Language Acquisition

Developmental dyslexia is believed to involve a phonological deficit of which the exact properties have not been clearly established. This article presents the findings of a longitudinal case study that suggest that, at least for some people with dyslexia, the fundamental problem involves a disturbance of temporal-spatial ordering abilities. A very frequent reading error of the case is to misread

This study aims at providing a possible model for linguistic representation, whose structure is able to describe the effects on sign’s indeterminacy (vagueness, ambiguities) and the dynamic nature of the system. In order to display the different ways of conceiving a linguistic system, various versions of the idea of "giving an order to the structures", that build up a theory, is taken into account: the Cartesian theory of generative grammar, the non-Euclidean one of hypertext networks, the complexity in genetic epistemology and in Jean Piaget’s cognitive development theory, and finally the theory of linguistic change by the language biologist Eric Lenneberg.

Scopo di questo studio è il tentativo di ipotizzare un modello di rappresentazione linguistica, la cui struttura sia capace di descrivere gli effetti dell'indeterminatezza del segno (vaghezza, ambiguità) e la dinamicità del sistema. Per mostrare differenti possibilità di concepire astrattamente un sistema linguistico, si considerano versioni diverse del concetto di “ordine delle strutture”: il sistema cartesiano nella grammatica generativa, la geometria non euclidea nelle reti ipertestuali, la (teoria della )complessità nella teoria dello sviluppo psicogenetico di Jean Piaget e nella teoria del mutamento del biolinguista Eric Lenneberg.

The present chapter traces the development of language acquisition planning. It begins by considering the work of Robert L. Cooper, who placed language acquisition planning alongside corpus planning and status planning as a fundamental type of language planning. While corpus planning focuses on language form and status planning on language function, acquisition planning focuses on language users and how they acquire the communicative repertoires they need for access to opportunities in society. It is thus central to the management of language teaching and learning in both formal and informal settings. Contemporary issues in language planning and policy across contexts and levels of education are addressed. Language acquisition planning, it is argued, is multifaceted, involving a continuum of issues from the psychological to the societal. Research spanning this continuum is discussed, with attention to conceptual orientations and methodological approachess.

The relationship between early maternal responsivity and later child communication outcomes in young children with fragile X syndrome was investigated. Data were obtained from 55 mother–child dyads over a 36-month period. Performance data were obtained at each measurement point from video observations of four different contexts. These were coded for (a) child communication behaviors, (b) parent responsivity, and (c) behavior management behaviors. Results indicate that early maternal responsivity predicts the level of four important child language outcomes at 36 months of age after controlling for child developmental level and autism symptomology.

A study focused on types of talk between parents and children as predictors of development of skills such as narrating, explaining, and describing. The study investigated some measures of home language environment and their relationships with literacy outcomes. Eighty-four 3-year-old children from low income families in the Boston (Massachusetts) area were visited to gather information about the family's social and economic circumstances and their literary practices. The mothers were asked to read to and converse with the children during the visits, and, at the end of their kindergarten year, the children were given a battery of standardized tests of linguistic and cognitive skills and asked to perform a set of independent language tasks. Results indicated that a combination of home social and economic measures, general family conversation measures, and child language measures are the best predictors of formal definitions scores and story comprehension scores. However, results d...

In 2017 Irish Sign Language (ISL) was officially recognised in Ireland yet no Applied Linguistics research to date has explored Irish families learning ISL when they discover their child is deaf. Research tells us of many potential benefits to both hearing and deaf family members by having a family language of communication in ISL (Dammeyer, 2010; Calderon, 2000; Moeller, 2000), yet research on Ireland’s Home Tuition Scheme, which entitles families with a deaf child to ISL tuition, remains low, due to lack of information, as well as misinformation (Mathews, 2011).

In this PhD study, qualitative research methods explore the language learning process of these families. Interviews and home observations follow Glaser’s Grounded Theory approach to break the academic silence on this research population by developing a theory that reflects the process of re-imagining the family language, or the way in which family members communicate, as they learn a new culture, a new modality, a new language in ISL.

