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| Author | : Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 251 |
| Release | : 2018-02-08 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 1107018005 |
This book explores a much-debated area of language acquisition: the omission by young children of direct objects in a sentence.
| Author | : Alexandru Mardale |
| Publisher | : John Benjamins Publishing Company |
| Total Pages | : 377 |
| Release | : 2020-06-15 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 9027261091 |
Differential Object marking (DOM), a linguistic phenomenon in which a direct object is morphologically marked for semantic and pragmatic reasons, has attracted the attention of several subfields of linguistics in the past few years. DOM has evolved diachronically in many languages, whereas it has disappeared from others; it is easily acquired by monolingual children, but presents high instability and variability in bilingual acquisition and language contact situations. This edited collection contributes to further our understanding of the nature and development of DOM in the languages of the world, in acquisition, and in language contact, variation, and change. The thirteen chapters in this volume present new empirical data from Estonian, Spanish, Turkish, Korean, Hindi, Romanian and Basque in different acquisition contexts and learner populations. They also bring together multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives to account for the complexity and dynamicity of this widespread linguistic phenomenon.
| Author | : Jeannette C. Schaeffer |
| Publisher | : John Benjamins Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 206 |
| Release | : 2000-01-01 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 9789027224903 |
This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the real time acquisition of grammar in First Language Acquisition Theory. It combines detailed and quantitative observations of object placement in Dutch and Italian child language with an analysis that makes use of the Modularity Hypothesis. Real time development is explained by the interaction between two different modules of language, namely syntax and pragmatics. Children need to build up knowledge of how the world works, which includes learning that in communicating with someone else, one must realize that speaker and hearer knowledge are always independent. Since the syntactic feature referentiality can only be marked if this (pragmatic) distinction is made, and assuming that certain types of object placement (such as scrambling and clitic placement) are motivated by referentiality, it follows that the relevant syntactic mechanism is dependent on the prior acquisition of a pragmatic distinction.
| Author | : Michael R. Brent |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 216 |
| Release | : 1997 |
| Genre | : Computers |
| ISBN | : 9780262522298 |
The past fifteen years have seen great changes in the field of language acquisition. New experimental methods have yielded insights into the linguistic knowledge of ever younger children, and interest has grown in the phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects of the lexicon. Computational investigations of language acquisition have also changed, reflecting, among other things, the profound shift in the field of natural language processing from hand-crafted grammars to grammars that are learned automatically from samples of naturally occurring language.Each of the four research papers in this book takes a novel formal approach to a particular problem in language acquisition. In the first paper, J. M. Siskind looks at developmentally inspired models of word learning. In the second, M. R. Brent and T. A. Cartwright look at how children could discover the sounds of words, given that word boundaries are not marked by any acoustic analog of the spaces between written words. In the third, P. Resnik measures the association between verbs and the semantic categories of their arguments that children likely use as clues to verb meanings. Finally, P. Niyogi and R. C. Berwick address the setting of syntactic parameters such as headedness--for example, whether the direct object comes before or after the verb.
| Author | : Misha Becker |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 337 |
| Release | : 2020-03-10 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 0262043580 |
An introduction to the study of children's language development that provides a uniquely accessible perspective on generative/universal grammar–based approaches. How children acquire language so quickly, easily, and uniformly is one of the great mysteries of the human experience. The theory of Universal Grammar suggests that one reason for the relative ease of early language acquisition is that children are born with a predisposition to create a grammar. This textbook offers an introduction to the study of children's acquisition and development of language from a generative/universal grammar–based theoretical perspective, providing comprehensive coverage of children's acquisition while presenting core concepts crucial to understanding generative linguistics more broadly. After laying the theoretical groundwork, including consideration of alternative frameworks, the book explores the development of the sound system of language—children's perception and production of speech sound; examines how words are learned (lexical semantics) and how words are formed (morphology); investigates sentence structure (syntax), including argument structure, functional structure, and tense; considers such “nontypical” circumstances as acquiring a first language past infancy and early childhood, without the abilities to hear or see, and with certain cognitive disorders; and studies bilingual language acquisition, both simultaneously and in sequence. Each chapter offers a summary section, suggestions for further reading, and exercises designed to test students' understanding of the material and provide opportunities to practice analyzing children's language. Appendixes provide charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet (with links to websites that allow students to listen to the sounds associated with these symbols) and a summary of selected experimental methodologies.
