserting that overextension errors occur not only in production but also in comprehension, Clark (2009) andO'Grady andCho (2001) argue that children overextending words in production rarely overextend in comprehension. All in all, as Kuczaj (2001, p. 144) states "overextension errors may reflect the denotation of words for children, and have implications for theories about how the denotation of object words may be represented in the minds of young children". ...
During the early years of language acquisition, children may use a word in a wide range of contexts, which is
called as overextension in research agenda. Barrett (1991) hypothesizes that if a word like dog is overextended not
only for referring to dogs of all sizes, but also for referring to cats, horses, or cows, then the overextension is likely
to be exhibited not only in the child's production of that word, but also in the child's comprehension of the word.
Based upon this hypothesis, the focal point of the present study is to test the overextension issue in terms of both
production and comprehension perspectives. The subjects (N=10) aged 2;2 to 4;0 have been experimented through
picture-naming and picture-pointing tasks in order to reveal whether there is a symmetry between these two
stances. The results of this experiment are inconsistent with the views foreseeing any parallelism between the
overextension in comprehension and production. Rather, it has been observed that children have a tendency to
overextend the words in production more often than in comprehension. Nor does it supply evidence for
overextensions mostly occurring in both phases at very early ages
... Conventionality: for certain meanings, speakers assume that there is a conventional form that should be used in the language community Contrast: speakers assume that any difference in form signals a difference in meaning (E. V. Clark, 2009: 133. See too E. V. Clark, 1988, 1990 Based on these principles, children can reason that if a speaker was intending to refer to the known object, she would have used the known label (Conventionality); as she did not use that label, but the novel one, she must not intend the known object (Contrast); instead, she must intend to refer to the novel object. ...
... Many studies report a connection between SES and child language development, particularly concentrating on vocabulary (for a US focussed overview see Hoff, 2006; for a UK study see Locke, Ginsborg, & Peers, 2002). Striking differences are observed between SES groups, with lower SES children lagging behind their higher SES peers (although note that this effect may be partly a result of the test design favouring middle-class children: E. V. Clark, 2009;Hoff, 2006). ...
In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker’s intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, ‘what did you put in the bag?’, the speaker says, ‘I put in a book’, then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning – a quantity implicature – involves reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state. This thesis examines children’s development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state is part of children’s pragmatic competence. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children’s development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill – implicatures – and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children’s early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker’s epistemic state is at stake. I present a series of experiments based on a sentence-to-picture-matching task, with children aged 3 to 7 years. In the first study, I identify a developmental trajectory whereby word learning by exclusion inferences emerge first, followed by ad hoc quantity and relevance, and finally scalar quantity inferences, which reflects their increasing complexity in a Gricean model. Then, I explore cognitive and environmental factors that might be associated with children’s pragmatic skills, and show that structural language knowledge – and, associated with it, socioeconomic status – is a main predictor of their implicature understanding. In the second study, I lay out some predictions for the development of manner implicatures, find similar patterns of understanding in children and adults, and highlight the particular challenges of studying manner implicatures experimentally. Finally, I focus on children’s ability to take into account the speaker’s epistemic state in pragmatic inferencing. While adults do not derive a quantity implicature appropriately when the speaker is ignorant, children tend to persist in deriving implicatures regardless of speaker ignorance, suggesting a continuing challenge of integrating contextual with linguistic information in utterance interpretation.
... Since the children studied included sequential bilinguals with varied exposure to the second language, testing both expressive and receptive vocabulary was of a particular importance to better capture the developing lexicon. The comprehension tasks make it possible to bypass possible retrieval problems due to competing linguistic processing (Clark, 2009). The production tasks make it possible to move beyond vocabulary size, as production errors may contribute to understanding the lexical access strategies employed by bilingual and monolingual children. ...
... Comprehension and production are both essential in the examination of lexical development. Comprehension is considered to be a 'purer' measure since it taps into the child's lexical knowledge without the barriers of pronunciation difficulties and lexical retrieval problems (Clark, 2009). In many instances, children have to struggle with these exact barriers in production, leading to lower test scores compared to comprehension (Goldfield, 2000). ...
While bilingual children follow the same milestones of language acquisition as monolingual children do in learning the syntactic patterns of their second language (L2), their vocabulary size in L2 often lags behind compared to monolinguals. The present study explores the comprehension and production of nouns and verbs in Hebrew, by two groups of 5- to 6-year olds with typical language development: monolingual Hebrew speakers (N = 26), and Russian-Hebrew bilinguals (N = 27). Analyses not only show quantitative gaps between comprehension and production and between nouns and verbs, with a bilingual effect in both, but also a qualitative difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in their production errors: monolinguals' errors reveal knowledge of the language rules despite temporary access difficulties, while bilinguals' errors reflect gaps in their knowledge of Hebrew (L2). The nature of Hebrew as a Semitic language allows one to explore this qualitative difference in the semantic and morphological level.
... BITD BISLI effect of SLI effect of bilingualism Phonological abilities emerge early in MOTD children and appear to develop together with lexical abilities (Clark, 2009). A task that typically measures phonological abilities is the nonword repetition task (Montgomery et al., 2010). ...
... There is a great variation in the rate of lexical development in MOTD children (Ellis & Thal, 2008 and citations therein). However, a vocabulary spurt is commonly described during the second year of life (Clark, 2009). Lexical development in BITD children depends on various factors, such as the amount, timing and context of exposure to the language(s) (Patterson & Pearson, 2004). ...
This innovative study investigated the language abilities of bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI) in their second language, French. Their language abilities were compared to the language abilities in French of typically-developing monolingual children, typically-developing bilingual children and monolingual children with SLI. The performance of these four groups of children was also compared in the domain of executive functioning (EF), an umbrella term that covers a wide range of cognitive abilities required for goal- oriented behaviors.
In the language domain, both a negative effect of SLI and a negative effect of bilingualism were observed on all measures. However, SLI and bilingualism did not affect language performance in the same way: the effect of SLI was the most visible on novel-word repetition and the effect of bilingualism was the most visible on vocabulary. Grammar differentiated less. In terms of diagnostic accuracy, novel-word repetition proved to be highly reliable for detecting SLI in both monolingual and bilingual children.
In the domain of non-verbal EF, a negative effect of SLI was found on response inhibition. As some literature predicts, a bilingual advantage was found in interference inhibition. In terms of diagnostic accuracy, response inhibition was not reliable for detecting SLI. There was no effect of SLI or bilingualism on shifting, planning or spatial working memory. No correlation between non-verbal EF and language was found. The study is of particular relevance to scholars and clinicians who are interested in the interaction between language and cognition in the context of SLI and/or bilingualism.
Cette étude innovante examine les capacités langagières des enfants bilingues avec trouble spécifique du langage oral (TSL) dans leur seconde langue, le français. Leurs performances langagières ont été comparées aux performances langagières en français d’enfants monolingues sans TSL, d’enfants monolingues avec TSL et d’enfants bilingues sans TSL. L’étude a également comparé les performances de ces quatre groupes d’enfants dans le domaine des fonctions exécutives (FE), domaine qui renvoie aux processus cognitifs impliqués dans la réalisation de tâches complexes orientées vers un but précis.
Au niveau langagier, un effet négatif du TSL et un effet négatif de bilinguisme ont été observés sur toutes les tâches proposées. Cependant, le TSL et le bilinguisme n’ont pas affecté les performances de la même manière : l'effet du TSL a été le plus fort sur la répétition de nouveaux mots alors que l'effet du bilinguisme l’a été sur le lexique. Les performances grammaticales ont moins différencié les deux effets. D’un point de vue diagnostic, la tâche de répétition de nouveaux mots s’est révélée particulièrement fiable pour détecter un TSL tant dans un contexte monolingue que bilingue. Au niveau des FE non-verbales, un effet négatif du TSL a été observé au niveau de l'inhibition de réponse. Comme le prédit la littérature, un avantage lié au bilinguisme a été observé au niveau de l'inhibition d’interférence. Aucun effet du TSL ou du bilinguisme n'a été observé sur les performances en flexibilité, en planification ou en mémoire de travail spatiale. Malgré la présence d’un effet du TSL sur l’inhibition de réponse, celle-ci n’est pas apparue comme une mesure fiable pour diagnostiquer un TSL. Enfin, aucune corrélation n’a été trouvée entre FE non-verbales et langage. Cette étude est particulièrement pertinente pour les chercheurs et cliniciens qui s’intéressent à l’interaction entre le langage et la cognition dans le contexte du TSL et/ou du bilinguisme.