Early data analysis suggests that families learning ISL develop new language and communication skills, deaf awareness, cultural understanding and a grounding principle of equality and inclusion allowing them to constantly prioritise learning this challenging, but enriching, visuo-spatial language.

Following the success of language recognition, and this study’s early results, families with a deaf child need more support as parents, language teachers and linguistic models in their home, and as language learners, to aid them in creating a new family language to allow each child equal access to their childhood and their family.

Are all children exposed to the same linguistic input, and do they follow the same route in acquisition? The answer is no: The language that children hear differs even within a social class or cultural setting, as do the paths individual children take. The linguistic signal itself is also variable, both within and across speakers - the same sound is different across words; the same speech act can be realized with different constructions. The challenge here is to explain, given their diversity of experience, how children arrive at similar generalizations about their first language. This volume brings together studies of phonology, morphology, and syntax in development, to present a new perspective on how experience and variation shape children’s linguistic generalizations. The papers deal with variation in forms, learning processes, and speaker features, and assess the impact of variation on the mechanisms and outcomes of language learning.

This study examined language development as a precursor of maladaptive behavior in inner-city early adolescents. Participating were 256 adolescents from the graduation classes of 2000 and 2001 who had previously attended District of Columbia prekindergarten/Head Start and kindergarten. The sample was 98 percent African American and 56 percent female. The subjects' teachers completed the Vineland Maladaptive Behavior Domain subscale. Results indicated that based on normative age expectations, only 48 percent of subjects were classified at the Nonsignificant level of maladaptiveness (NM), while 24 percent showed Intermediate maladaptation (IM), and 28 percent were Significantly Maladapted (SM). Among the SM group, boys outnumbered girls, students from poorer families outnumbered those from more affluent families, students from single-parent families outnumbered those from two-parent families, students previously retained in-grade outnumbered non-retained students, special educatio...

This study tested the relationship between prelinguistic vocalization and expressive vocabulary 1 year later in young children with mild to moderate developmental delays. Three vocalization variables were tested: rate of all vocalization, rate of vocalizations with consonants, and rate of vocalizations used interactively. The 58 toddlers in the study were 17–34 months old, not sensory impaired, and had Bayley Mental Development Indices (Bayley, 1969; Bayley, 1993) from 35–85. In addition, the children had fewer than 3 words in their expressive vocabularies and during classroom observation each showed at least one instance of intentional prelinguistic communication before testing. Selected sections of the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales procedures (CSBS; Wetherby & Prizant, 1993) were administered at the beginning and at the end of the study. The vocal measures were obtained in the initial CSBS session. One measure of expressive vocabulary was obtained in the CSBS session ...

Cerebral organization during sentence processing in English and in American Sign Language (ASL) was characterized by employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 4 T. Effects of deafness, age of language acquisition, and bilingualism were assessed by comparing results from (i) normally hearing, monolingual, native speakers of English, (ii) congenitally, genetically deaf, native signers of ASL who learned English late and through the visual modality, and (iii) normally hearing bilinguals who were native signers of ASL and speakers of English. All groups, hearing and deaf, processing their native language, English or ASL, displayed strong and repeated activation within classical language areas of the left hemisphere. Deaf subjects reading English did not display activation in these regions. These results suggest that the early acquisition of a natural language is important in the expression of the strong bias for these areas to mediate language, independently of the form of the language. In addition, native signers, hearing and deaf, displayed extensive activation of homologous areas within the right hemisphere, indicating that the specific processing requirements of the language also in part determine the organization of the language systems of the brain.

This paper reports on the development of the Malay Crosslinguistic Lexical Task (LITMUS-CLT) following the initiative of the COST Action IS0804 to create parallel tasks assessing various aspects of language development in bilingual and multilingual children (Armon-Lotem, de Jong, & Meir, 2015). LITMUS-CLTs are picture naming and picture choice tasks assessing receptive and expressive knowledge of single nouns and verbs. CLTs are created according to the same criteria in each language individually with the use of a common picture database. The development of the Malay CLT follows the procedure designed within the COST Action IS0804 with the modifications required for a new language in the sample of CLT languages. To that end, two preparatory studies with adult native speakers of Malay were conducted: a picture naming study using CLT picture base and a subjective age of acquisition (AoA) survey for words obtained in the picture naming study. The results of the two studies show that al...