| Author | : Luis H. González |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 86 |
| Release | : 2021-02-07 |
| Genre | : Foreign Language Study |
| ISBN | : 1000356515 |
The Fundamentally Simple Logic of Language: Learning a Second Language with the Tools of the Native Speaker presents a data-driven approach to understanding how native speakers do not use subject and direct object to process language. Native speakers know who does what in a sentence by applying intuitively two simple inferences that are argued to be part of universal grammar. The book explains and exemplifies these two inferences throughout. These two inferences explain the native speaker’s ease of acquisition and use, and answer difficult questions for linguistics (transitivity, case, semantic roles) in such a way that undergraduate students and second language learners can understand these concepts and apply them to their own language acquisition. While Spanish is used as the primary example, the theory can be applied to many other languages. This book will appeal to teachers and learners of any second language, as well as linguists interested in second language acquisition, in second language teaching, and in argument structure.
| Author | : Martyn Barrett |
| Publisher | : Psychology Press |
| Total Pages | : 434 |
| Release | : 2016-01-28 |
| Genre | : Psychology |
| ISBN | : 1317715276 |
This book presents a general overview of our current knowledge of language development in children. All the principal strands of language development are covered, including phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic development; bilingualism; precursors to language development in infancy; and the language development of children with developmental disabilities, including children with specific language impairment. Written by leading international authorities, each chapter summarises clearly and lucidly our current state of knowledge, and carefully explains and evaluates the theories which have been proposed to account for children's development in that area.
| Author | : Liliana Sánchez |
| Publisher | : John Benjamins Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 201 |
| Release | : 2003-12-19 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 9027295964 |
This book addresses how cross-linguistic interference is represented in the bilingual mind. Examining novel oral production data from older bilingual children representing two Quechua varieties, this research concludes that interference in the feature specification of functional categories leads to language change in a language contact situation, and links convergence, a common set of feature values for the same functional category in both languages to the activation of features related to the informational structure of the sentence. These mechanisms are illustrated in detail by the presence of overt determiners, canonical SVO word order and the absence of accusative marking in bilingual Quechua and by neutralization of case and gender distinctions in direct object pronouns as well as in the emergence of null pronouns with definite antecedents in bilingual Spanish.
| Author | : Miren J. Hodgson |
| Publisher | : Universal-Publishers |
| Total Pages | : 182 |
| Release | : 2010-08 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 1599427222 |
This dissertation presents a study on the acquisition of telicity by Spanish and English native speakers. In addition to the study of acquisition, it investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of locatum constructions (e.g., the water filled the bucket), which are sentences that contain two internal arguments and whose subject is non-agentive. This dissertation explores the syntactic and semantic properties of elements of the verb phrase that had not been previously considered in the interpretation of telicity, such as the role of non-agentive subjects and the type of movement that takes place in the checking of the verb's telic features. Contrary to the assumption that only the direct internal argument of the verb can delimit an event, I argue that objects generated in the lower verb phrase, by virtue of being an internal argument of the verb can delimit an event. An object delimits an event by checking the verb's telic features in spec-AspP, either by covert or overt movement. If a predicate contains one internal argument (e.g., the boy filled the bucket) the checking of the verb's telic features takes place via covert movement. That is, only the NPs specific quantification features move covertly to check the verb's telic features in spec-AspP. However, if the predicate contains two internal arguments (e.g., fill the bucket with water), the surfaced subject (e.g., the water filled the bucket) by virtue of being an internal argument of the verb, checks the verb's telic features as the category and its features move overtly to subject position. The study shows that young children understand telicity when the verb's telic features are checked via overt movement, but have difficulties understanding telicity when the verb's telic features are checked via covert movement. I propose that predicates whose telicity involves overt movement should be acquired earlier than predicates whose telicity involves covert movement because overt movement is an operation that happens between D-structure and S-structure before the sentence is pronounced. Predicates whose telicity involves covert movement might be acquired at a later age of development because covert movement happens between S-structure and LF after the sentence is pronounced.