In deze innovatieve studie worden de taalvaardigheden onderzocht van tweetalige kinderen met specific language impairment (SLI; in het Nederlands: een specifieke taalontwikkelingsstoornis, (S)TOS). De studie richt zich op hun tweede taal, het Frans. Hun taalvaardigheid in het Frans werd vergeleken met die van niet-taalgestoorde eentalige kinderen, niet-taalgestoorde tweetalige kinderen en taalgestoorde eentalige kinderen. De prestaties van deze vier groepen kinderen werden daarnaast vergeleken op het vlak van de executieve functies (EF). EF is een verzamelterm voor een brede set van cognitieve vermogens die noodzakelijk zijn voor doelgericht gedrag.
In het taaldomein werd, voor alle onderzochte maten, een negatief effect waargenomen van zowel taalstoornis als tweetaligheid. De aard van het effect was echter niet gelijk: het effect van de taalstoornis was het meest zichtbaar in het nazeggen van woorden die weinig frequent zijn (en die het kind dus niet kent); het effect van tweetaligheid bleek vooral in de woordenschat. Grammaticale maten differentieerden minder. Bij een onderzoek naar de diagnostische waarde van de maten bleek dat het nazeggen van laagfrequente woorden een betrouwbare maat was voor het opsporen van een taalstoornis, bij zowel eentalige als tweetalige kinderen.
Binnen het domein van de non-verbale executieve functies werd een negatief effect gevonden van SLI op response inhibition. In overeenstemming met een deel van de literatuur werd een positief effect van tweetaligheid gevonden op interference inhibition. Er was geen effect van taalstoornis of tweetaligheid op shifting, planning of ruimtelijk werkgeheugen. Er werd geen correlatie gevonden tussen de non-verbale EF en taal.
Deze studie is vooral relevant voor onderzoekers en diagnostici die belangsteling hebben voor de interactie tussen taal en cognitie bij kinderen met een taalstoornis en/of tweetalige kinderen.
... V češtině tato tendence není tolik patrná jako v angličtině, kdy jsou užívány např. pravidelné tvary plurálu u nepravidelných podstatných jmen a pravidelné tvary minulého času u nepravidelných sloves ( Clark 2003;Crystal 1986;Peccei 1999). Takto pořízená databáze ilustruje i okrajové příklady, které by mohly být opomenuty, kdyby byla využita pouze metoda audionahrávek. ...
Abstrakt: Příspěvek se zabývá osvojeností gramatických kategorií češtiny u dítěte kolem věku pěti let. Autorka nejprve představuje metodologii výzkumu, který mapoval grama‑ tický vývoj dítěte od prvních řečových projevů, a korpus dětské řeči, založený na řečových projevech jednoho česky mluvícího dítěte, který byl pořizován formou deníkových zázna‑ mů a audionahrávek. Hlavní pozornost je věnována míře osvojení gramatických kategorií jmen a sloves ve věku kolem pěti let. V řeči dítěte se stále objevuje tendence k regularizaci a hypergeneralizaci. U sloves se dítě snaží vytvářet pravidelné vidové dvojice, což ovšem ne vždy koresponduje se skutečným územ. Dítě je ovšem schopno používat i složitější gramatické konstrukce, např. kondicionál a pasiva. U jmen většina hypergeneralizací již vymizela, větší problémy činí skloňování femininin zakončených na konsonant a slov cizího původu.
... causal relation) or negative causality (i.e. the negation of a causal relation) in addition to additivity. The differences in cognitive complexity are consistent with the development studies showing that additive relations are acquired before causal and adversative relations ( Bloom et al., 1980;Clark, 2003;Spooren and Sanders, 2008). Second language learners may encounter greater difficulties than native speakers to entertain two referential representations when they encounter sentences connected by cognitively more complex causal or adversative relations. ...
Conjunctions play a crucial role in the construction of a coherent mental representation by signaling coherence relations between clauses, especially for second language users. By using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study aimed to investigate how different conjunctions (so, and, although, or a full stop) affect the interpretation of a following ambiguous pronoun for both native and non-native speakers, in sentences such as Lily disappointed Nina, so she …. ERP results showed that relative to so, and, and full stop sentences, the pronoun in although clauses elicited a larger Nref (sustained negativity) response in both native (L1) readers and second language (L2) readers, irrespective of whether the verb in the first clause biased towards a particular noun phrase (NP) referent. Moreover, larger Nrefs to pronouns were seen in L2 than L1 readers when clauses were connected by so, although or a full stop. Additionally, larger Nref responses were evoked by pronouns in NP2- than NP1-biased conditions when the clauses were connected by the conjunction so or when sentences contained no overt conjunctions (full stop). These findings indicate that different conjunctions exert different modulating effects on resolving referential uncertainty/ambiguity. Relative to native speakers, non-native speakers are more likely to encounter referential uncertainty when the sentences are conjoined by conjunctions with more complex semantics.
... The ability to appropriately use a word develops slowly over time, progressing from comprehension of a word, to use of a word in a single context, to eventually using the word across a range of contexts (Clark, 2010). Children often have surprisingly restricted contexts of use for words that they appear to ''know''. ...
The importance of early vocabulary development to later reading comprehension has been well-established. However, there have been a number of criticisms that the assessments typically used to measure oral vocabulary knowledge do not adequately capture the complexity of this construct. This conceptual review works towards a more robust theoretical framework for vocabulary knowledge, focusing especially on the understudied dimension of vocabulary depth, which can be used to evaluate and design measures for early childhood learners. This framework is then used to review measures commonly used for preschool to 1st grade learners in the context of vocabulary interventions and observational studies. Recommendations are made for the use of existing measures and the design of future measures.
... Gifted individuals acquire language competence earlier than their peers and the majority of gifted individuals have many characteristics based on their higher verbal competencies. These characteristics involve reading before time (before their education begins at school or just after starting school), extensive vocabulary, advanced level of comprehension skills, low amount of performing tasks for beginning the reading process or no need for doing any preparation task for reading, extensive interest in language skills and reading a wide range of subjects in an interesting and curious way (Clark, 2009). In general, reading skills and high-level thinking abilities are more emphasized in teaching language skills (Foster, 2017;Osokina, 2016). ...
This study aims to carry out a content analysis of the studies on language learning of gifted individuals and determine the trends in this field. Articles on language learning of gifted individuals published in the Scopus database were examined based on certain criteria including type of publication, year of publication, language, research discipline, countries of research, institutions of authors, key words, and resources. Data were analyzed with the content analysis method. Results showed that the number of studies on language learning of gifted individuals has increased throughout the years. Recommendations for further research and practices are provided.
... Both internal and external factors are considered essential to child early language development (Clark, 2003;Sun, Steinkrauss, Wieling, & de Bot, 2016). As noted above, internal factors are intrinsic to the learner, including biological characteristics (age and gender) and cognitive abilities (e.g., working memory and intelligence). ...