Second language acquisition studies can contribute to the body of research on the influence of language on thought by examining cognitive change as a result of second language learning. We conducted a longitudinal study that examined how the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender influences categorization in native English-speaking adults. We asked whether learning the grammatical gender of Spanish affects adult native English speakers' attribution of gender to inanimate objects. College students enrolled in beginning Spanish participated in two tasks repeatedly (four times) throughout one academic year. One task examined their acquisition of grammatical gender. The other examined their categorization of inanimate objects. We began to observe changes in participants' grammatical gender acquisition and in categorization after ten weeks of Spanish instruction. Results indicate that learning a second language as an adult can change the way one categorizes objects. However, t...

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years, project implementation descriptions have accounted for the majority of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) publications, some 345 in total. Those interested in MALL applications thus need to read widely to acquire an adequate perspective of MALL implementations. The intent of this bibliography is to facilitate this task by providing a comprehensive historical background of MALL applications from the first published work in 1994 to the end of 2012. To enhance the information contained in these references, over 90% of the entries are complemented by a brief (~80 word) summary. To the extent that the publication provides such information, each annotation identifies the country of origin of the study, native language (L1) and/or the second or foreign language (L2) involved, the mobile technology used, the learning area(s) targeted, the type of learners, their numbers, the duration of the study, and a summary of the results (i.e., learning outcomes and survey opinions). Since nearly 60% of MALL implementation studies appear outside of professional journals, in conference proceedings, project reports, academic dissertations, and so forth, locating copies of these publications poses a major challenge in itself. For this reason, where possible, links are included to copies of the works cited.

This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) – often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) ‘cross-level harmony constraint’, the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically – and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's ‘cross-level harmony constraint’ may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I dis...

Spontaneous language samples of 30 24-month-old toddlers diagnosed with Specific Expressive Language Impairment (SLI-E) were compared with samples produced by an age-matched group of 30 typically developing toddlers. Vocalization patterns, phonetic inventories, and syllable formation patterns were compared. Toddlers with SLI-E vocalized significantly less often than their typically developing peers, had proportionately smaller consonantal and vowel inventories, and used a more restricted and less mature array of syllable shapes. Although the mean incidence of phoneme usage varied significantly in all comparisons, profiles of consonant usage were similar between the two groups for initial phoneme usage, but considerably different for final consonant closure. Such patterns of vocal and phonetic behavior confirm earlier reports of phonetic delay in SLI-E, and suggest that nongrammatical factors contribute to the development of expressive language deficits in toddlers. We further propos...

En faisant un premier tour d'horizon des resultats actuels de la recherche en biographie langagiere, de son point de vue theorique et methodologique, l'auteure presente les perspectives nouvelles que ce courant apporte a la recherche en linguistique, en particulier sur l'acquisition du langage. L'interet pour la biographie langagiere s'est developpe rapidement dans les annees 1990 et tout specialement en Europe. La biographie langagiere peut, a bien des egards, contribuer a une analyse plus differenciee de l'acquisition du langage. En exposant les principes du courant, l'auteure presente differentes recherches en cours et leurs premiers resultats. Exemple est donne a travers notamment la presentation d'un projet du Fonds national suisse de la recherche entre les Universites de Bâle et de Prague. Cette etude vise a demontrer l'apport de la biographie langagiere pour une analyse neurobiologique du plurilinguisme.

We review empirical research on English language learners (ELLs) who struggle with reading and who may have learning disabilities (LD). We sought to determine research indicators that can help us better differentiate between ELLs who struggle to acquire literacy because of their limited proficiency in English and ELLs who have actual LD. We conclude that more research is warranted to further elucidate the strengths and learning needs of subgroups of underachieving ELLs, to help us determine who should qualify for special education, and to clarify why some ELLs who do not have LD still struggle with language and literacy acquisition. Future research should account for the complexities involved in becoming literate in another language and focus more on cultural and contextual factors that affect student achievement.