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How do infants and young children coordinate information in real time to arrive at sentence meaning from the words and structure of the sentence and from the nonlinguistic context? This volume introduces readers to an emerging field of research, experimental developmental psycholinguistics, and to the four predominant methodologies used to study on-line language processing in children. Authored by key figures in psycholinguistics, neuroscience and developmental psychology, the chapters cover event-related brain potentials, free-viewing eyetracking, looking-while-listening, and reaction-time techniques, also providing a historical backdrop for this line of research. Multiple aspects of experimental design, data collection and data analysis are addressed in detail, alongside surveys of recent important findings about how infants and children process sounds, words, and sentences. Indispensable for students and researchers working in the areas of language acquisition, developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience of language, this volume will also appeal to speech language pathologists and early childhood educators.
This edited collection contains 34 papers originally presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA) conference in 2013, held in Oldenburg, Germany. It represents theoretically guided, high quality work, and provides impressive insights into state-of-the-art research in the fields of first and second language acquisition and developmental impairments. The studies brought together here cover a wide variety of different (mainly European) languages, focusing on the areas of phonology, morpho-syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces. Since their first publication, the proceedings of GALA have become an invaluable reference for cutting-edge research in First and Second Language Acquisition and its impairments – and this volume continues that tradition.
This volume is the first dedicated to the growing field of theory and research on second language processing and parsing. The fourteen papers in this volume offer cutting-edge research using a number of different languages (e.g., Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, English) and structures (e.g., relative clauses, wh-gaps, gender, number) to examine various issues in second language processing: first language influence, whether or not non-natives can achieve native-like processing, the roles of context and prosody, the effects of working memory, and others. The researchers include both established scholars and newer voices, all offering important insights into the factors that affect processing and parsing in a second language.
This volume explores a variety of aspects of second language speech, with special focus on contributions to the field made by (primarely) generative linguists looking at the sounds and sound systems of second language learners. "Second Language Phonology" starts off with an overview of second language acquisition research in order to place the study of L2 speech in context. This introductory chapter is followed by an outline of traditional approaches to investigating interlanguage phonology. The third chapter consists of a discussion of relevant aspects of a learning theory that must be included in a treatment of how people learn sound systems. The next three chapters focus on particular aspects of the mental represenation of phonological competence; segments, syllables, and stress, respectively. The penultimate chapter deals with issues related to the mechanisms that govern the changing of interlanguage grammars over time. The volume ends with a summary of the issues raised throughout the text.
This book presents a thorough description of morphosyntactic knowledge developed by learners of French in four different learning situations first language (L1) acquisition, second (L2) language acquisition, bilingualism, and acquisition by children with Specific Language Impairment within the theoretical framework of generative grammar. This approach allows for multiple comparisons across acquisition contexts, which provides the reader with invaluable insights into the nature of the acquisition process. The book is divided into four parts each dealing with a major morphosyntactic domain of acquisition: the verbal domain, the pronominal domain, the nominal domain, and the CP domain. Each part contains four chapters, the first one presenting an overview of the basic facts and analyses of the relevant properties of French, and the next three focusing on the different acquisition contexts. This book will be useful to anyone interested in the acquisition of French and in language development in general. It is also meant to stimulate cross-linguistic research from a theoretical perspective."
Sonority has a long and contentious history. It has often been invoked by linguists as an explanatory principle underlying various cross-linguistic phonotactic generalizations, especially within the domain of the syllable. However, many phonologists and phoneticians have expressed concerns about the adequacy of formal accounts based on sonority, including even doubts about the very existence of sonority itself. To date, the topic of sonority has never been the focus of an entire book. Consequently, this is the first complete volume that explores diverging viewpoints about phonological phenomena rooted in sonority taken from numerous languages. All of the contributors are well-known and respe...
The volume is a collection of original articles that present new research on first and second language acquisition from the perspective of current generative linguistics, using a detailed case study of Portuguese as a first, second and third language. The book focuses on studies exploring both empirical/experimental and theoretical aspects of the acquisition of syntax and its interfaces with morphology, with semantics/pragmatics, and language change. The volume includes chapters on the child and adult acquisition of European and Brazilian Portuguese, and several chapters that also compare and contrast the two varieties from these different perspectives.
This cross-linguistic volume innovates research of the acquisition of diminutives in the inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Russian, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, the agglutinating languages Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish and in the introflecting Hebrew. These languages differ in various aspects relevant for the acquisition of diminutives and the development of pragmatics in early child language. Diminutive formation often tends to be the first pattern of word formation to emerge. The main reason for this seems to lie in the pragmatic functions of endearment, empathy, and sympathy, which make diminutives particularly appropriate for child-centred communication. A main topic of this book is the relation of emergence and early development between diminutives and other categories of word formation and inflection. The greater degree of morphological productivity and transparency, as well as phonological saliency, favors the use of diminutives. In this case diminutives may facilitate the acquisition of inflection.
This collection of nine original articles deals with the expression of possession at various levels of grammar, morphological, phrasal, and syntactic, and from a typologically diverse range of languages (including Germanic, Oceanic, Meso-American, and Australian Aboriginal). There are two main aims. The first is to reveal something of the range of constructions employed cross-linguistically in the expression of possession, and second, to present an understanding of the possessive relation itself as a cognitive and linguistic phenomenon. A guiding principle in the selection of contributors has been to invite linguists whose research, while not necessarily directly dealing with possession, touches on it, and indicates that they are likely to provide fresh perspectives on this well-trodden field. Key features: William McGregor is a well known expert in this fíeld of research Possession is a paradigm for studies on typology, ethnology etc., because a multitude of linguistic and cultural varieties are reflected in this field new series textbook
This volume is a collection of cutting-edge research papers written by well-known researchers in the field of Romance phonetics and phonology. An important goal of this book is to bridge the gap between traditional Romance linguistics with its long and rich tradition in data collection, cross-language comparison, and phonetic variation and laboratory phonology work. The book is organized around three main themes: segmental processes, prosody, and the acquisition of segments and prosody. The various articles provide new empirical data on production, perception, sound change, first and second language learning, rhythm and intonation, presenting a state-of-the-art overview of research in laboratory phonology centred on Romance languages. The Romance data are used to test the predictions of a number of theoretical frameworks such as gestural phonology, exemplar models, generative phonology and optimality theory. The book will constitute a useful companion volume for phoneticians, phonologists and researchers investigating sound structure in Romance languages, and will serve to generate further interest in laboratory phonology.