Both internal factors (e.g., nonverbal intelligence) and external factors (e.g., input quantity) are claimed to affect the rate of children's vocabulary development. However, it remains an open question whether these variables work similarly on bilingual children's dual language learning. The current paper examined this issue on 805 Singapore children (4 years, 1 month to 5 years, 8 months) who are learning English (societal language) and an ethnic language (Mandarin/Malay/Tamil). Singapore is a bilingual society; however, there is an inclination for English use at home in recent years, resulting in a discrepancy of input between English and ethnic languages in many families. In this study, internal and external factors were examined comprehensively with standardized tests and a parental questionnaire. Regression analysis was used to address the questions. There were statistically significant differences in language input quantity, quality, and output between English and ethnic language learning environments. Singapore children are learning English in an input-rich setting while learning their ethnic language in a comparatively input-poor setting. Multiple regressions revealed that while both sets of factors explained lexical knowledge in each language, the relative contribution is different for English and ethnic languages: internal factors explained more variance in English language vocabulary, whereas external factors were more important in explaining ethnic language knowledge. We attribute this difference to a threshold effect of external factors based on the critical mass hypothesis and call for special attention to learning context (input-rich vs. input-poor settings) for specific bilingual language studies.
... To what extent does Ellie pick up shrugging from the adults around her? Ellie's mother is the adult that she interacts with most often, hence we document the use of all of her shrugs in the data, whether she is addressing Ellie or not. As part of our constructivist approach (Tomasello, 2003), we document the mother's productions since the input plays a crucial role in the way children express themselves (Clark, 2003;Nelson, 1998). Studying the mother's use of shrugs could give some insight on what gestures Ellie might pick up as a participant or as an overhearer (Goffman, 1981) of adult conversations. ...
This article analyses the development of a composite communicative posture, the shrug (which can combine palm-up flips, lifted shoulders and a head tilt), in a video corpus of spontaneous interactions between a typically developing British girl, Ellie, and her mother, filmed at home one hour each month from Ellie’s tenth month to her fourth birthday. The systematic coding of every shrug yields a total of 124 tokens (Ellie: 98; her mother: 26), providing results in terms of forms, functions and input. Ellie’s first shrug components emerge from non-linguistic actions and she acquires them one at a time starting with the hands: these features recall the development of complex signs among deaf children of the same age (Reilly & Anderson, 2002 for ASL). The functions of Ellie’s shrugs gradually diversify from the expression of absence at 1;04 to other epistemic and non-epistemic meanings (affective and dynamic). Adult intervention plays a crucial role as adults recurrently equate Ellie’s physical movements with speech, thereby contributing to the emergence of their communicative functions as gestural emblems (Ekman & Friesen, 1969).
... Bühler [7] argued that demonstratives play a major role in the evolution of grammar. Furthermore, Clark and Eve [10] observed that demonstratives are among the first words infants acquire, and Iverson [27] found that gestures can predict the acquisition of language. Diessel [13] reported findings indicating that demonstratives are more related to gestures than other words. ...
Mobile systems provide many means to relay information to a distant partner, but remote communication is still limited compared to face-to-face interaction. Deictic communication and pointing, in particular, are challenging when two parties communicate across distances. In this paper, we investigate how people envision remote pointing would work when using mobile devices. We report on an elicitation study where we asked participants to perform a series of remote pointing tasks. Our results provide initial insights into user behaviors and specific issues in this context. We discovered that most people follow one of two basic patterns, that their individual pointing behavior is very consistent and that the shape and location of the target object have little influence on the pointing gesture used. From our results, we derived a set of design guidelines for future user interfaces for remote pointing. Our contributions can benefit designers and researchers of such interfaces.
... The acquisition of the third person -s ending is, however, slow and problematic despite its conceptual simplicity, and slips when the student fails to produce the form may occur even beyond the intermediate level. Interestingly, its acquisition has been shown to be slow even for children acquiring English as L1 when the plural -(e)s ending and the genitive 's tend to be acquired first (Clark, 2009;Ingram, 1989). This is probably caused by the relative infrequency of the ending (compared to the higher frequency of the plural marker, and the frequency with which we refer to personal possessions when communicating with little children, e.g. ...
As an experienced teacher of advanced learners of English I am deeply aware of recurrent problems which these learners experience as regards grammatical accuracy. In this paper, I focus on researching inaccuracies in the use of verbal categories. I draw the data from a spoken learner corpus LINDSEI_CZ and analyze the performance of 50 advanced (C1–C2) learners of English whose mother tongue is Czech. The main method used is Computer-aided Error Analysis within the larger framework of Learner Corpus Research. The results reveal that the key area of difficulty is the use of tenses and tense agreements, and especially the use of the present perfect. Other error-prone aspects are also described. The study also identifies a number of triggers which may lie at the root of the problems. The identification of these triggers reveals deficiencies in the teaching of grammar, mainly too much focus on decontextualized practice, use of potentially confusing rules, and the lack of attempt to deal with broader notions such as continuity and perfectiveness. Whilst the study is useful for the teachers of advanced learners, its pedagogical implications stretch to lower levels of proficiency as well.
... Successful acquisition of language typically happens by 4, is guaranteed for children up to the age of six. Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them (Clark, 2003).Words are usually produced isolation. This one word stage can last from six months to a year. ...
This study aims at describing of acquisition planning and language acquisition by four-year old children. The objectives of this study were to find out the characteristics of Indonesian language acquisition of four-year old children who study at kindergarten and who do not ones and acquisition planning in the kindergarten. To achieve the objectives, this study was conducted by applying qualitative research. It is a kind of multi-case study. The subjects of this study were the children who study in the kindergarten and who do not ones. And the objects of this research were the utterances which contained characteristics of language acquisition uttered by the children and the implementation of acquisition planning in a kindergarten. The data were collected by using content analysis technique. The data were analyzed based on the theory of characteristics of language acquisition and the interview was conducted to get the answer of how the kindergarten school implements the acquisition planning. Based on the results of this study, the children’s utterances that study in kindergarten is better than children who don’t study, in their language development and have more vocabulary and can use them more appropriately compared to the chidren who only stayed at home as the effect of the acquisition planning applied in the kindergarten.
... The in tandem co-construction by speaker and hearer of some sound-interpretation pairing is grounded in the already robustly established pattern of situated interactional behaviour between carer and child. The infant's non-language-based verbalising behaviour is interpreted by the carer as contributing to some verbal frame which she herself may have as the basis for engaging with the child in order to create the bonding achievable – even without any signalled content being conveyed (e.g. the peekaboo games which pre-linguistic children so enjoy;Clark and Casillas, 2016). Fragments such as one word utterances initiating the child's emerging language capability are also interpreted against the rich contextualisation of the carer, either in interpreting the child's minimal utterance, or in providing a frame relative to which the utterance provides an entirely successful completion (as in (5,6)), building on the pleasure in interaction which the infant and carer already share. ...
We explore prerequisites necessary for embedding Dynamic Syntax within an account of language evolution. We show how the dynamics of processing as modelled in Dynamic Syntax display remarkable parallelism with Clark's (2016) Pre-dictive Processing Model and that the interactive stance of a combined DS/PPM model of language/cognition reflects the Multi-Level Selection Hypothesis – with groups as units for evolutionary purposes, not just individuals. With these assumptions , language emerges without necessary invocation of rich innate encapsulated structures or mind-reading capacities, par-alleling first language acquisition.
... As predicted, lexical comprehension was more advanced than production for participants from each of the languages studied ( Table 7). Findings showing the primacy of comprehension over production ( Benedict, 1979;Bornstein & Hendricks, 2012;Clark, 2012;Goldfield, 2000;Goldin-Meadow, Seligman, & Gelman, 1976;Harris et al., 1995;Reznick & Goldfield, 1992) are robust, and our data add to this body of research. Production is claimed to be more demanding in terms of long-term memory and lexical access. ...
This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0–6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.
... Although monolinguals are reported to acquire the basics of the target language in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics by the age of 3 or 4 (Berman & Slobin, 1994;Clark, 2003;Verhoeven & Strömqvist, 2001;Weissenborn & Höhle, 2000), the use of ellipsis cannot be explained in terms of syntax. Moreover, the pragmatic aspects of ellipsis may be achieved after the age of 3 or 4 and it is not clear from the literature when children are able to handle ellipsis at an adult level. ...
The research literature comparing the language acquisition trajectory of monolingual and bilingual speakers has been inconclusive. Some studies have emphasised similarities between mono-and bilinguals. Others have argued for qualitative differences due to bilingual transfer from their participants' other language. Some studies have even claimed that bilinguals' weaker language may not develop fully despite initial similarities. This study revisits these fundamental questions of bilingualism by testing the use of ellipsis in monolingual and bilingual Japanese speakers. Experimental data were gathered by eliciting oral narratives based on a wordless picture book called 'Frog, Where are You?' from five groups of participants: Japanese monolingual and Japanese-English bilingual children aged 4–5 and 8–9-years-old, and Japanese monolingual adults who formed a control group. The results of this study suggest that the fundamental difference, at least in term of ellipsis usage, between mono-and bilinguals is quantitative rather than qualitative, and that this difference was found at an early stage of acquisition rather than only in the older age group.
... Both of these findings make the important point that only the information that comes into contact with the learning system can be used for cross-situational word learning, and this information is directly influenced by the attention and memory constraints of the learner. These results also add to a large literature showing the importance of social information for word learning (Bloom, 2002;Clark, 2009) and to recent work exploring the interaction between statistical learning mechanisms and other types of information (Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009;Koehne & Crocker, 2014;Yu & Ballard, 2007). Our findings suggest that referential cues affect statistical learning by modulating the amount of information that learners store in the underlying representations that support learning over time. ...
... Over the toddler and preschool years, pragmatic abilities continue to burgeon and children attain more advanced conversational skills, becoming socially competent talkers (O'Neill, 2007). Four-year-olds are able to tailor their own language and take into account a listener's age, gender and status (Clark, 2003). In particular, preschoolers produce less polite and more direct requests when they interact with higher-status speakers (e.g. ...
The study was designed to investigate pragmatic development and the ability to make comments/questions on social and non-social topics in Italian-speaking children aged 18–47 months. Parents of 190 children completed an adaptation of the Language Use Inventory into Italian. Overall, the children’s performance on the subscales of the LUI-Italian investigating verbal communication increased, while the score on gestural subscales, with both an imperative and a declarative function, decreased with age. Specific analyses of comments and questions about things, self and other people showed specific age-related differences. No main gender effect was found, but an interaction of gender × age group is discussed. The article concludes with limitations and guidelines for future research.
... Nor÷dami lygiavertiškai dalyvauti pokalbyje mes visi privalome gerai suvokti pokalbio dalyvių opoziciją, funkcijas ir tarpusavio santykį. Netgi paprasčiausiai pasakodami, juokaudami, prašydami, liepdami turime matyti pokalbio objektą pašnekovo akimis (Clark 2003). Šios žinios ir geb÷jimai įgyjami jau ankstyvoje vaikyst÷je, tačiau vaikams jų įsisavinimas visuomet sukelia tam tikrų sunkumų (Pan, Snow 1999). ...
In this article we are concerned with the acquisition of Lithuanian demonstrative pronouns; special attention is paid to their morphological form and meaning, the emergence of their grammatical categories, such as case, gender and number. Analysis is based on a longitudinal data of one Lithuanian girl. Her speech was recorded in natural situations. Recordings were started in 2000, the girl was recorded twice or three times a week for about 15–20 minutes. The total number of recordings is 42 hours. The electronic data is supplemented with diary recordings documented from the age of 1;0.
According to the hypothesis, that children start to use those demonstrative pronouns referring to objects closer to the speaker, our data confirms that the pronoun šitas ‘this’ emerges earlier in the speech of the child, and the pronoun anas ‘that’ emerges later. The pronoun šitas ‘this’ is used most frequently, the pronoun tas ‘that’ occurs rarely and the pronoun anas ‘that’ is the most rare. Demonstrative pronouns as substitution of the nouns perform typical semantic and syntactic functions of nouns’ cases. The nominative is the most frequent case and it functions as a subject. The accusative and the genitive function as an object, and the genitive in a prepositional phrase (with ant ‘on’) is an adverbial of place. The dative and the instrumental function as a benefactive and an instrument. When the pronouns substitute the adjectives they perform typical attributive syntactic function.
... Language developmentalists have examined children's developing understanding of spatial language (see, e.g., Clark, 2016). Before applying research in language development to interviewing, however, it is important to keep in mind the differences between the goals of language developmentalists and practitioners. ...
Children’s descriptions of clothing placement and touching with respect to clothing are central to assessing child sexual abuse allegations. This study examined children’s ability to answer the types of questions attorneys and interviewers typically ask about clothing, using the most common spatial terms (on/off, outside/inside, over/under). Ninety-seven 3- to 6-year-olds were asked yes/no (e.g. “Is the shirt on?”), forced-choice (e.g., “Is the shirt on or off?”), open-choice (e.g., “Is the shirt on or off or something else?”), or where questions (e.g., “Where is the shirt?”) about clothing using a human figurine, clothing, and stickers. Across question types, children generally did well with simple clothing or sticker placement (e.g. pants completely on), except for yes/no questions about “over,” suggesting children had an underinclusive understanding of the word. When clothing or sticker placement was intermediate (e.g., pants around ankles, and therefore neither completely on nor off), children performed poorly except when asked where questions. A similar task using only stickers and boxes, analogous to forensic interviewers’ assessments of children’s understanding, was only weakly predictive of children’s ability to describe clothing. The results suggest that common methods of questioning young children about clothing may lead to substantial misinterpretation.
... This is so because of what children want to say being somehow different from what they mean, as has been proved true in many longtitdunal studies (see e.g. Clark, 2009;Brown, 1973, Brown 1994, among many others). The difference between what the child wants to say and what he/she means is referred to as "disjunction" between what is intended and what is said (see also Shormani, forthcoming). ...
Linguists, language teachers and educators are most of the time confronted with questions as to what knowledge of language is, how it develops in children, how they acquire it, etc. If the assumption that children are innately, genetically and biologically endowed with a language faculty is correct, then, again several other questions are imposed. The latter include questions such as what this language faculty is, what it contains that allows children to acquire any language, in addition to their L1, how this “containment” looks like, and more importantly, how it works. This paper, thus, addresses these issues from biological and physical perspectives, hence, correlating both aspects with language acquisition process. It proposes a novel theory of human language faculty working mechanism, arguing that there is a ‘magnetic mechanism’ underlying the biological architecture that makes it able to “attract” all and only human languages. This mechanism enables both children and adults to acquire any language(s), controlled by distance (i.e. nearness/farness) of such language(s) from the language faculty, and velocity of attraction. The theory has pedagogical implications for language acquisition of L1, L2, L3… Ln, and in both cases, viz. child as well as adult language acquisition.
... If this is true, how is it that such a vital role could be ignored or even underestimated? How is it that the child resets some properties he/she has been so persistent and resistant to (Carroll, 1996;Mitchell and Myles, 1998;Long, 2003;Clark, 2009)? In fact, children cannot decide which hypothesis created by them is correct unless getting feedback from whosoever around, telling them whether or not a mistake has been committed, or even they discover such a mistake alone the more they get older, or when being able to internalize their L1 linguistic system. ...
... Since a verbal complement refers to subordinate construction completing a verb in a more complex sentence, it is not easy to acquire complement knowledge, even for the native speakers. According to Clark (2003), children usually lack the complementizer such as 'that' in their speech. For instance, 'And I think <pause> we need dishes' ( Clark, 2003: 255). ...
... The acquisition of inflectional morphology has received a lot of attention in the last few decades (Bybee, 1995;Clahsen, 1999;Clark, 2003;Clahsen, 2006;Dabrowska, 2008;among others). Specifically, the acquisition of inflectional morphemes has been dominated by two main controversies; namely, dual-route and single-route acquisition models of inflection (see section 2.1). ...
This research paper aims to test the extent to which 100 Kuwaiti EFL learners are aware of the correct use of inflectional morphemes in English. It also explores the main causes of the errors that Kuwaiti EFL learners may make. Additionally, it checks whether the English proficiency level of the participants plays a role in their answers on the test. To this end, a multiple-choice test was used to measure the participants’ ability to use the correct inflectional morphemesin English. Following data analysis, the results reveal that Kuwaiti EFL learners are aware of the correct use of the inflectional morphemes in English to a certain degree (total mean=65.5%). Additionally, the t-test shows that the participants’ English proficiency level plays a central role in their comprehension of these morphemes. In particular, there is a statistically significant difference between the answers of the advanced learners (ALs) (73.5%) and intermediate learners (ILs) (57.5%). The number of correct answers provided by ALs is higher than that provided by ILs. Regarding the types of errors made by the participants, it has been argued that the most noticeable ones are due to first language (L1) negative transfer and the irregularity of some types of inflectional morphemes in English. Finally, the study concludes with some pedagogical implications and recommendations for further research.
This inquiry examines how an index tracks the internalization of habits, from action templates to intersubjective and intrasubjective regulators (West 2013, 2014). Habit draws upon spatial primitives (Mandler 2010) and is expressed as sensory coordinations (tracking movement, force, orientation). Indexical action templates advance mechanical and self-regulative purposes: Source, path, and goal transition to social and internal regulators. Inferences drawn from event sequences culminate in plausible directives – recommending courses of action (Peirce MS 637: c1909), useful in dialogue alterations. Such alterations require habit-change, fitting novel participants into different event slots – driven by good instinctual guesses or “twigging ideas” (Peirce MS 930: c1913).
This thesis investigates complex demonstratives and their functions in spoken Norwegian, as well as the development of demonstratives through cyclic reinforcement from a usage-based approach. The study is based on Norwegian data, but it also includes cross-linguistic considerations.
In Norwegian, demonstratives such as den ‘that’, denne ‘this’, sånn ‘such’, and han/hun ‘he/she’ can be reinforced by intensifier words. There are two main types of intensifiers in Norwegian: short and stressed her/der ‘here/there’, which reinforce exophoric deixis, and (often) extended and non-distance-marked herre/derre ‘here/there’, which reinforce a signal of non-salient information, which is a more grammaticalized use. Corpus analyses show that complex demonstratives attract compound nouns and hapaxes to a very high degree, which suggests that they often mark private referents and are used recognitionally. The recognitional function may have developed due to inference of distance in space as non-accessibility of the referent. Complex demonstratives are particularly frequent, and have become grammaticalized further, in North Norwegian dialects.
Demonstratives can become renewed in a cyclic reinforcement process which is similar to the negative cycle. Rather than assuming reduction of the old demonstrative as a triggering factor for reinforcement, this study argues that reinforcement is motivated by spontaneous speaker strategies and reanalysis of frequently collocating items. Thus, renewal is a result of reinforcement rather than a cause. When a new, complex demonstrative is chunked and interpreted as one unit, it is in paradigmatic competition with old demonstratives. The competition may result in creation of a new paradigmatic slot (e.g. proximal deixis) or ousting of one of the forms. Furthermore, new demonstratives which are unambiguous markers of exophoric deixis may catalyze grammaticalization, as more polysemous demonstratives become more associated with grammaticalized functions.
What is it about children's interactions that is distinctive from adults' interactions? This article relies on a conversation analytically informed quantitative analysis of video recordings of child-child interaction to address this question. We examined 2000 questions and their responses in spontaneous conversation among three-party groups of same age children between 4-8 years of age to investigate the frequency and distributional patterns related to norms governing question-response sequences. We show that school-age children exhibit similar frequency distributions to adults but respond to questions less often and are slower than adults, with minimal age-related differences. Still more important, we argue, is that children's responses show a lack of reflexive awareness of the underlying norms. We propose that it is children's turn designs that lead child interaction to feel distinctive because children at these ages are not differentiating their norm-following from norm-departing responses.
The use of Indonesian language by children who speak the Balinese language, especially for children who live in rural areas is quite difficult. This is because their Balinese language is much different from Indonesian language. If they speak Indonesian language, they have to fall back to the language first. That is, language transfer process will take place from Balinese language to Indonesian language. This research aims to describe two phenomena of the language transfer process, namely avoidance and overuse (excessive use). Qualitative data were obtained from one Balinese child, namely Gede. Gede’s daily conversations were recorded to be analyzed. The researcher also used field notes. The results show that there is indeed avoidance and overuse in the use of Indonesian language by Gede. The teachers must be aware of the student's avoidance and overuse of Indonesian language, then the teacher can choose a contextual teaching method that best fits their students’ need in order to enable them to cope with the avoidance and overuse in learning the second language. In conclusion, the Balinese child’s avoidance and overuse, displayed in his use of Indonesian Language, is a concequence of his prior knowledge of his first language (L1) as well as his cultural awareness. Teachers should facilitate their students’ second language (L2) learning by being aware of their L1 prior knowledge and culture.
The current study describes the development and validation of a novel scale (BILEX) designed to assess young bilingual children’s receptive vocabulary in both languages, their conceptual vocabulary, and translational equivalents. BILEX was developed to facilitate the assessment of vocabulary size for both of the children’s languages within one session without any transfer from one language to the other. One-hundred-and-eighty-two 3-year-old children participated in the studies of reliability and validity. Psychometric properties have very good consistency and reliability, along with good concurrent, construct, and criteria validity.
Children acquire language in conversation. This is where they are exposed to the community language by more expert speakers. This exposure is effectively governed by adult reliance on pragmatic principles in conversation: Cooperation, Conventionality, and Contrast. All three play a central role in speakers’ use of language for communication in conversation. Exposure to language alone, however, is not enough for learning. Children need to practice what they hear, and take account of feedback on their usage. Research shows that adults offer feedback with considerable frequency when young children make errors, whether in pronunciation (phonology), in word-from (morphology), in word choice (lexicon), or in constructions (syntax). Adults also offer children new words for objects, actions, and relations. And, along with new labels for such categories, they also provide supplementary information about the referents of new words—information about parts, properties, characteristic sounds, motion, and function, as well as about related neighboring objects, actions, and relations. All this helps children build up and organize semantic domains as they learn more words and more language.
There is now considerable evidence that social interaction plays a critical role in language acquisition: Typically developing infants’ learning of new language material is excellent when language is experienced during social interaction with a live person, but virtually nonexistent when that same information is presented via a non-interactive machine; moreover, studies of children with autism implicate dual impairments in social and linguistic processing. These data have led to the theoretical hypothesis that social interaction “gates” language learning (Kuhl, 2007; 2011). However, the underlying brain mechanisms by which the social gating hypothesis might work are not well understood. This chapter reviews the brain and behavioral data on the effects of social interaction on language acquisition in children, and relates these findings to work on the acquisition of communicative repertoires in non-human animals. We then review candidate brain systems that could explain the existing results. Finally, the chapter discusses new neuroscience approaches to the question, including studies that shed light on how the infant brain responds to speech, which may provide breakthrough data regarding social factors influencing language acquisition.
Previous research has suggested that distributional learning mechanisms may contribute to the acquisition of semantic knowledge. However, distributional learning mechanisms, statistical learning, and contemporary “deep learning” approaches have been criticized for being incapable of learning the kind of abstract and structured knowledge that many think is required for acquisition of semantic knowledge. In this paper, we show that recurrent neural networks, trained on noisy naturalistic speech to children, do in fact learn what appears to be abstract and structured knowledge. We trained two types of recurrent neural networks (Simple Recurrent Network, and Long Short-Term Memory) to predict word sequences in a 5-million-word corpus of speech directed to children ages 0–3 years old, and assessed what semantic knowledge they acquired. We found that learned internal representations are encoding various abstract grammatical and semantic features that are useful for predicting word sequences. Assessing the organization of semantic knowledge in terms of the similarity structure, we found evidence of emergent categorical and hierarchical structure in both models. We found that the Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) and SRN are both learning very similar kinds of representations, but the LSTM achieved higher levels of performance on a quantitative evaluation. We also trained a non-recurrent neural network, Skip-gram, on the same input to compare our results to the state-of-the-art in machine learning. We found that Skip-gram achieves relatively similar performance to the LSTM, but is representing words more in terms of thematic compared to taxonomic relations, and we provide reasons why this might be the case. Our findings show that a learning system that derives abstract, distributed representations for the purpose of predicting sequential dependencies in naturalistic language may provide insight into emergence of many properties of the developing semantic system.
This paper is the Editorial to the Special Issue: ‘Testing Vocabulary in Bilingual Children across Languages’ of Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics.
The present study deals with the problem of the acquisition of language in children in the light of rationalist philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. The main objective of the paper is to present the way Gerauld de Cordemoy’s views on the nature of language, including its socio-linguistic aspects, and on the process of speech acquisition in children are reflected in contemporary writings on how people communicate with each other. Reflections on 17th-century rationalist philosophy of mind and the latest research conducted within the field of cognitive abilities of human beings indicate that between those two spheres many similarities could be discerned in terms of particular stages of the development of speech and its physical aspects.
This cross-linguistic study investigated whether the native language has any influence on lexical composition among Italian (N = 125) and Finnish (N = 116) very preterm (born at <32 gestational weeks) children at 24 months (controls: 125 Italian and 146 Finnish full-term children). The investigation also covered the effect of maternal education (ME) on lexical composition. The Italian/Finnish MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory was used for gathering the data. Although the lexicons of the preterm children were smaller than those of the controls, the native language had no major effect on their lexical composition. The ME had a significant effect on preterm children’s lexical composition, especially in the Finnish children. The findings indicate that lexical composition is not strongly affected by preterm birth. They also imply that lexical composition is a robust phenomenon that is connected to lexicon size and is not language-specific when analysed in broad terms, although some language-specific features were also detected.
This chapter looks at some of the questions raised by the fact that people know more than one language. It presents the approach that look at areas where some relationship can be found between linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research. A relationship between linguistics and SLA research started to emerge with the influential distinction made by Weinreich (1953) between compound and coordinate bilinguals. The European Science Foundation (ESF) project is thus a practical demonstration of the interlanguage hypothesis since it shows a common interlanguage independent of both L1 and L2. The project's aim was indeed to see “whether a learner variety is based on recognisable organisational principles, how these principles interact, and whether they also apply to fully-fledged languages”. The Universal Grammar (UG) model of language acquisition claims that the child's mind possesses universal principles that always apply to language and variable parameters that have different settings in different languages.
Die Sprachpsychologie oder Psycholinguistik ist noch ein relativ junges Forschungsfeld der Allgemeinen Psychologie, das gegenwärtig einen zunehmenden Raum in den kognitiven Neurowissenschaften einnimmt, und dem jetzt ein eigenes Kapitel gewidmet ist. Dabei werden hier zunächst insbesondere die Grundfragen des Sprachverstehens und der Sprachproduktion besprochen. Die betrachteten Prozesse stehen jedoch einerseits in enger Verbindung mit den Inhalten des vorangehenden Kapitels Gedächtnis. Sie sind andererseits aber auch eng mit den kognitiven und neurophysiologischen Prozessen von Denken und Problemlösen verbunden, die im nächsten Kapitel besprochen werden.
Useful guidelines on writing well have been available for more than fifty years (e.g. Fowler, 1926). Yet many legal documents are a lexical steeplechase, in which intrepid readers surmount the hurdles of archaic terms only to stumble at the lengthy waterjumps of qualifying clauses packed end to end against each other. Such language inevitably restricts people’s access to information. Moreover this style of language has been copied by many organisations dealing with the general public. The following example, from form SA101 issued by the Department of National Savings, is currently available in British post offices (January 1979). Paragraph to of the form explains what happens to those who join the Save as you Earn Scheme but die before making the full sixty payments:
If repayment is made on or after the first anniversary of the starting date there shall be payable —
(a) the total amount of the revalued contributions each contribution being revalued to reflect the difference between the Index figure applicable to the month beginning with the date following the due date of that contribution or, in the case of the first contribution, between the Index figure applicable to the month in which the starting date falls and the Index figure applicable to the month of repayment; or …
Can many readers understand this without a struggle? Does the difficulty of such language restrict the number of people willing to join the scheme?
Kapitel 2 beschreibt zunächst die allgemeine Sprachentwicklung im Überblick und richtet dann den Blick Richtung Wortschatz. Die physiologische Wortschatzentwicklung wird ausgehend von vorsprachlichen Vorläuferfertigkeiten bis ins Schulalter hinein ausführlich beschrieben und im Kontext der allgemeinen (Sprach-)Entwicklung dargestellt. Dabei werden zwei Bereiche unterschieden: der quantitative Wortschatz, der beschreibt, wie viele Wörter ein Kind kennt und verwendet, und der qualitative Wortschatz, der die semantische und die phonologische Qualität der Abspeicherungen (Repräsentationen) betrifft und im direkten Zusammenhang mit Wortabruffähigkeiten (Wortfindung/Wortfindungsstörungen) steht.
Darüber hinaus wird die Rolle der „ans Kind gerichteten Sprache“ erläutert.
The aim of this study is to investigate the acquisition of additive connectives by Turkish children between the ages of 2;0 and 6;0. After children start to combine words together, they make some semantic relations between them; and coordination is one of them. In this study, acquisition of additive connectives is under investigation in terms of their emergence, frequency, variety of types, and divergent uses of them. In the study data taken from CHILDES for 2;0 to 4;8 old children; and data collected by the researchers from children at the age between 4;6 and 6;0 have been used. The study results show that dA, ve, ile and bir de are the first additive connectives used by Turkish children. Also, dA, sonra, ve and bir de are the most frequently used additives respectively while bile and –arak affixes are used only one time. The variety of the connectives firstly shows an increase, then a stabilization; at the end a decrease. Apart from the additive connectives listed in the literature, the children also use some other tools such as ondan sonar(and then) and başka (other) to coordinate linguistic units.
Keywords: Acquisition, Coordination, L1 Turkish, Additive Connectives
The debate about which language is best suited to take on the role of the first foreign language and language of education in Morocco is in full force these days. The policy of Arabization, which many blame for the current education crisis in Morocco, has failed to replace French as the linguistic medium of science and technology in tertiary education and as a result has produced high school students who are unable to function in any foreign language upon graduation. The 1999 National Charter of Education and the 2009 Emergency Program have been attempts to come to the rescue through the proposals of several reforms to the system of education as a whole, including the introduction of another foreign language – for the teaching of science and technology – on an already saturated linguistic scene. The question is which foreign language is it going to be: French, which represents continuity, or English, which provides access to international communication and economic development? All indications point to a language shift towards English. What remains to be seen are the steps the government will take to guarantee the success of this new venture, especially after the failures of recent policies meant to salvage the Moroccan educational system from total ruin.
This article outlines a range of theoretical, empirical, and practical desiderata for the design of (preschool) language assessments that follow from recent insights into language development from a cognitive-linguistic and usage-based perspective. To assess children’s productive communicative abilities rather than their ability to judge the acceptability of complex sentences in isolation is a new perspective in language testing that requires theoretical motivation as well as operationalizable criteria for judging the appropriateness of children’s language productions, and for characterizing the properties of their language command. After a brief review of the basic rationale of current strands of preschool assessment in Germany (Section 2), the fundamental usage-based assumptions regarding children’s developing linguistic competence and their implications for the design of preschool language diagnostics are characterized (Section 3). In order to assess children’s language production, in particular its flexibility and productivity in context, a test environment needs to be created in which children are allowed to use a certain range of language in meaningful contexts. Section 4 thus zooms in on the central question of scaffolding. Section 5 presents corresponding corpus evidence for adult strategies of prompting children to elaborate their answers and for typical child responses. Sections 6 and 7 discuss the corpus-based findings with respect to their implications for the design of ( preschool) language assessment and point to further challenges.
Because linguistic communication is inherently noisy and uncertain, adult language comprehenders integrate bottom-up cues from speech perception with top-down expectations about what speakers are likely to say. Further, in line with the predictions of ideal-observer models, past results have shown that adult comprehenders flexibly adapt how much they rely on these two kinds of cues in proportion to their changing reliability. Do children also show evidence of flexible, expectation-based language comprehension? We presented preschoolers with ambiguous utterances that could be interpreted in two different ways, depending on whether the children privileged perceptual input or top-down expectations. Across three experiments, we manipulated the reliability of both their perceptual input and their expectations about the speaker’s intended meaning. As predicted by noisy-channel models of speech processing, results showed that 4- and 5-year-old—but perhaps not younger—children flexibly adjusted their interpretations as cues changed in reliability.
This chapter examines the role of culture in two separate domains of experience: language and emotion. It considers how culture interacts with development to produce culturally specific and culture-general trajectories of language development and emotion regulation in children and adults. The focus in language development is on vocabulary, including how the sounds of language are intertwined with the words and how the different types of words that are learned across cultures relate to larger patterns of perceiving and conceptualizing our worlds. Beyond the finding of differences across cultures, cultural variations in development allow us to consider our constructs more carefully. In so doing, we are challenged to think more carefully about linguistic categories such as nouns and verbs and to think, also, about how these are constructed across languages. When we consider constructs such as emotional expressivity and regulation, it is important also to think about what we consider to be "happy" and "sad" and how even "neutral" emotions may have different cultural interpretations. Finally, this chapter also considers the physiological aspects of emotion and how they relate or do not relate to observations of expressed emotion across different cultural contexts. Consideration of multiple aspects of development and culture, while complex and challenging, helps us to gain a better understanding of both culture and development.
This paper presents and analyzes lexical and syntactic evidence from heritage Russian as spoken by bilinguals dominant in American English. The data come from the Russian Learner Corpus, a new resource of spoken and written materials produced by heritage re-learners and L2 learners of Russian. The paper focuses on lexical phrase violations, which we divide further into transfer-based structures and novel creations, showing that the latter are used by heritage speakers, but generally not freely available to L2 learners. In constructing innovative expressions, heritage speakers follow general principles of compositionality. As a result, novel constructions are more semantically transparent than their correlates in the baseline or dominant language. We argue that such semantically transparent, compositional patterns are based on structures that are universally available across languages. However, L2 speakers resort to these universal strategies for creating novel phrases much less often than heritage speakers. In their linguistic creativity, heritage speakers’ utterances parallel those of L1 child learners rather than L2 speakers.
Learning Strategies, Language Forms, and Illocutionary Functions in Arabic Speaking Skills The objectives of this study were to reveal the kinds and application of language learning strategies in developing Arabic speaking skills, the language forms produced as represented by the complexity of sentences and the oral fluency, and the illocutionary functions in the Arabic speech. The data were analyzed using the theories on learning strategies, psycholinguistics, and speech act. The findings obtained were as follows. The kinds of language learning strategies used included the memory, cognitive compensation, metacognitive, affective, and social strategies, as well as two other strategies. The types of sentences produced were simple sentences, sentences without clauses, compound sentences, and compound complex sentences. The Arabic speech was less fluent moving to fluent, with a number of speech impediments, that is, pauses, repetitions, correction, non functional words, slips of the tongue, and stutter. Three illocutionary functions were found in the Arabic speech, namely, representative, directive and expressive functions.
How do adults offer new words from different parts of speech? This study examined the offers in book-reading interactions for 48 dyads (parents and children aged 2- to 5-years-old). The parents relied on fixed syntactic frames, final position, and emphatic stress to highlight unfamiliar words. As they talked to their children about the referent objects, events, or scenes, they also linked new words to other terms in the pertinent semantic domain, thereby presenting further information about possible meanings. Children attended to new words, often repeating them in the next turn, and, as they got older, they too related new words to familiar terms as they talked about their referents with their parents. These data add further evidence that interaction in conversation supports the process of language acquisition.
When offered unfamiliar words, do children attend to them? Examination
of 701 offers of new words drawn from the longitudinal records of five
children provides extensive evidence of attention to the new words:
Children repeated the new word in the next turn 54% of the time; they
acknowledged it in the next turn with markers like yeah or
uh-huh 9% of the time, or made a relevant move-on by alluding to
some aspect of its referent, again in the next turn, 38% of the time. By
comparison, the repeat-rate in new-to-given shifts in conversation is
significantly lower. The present data provide strong evidence for some
immediate uptake. When children register that new words are new, they can
assign them some preliminary meaning and begin to use them right away from
as young as age two. a
Adult speakers constantly offer young children
new terms, conventional words for the events and objects being
talked about. They make direct offers of unfamiliar words, using
deictics or other forms that signal that the upcoming term is
new, and they make indirect offers on the assumption that the
relevant meaning is computable on that occasion. Adults also
present young children with information about how words are
related to each other through such connections as is
a
part
of, is
a
kind
of, belongs
to, or is
used
for. These pragmatic directions provide children with
essential information about language and language use as they
make inferences about possible meanings for unfamiliar words.
They also offer support for an alternative to constraints-based
accounts of lexical acquisition by providing a conversation-based
approach more consistent with the findings from spontaneous
speech and from experimental results.
The purpose of this study was to further researchers' understanding of lexical acquisition in the beginning primary schoolchild by investigating word learning in small-group elementary science classes. Two experiments were conducted to examine the role of semantic scaffolding (e.g., use of synonymous terms) and physical scaffolding (e.g., pointing to referents) in children's acquisition of novel property terms. Children's lexical knowledge was assessed using multiple tasks (naming, comprehension, and definitional). Children struggled to acquire meanings of adjectives without semantic or physical scaffolding (Experiment 1), but they were successful in acquiring extensive lexical knowledge when offered semantic scaffolding (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 also shows that semantic scaffolding used in combination with physical scaffolding helped children acquire novel adjectives and that children who correctly named pictures of adjectives had acquired definitions.
The shared features that characterize the noun categories that young children learn first are a formative basis of the human category system. To investigate the potential categorical information contained in the features of early-learned nouns, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of noun-feature networks. The networks are built from the overlap of words normatively acquired by children prior to 2(1/2) years of age and perceptual and conceptual (functional) features acquired from adult feature generation norms. The resulting networks have small-world structure, indicative of a high degree of feature overlap in local clusters. However, perceptual features--due to their abundance and redundancy--generate networks more robust to feature omissions, while conceptual features are more discriminating and, per feature, offer more categorical information than perceptual features. Using a network specific cluster identification algorithm (the clique percolation method) we also show that shared features among these early-learned nouns create higher-order groupings common to adult taxonomic designations. Again, perceptual and conceptual features play distinct roles among different categories, typically with perceptual features being more inclusive and conceptual features being more exclusive of category memberships. The results offer new and testable hypotheses about the role of shared features in human category knowledge.
In this paper, I review properties and consequences of the PRINCIPLE OF CONTRAST. This principle, which I have argued from the beginning has a pragmatic basis, captures facts about the inferences speakers and addresses make for both conventional and novel words. Along with a PRINCIPLE OF CONVENTIONALITY, it accounts for the pre-emption of novel words by well-established ones. And it holds just as much for morphology as it does for words and larger expressions. In short, Contrast has the major properties Gathercole (1989) proposed as characteristic of her alternative to Contrast.
To explore how online speech processing efficiency relates to vocabulary growth in the 2nd year, the authors longitudinally observed 59 English-learning children at 15, 18, 21, and 25 months as they looked at pictures while listening to speech naming one of the pictures. The time course of eye movements in response to speech revealed significant increases in the efficiency of comprehension over this period. Further, speed and accuracy in spoken word recognition at 25 months were correlated with measures of lexical and grammatical development from 12 to 25 months. Analyses of growth curves showed that children who were faster and more accurate in online comprehension at 25 months were those who showed faster and more accelerated growth in expressive vocabulary across the 2nd year.
During the second year of life, the rate at which children acquire new words accelerates dramatically. This has led the field of language acquisition to posit specialized mechanisms that leverage the few words learned in the initial slow phase for faster vocabulary growth later. Simulations and mathematical analysis demonstrate that specialized cognitive changes are unnecessary. The acceleration in lexical acquisition is a necessary by-product of learning if (i) multiple words are learned in parallel and (ii) words are distributed such that there are few words that can be acquired quickly and many difficult ones.
Babies are not born talking, they learn language, starting immediately from birth. How does this process take place? When do children master the skills needed for using language successfully? What stages do they go through as they learn to understand and talk? Do the languages they learn affect the way they think? This edition of Eve Clark's highly successful textbook focuses on children's acquisition of a first language, the stages of development they go through, and how they use language as they learn. It reports on recent findings in each area covered, includes a completely new chapter on the acquisition of two languages and shows how speech to children differs by social class. Skilfully integrating actual data with coverage of current theories and debates, it is an essential guide to studying language acquisition for those working in linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive science.
Without words, children can't talk about people, places, things, actions, relations, or states, and they have no grammatical rules. Without words, there would be no sound structure, no word structure, and no syntax. The lexicon is central in language, and in language acquisition. Eve Clark argues for this centrality and for the general principles of conventionality and contrast at the core of language acquisition. She looks at the hypotheses children draw on about possible word meanings, and how they map their meanings on to forms. The book is unusual in dealing with data from a wide variety of languages, in its emphasis on the general principles children rely on as they analyse complex word forms, and in the broad perspective it takes on lexical acquisition.
This chapter focuses on of the knowledge that one has to have about a word to use it appropriately. From the developmental point of view, what the child knows about the meaning of a word needs to be found in addition to the way in which this knowledge changes during the language acquisition process. The semantic feature hypothesis assumed that the meanings of words are made up of features or components of meaning and proposed that children learn word meanings gradually by adding more features to their lexical entries. The general predictions made by this theory have been shown to be remarkably consistent with data from several different sources in the literature on children's language. The theory contains a number of lacunae that future work will have to fill. For example, there is no account of the internal structure or lack of it in the child's earliest lexical entries. To study language acquisition properly, semantics cannot be ignored, for it is essential to know what the children means by what they says, and to know how they understand what they hear.
Examined exposure to vocabulary in different conversational situations between 81 mothers and their 84 preschoolers (aged 3–4 yrs). Data indicate that different situations provide varying proportions of rare words, with the elicited reports providing few rare words and mealtimes providing many rare words. Book reading results were mixed, indicating some books provide more vocabulary exposure than others. Different contexts varied in their associations with the children's Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) scores at age 5, suggesting that some contexts may be more potent sources for vocabulary learning than others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The social-linguistic experiences of early readers in interaction with their parents were compared to that of age peers from similar families. Twelve kindergarten children, six precocious readers (ER) and six prereading peers (PR), and their parents were subjects for this study. Children were matched on age, sex, and receptive vocabulary (PPVT). ERs were reading fluently at the third grade level. The PRs presented age-appropriate emergent literacy skills. All parents were middle class, and educated at least two years beyond secondary school. The oral language of all speakers was analyzed for variables considered to be facilitative of the development of decontextualized language. Analyses of the 36 audio-recorded interactions focused on elements that described each speaker's 1) language complexity, 2) conversational devices, and 3) topic, as well as the children's performance on two decontextualized language tasks. ERs' parents created an even more enriched language environment for their children than PRs' parents. All significant and nonsignificant differences relating to decontextualized language favored ER families. ERs did not differ from PRs on the decontextualized task of giving formal definitions, though they did produce more complete and comprehensible procedural descriptions.
How do children learn that the word "dog" refers not to all four-legged animals, and not just to Ralph, but to all members of a particular species? How do they learn the meanings of verbs like "think," adjectives like "good," and words for abstract entities such as "mortgage" and "story"? The acquisition of word meaning is one of the fundamental issues in the study of mind.
According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. Although other researchers have associated word learning with some of these capacities, Bloom is the first to show how a complete explanation requires all of them. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways.
This book requires no background in psychology or linguistics and is written in a clear, engaging style. Topics include the effects of language on spatial reasoning, the origin of essentialist beliefs, and the young child's understanding of representational art. The book should appeal to general readers interested in language and cognition as well as to researchers in the field.
Bradford Books imprint
Diary observations of two-year-olds' over-extended word use have been interpreted as arising from the word's underlying semantic feature structure, retrieval error, or limited vocabulary. The first interpretation was tested by analysing whether the same few features systematically characterized most over-extensions of a word (picture-naming task), and whether the same word was over-extended in comprehension (picture-pointing task). Four instances of over-extended use were studied in each of 5 children aged 1; 9 to 2; 3. A semantic feature interpretation is rejected, as is the view that overextensions are used by the child deliberately, to refer to objects which he knows are not properly named by the words. The need to construct models of early word meaning which reflect the early instability of conceptual organization, the probability of retrieval error in recall tasks, and the developmental history of individual words – particularly parental acceptance or rejection of use – is discussed.
Previous investigations comparing auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to words whose meanings infants did or did not comprehend, found bilateral differences in brain activity to known versus unknown words in 13-month-old infants, in contrast with unilateral, left hemisphere, differences in activity in 20-month-old infants. We explore two alternative explanations for these findings. Changes in hemispheric specialization may result from a qualitative shift in the way infants process known words between 13 and 20 months. Alternatively, hemispheric specialization may arise from increased familiarity with the individual words tested. We contrasted these two explanations by measuring ERPs from 20-month-old infants with high and low production scores, for novel words they had just learned. A bilateral distribution of ERP differences was observed in both groups of infants, though the difference was larger in the left hemisphere for the high producers. These findings suggest that word familiarity is an important factor in determining the distribution of brain regions involved in word learning. An emerging left hemispheric specialization may reflect increased efficiency in the manner in which infants process familiar and novel words.
General lexical development in children, including extensive studies of word-formation
Data from parent reports on 1,803 children--derived from a normative study of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs)--are used to describe the typical course and the extent of variability in major features of communicative development between 8 and 30 months of age. The two instruments, one designed for 8-16-month-old infants, the other for 16-30-month-old toddlers, are both reliable and valid, confirming the value of parent reports that are based on contemporary behavior and a recognition format. Growth trends are described for children scoring at the 10th-, 25th-, 50th-, 75th-, and 90th-percentile levels on receptive and expressive vocabulary, actions and gestures, and a number of aspects of morphology and syntax. Extensive variability exists in the rate of lexical, gestural, and grammatical development. The wide variability across children in the time of onset and course of acquisition of these skills challenges the meaningfulness of the concept of the modal child. At the same time, moderate to high intercorrelations are found among the different skills both concurrently and predictively (across a 6-month period). Sex differences consistently favor females; however, these are very small, typically accounting for 1%-2% of the variance. The effects of SES and birth order are even smaller within this age range. The inventories offer objective criteria for defining typicality and exceptionality, and their cost effectiveness facilitates the aggregation of large data sets needed to address many issues of contemporary theoretical interest. The present data also offer unusually detailed information on the course of development of individual lexical, gestural, and grammatical items and features. Adaptations of the CDIs to other languages have opened new possibilities for cross-linguistic explorations of sequence, rate, and variability of communicative development.
Beginning literacy with language
- D K Dickinson
- Tabors
Dickinson, D. K., & Tabors, P. O. (Eds.). (2001). Beginning literacy with language. Baltimore, MD:
Brookes.
Variability in early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
- L Fenson
- P S Dale
- J S Reznick
- E Bates
- D J Thal
- S J Pethick
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Bates, E., Thal, D. J., & Pethick, S. J. (1994). Variability in
early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development,
242. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.