Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

自然界和人类社会中存在着大量的中间状态，人类的语言也是如此。大多数人在出生后首先习得和掌握的是他的母语（mother tongue），在以后的人生中，会有机会学习第二语言（secongd language）或目的语（target language）。所谓中介语是指第二语言学习者建构起来的介于母语和目的语之间的过渡性语言，它处于不断的发展变化过程中，并逐渐向目的语靠近。

中介语（interlanguage）初探

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (mature native speakers, child first language [L1] and adult second language [L2] learners) as well as different domains of language (morphology and syntax). This article presents an overview of the results from this project and of other previous studies, with the aim of explaining how grammatical processing in language learners differs from that of mature native speakers. For child L1 processing, we will argue for a continuity hypothesis claiming that the child's parsing mechanism is basically the same as that of mature speakers and does not change over time. Instead, empirical differences between child and mature speaker's processing can be explained by other factors such as the child's limited working memory capacity and by less efficient lexical retrieval. In nonnative (adult L2) language processing, some striking differences to native speakers were observed in the domain of sentence processing. Adult learners are guided by lexical–semantic cues during parsing in the same way as native speakers, but less so by syntactic information. We suggest that the observed L1/L2 differences can be explained by assuming that the syntactic representations adult L2 learners compute during comprehension are shallower and less detailed than those of native speakers.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/28EB9167780446B105527FA06D996119/S0142716406060024a.pdf/div-class-title-grammatical-processing-in-language-learners-div.pdf

Grammatical Processing in Language Learners.

The ‘Interface Hypothesis’ (IH) was put forward by Sorace and colleagues as an attempt to account for patterns of non-convergence and residual optionality found at very advanced stages of adult second (L2)acquisition. The IH originally proposed that language structures involving an interface between syntax and other cognitive domains are less likely to be acquired completely than structures that do not involve this interface. At the same time, the IH was extended to bilingual first language (L1) acquisition and to the very early stages of L1 attrition, which exhibit optionality in precisely the same structures: this provides a unifying framework for the study of bilingual language development. This paper selectively reviews the research on the IH, addressing some common misinterpretations and outlining the most recent interdisciplinary developments.

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~antonell/Sorace-LAB2011.pdf

Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism

Cognition and Second Language Instruction

This study investigates the way adult second language (L2) learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter .T wo groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their first language participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of this type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. Although the learners’ disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical–semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent noun phrases (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they applied any phrase structure–based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners’ performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study, in that the children’s attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all. We argue that children, monolingual adults, and adult L2 learners differ in the extent to which they are guided by phrase structure and lexical–semantic information during sentence processing.

/pdf/the-processing-of-ambiguous-sentences-by-first-and-second-22rww8locp.pdf

The processing of ambiguous sentences by first and second language learners of English

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German, and Greek) and a group of native speaker controls participated in an online reading time experiment with sentences involving long-distance wh-dependencies. Although the native speakers showed evidence of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2 learners appeared to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the subjacency constraint was operative in their native language. This finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing.Theodore Marinis is now working at the Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, and Leah Roberts is at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. The research reported here was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. F/00 213B to H. Clahsen, C. Felser, and R. Hawkins), which is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Bob Borsley, Roger Hawkins, Andrew Radford, the audiences at EUROSLA 12, the 24th Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Sprachwissenschaft Meeting, the 27th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, EUROSLA 13, three anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful comments and discussion, and Ritta Husted and Michaela Wenzlaff for helping with the data collection. We also wish to thank Ted Gibson and Tessa Warren for making their prepublication manuscript available to us.

/pdf/gaps-in-second-language-sentence-processing-559qdoyzgd.pdf

Gaps in Second Language Sentence Processing.

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German, and Greek) and a group of native speaker controls participated in an online reading time experiment with sentences involving long-distance wh-dependencies. Although the native speakers showed evidence of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2 learners appeared to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the subjacency constraint was operative in their native language. This finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing.Theodore Marinis is now working at the Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, and Leah Roberts is at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. The research reported here was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. F/00 213B to H. Clahsen, C. Felser, and R. Hawkins), which is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Bob Borsley, Roger Hawkins, Andrew Radford, the audiences at EUROSLA 12, the 24th Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft Meeting, the 27th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, EUROSLA 13, three anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful comments and discussion, and Ritta Husted and Michaela Wenzlaff for helping with the data collection. We also wish to thank Ted Gibson and Tessa Warren for making their prepublication manuscript available to us.

Gaps in Second Language Sentence Processing

Individual differences in second language acquisition

This study investigates the real-time processing of wh-dependencies by advanced Greek-speaking learners of English using a cross-modal picture priming task. Participants were asked to respond to different types of picture target presented either at structurally defined gap positions, or at pre-gap control positions, while listening to sentences containing indirect-object relative clauses. Our results indicate that the learners processed the experimental sentences differently from both adult native speakers of English and monolingual English-speaking children. Contrary to what has been found for native speakers, the learners' response pattern was not influenced by individual working memory differences. Adult second language learners differed from native speakers with a relatively high reading or listening span in that they did not show any evidence of structurally based antecedent reactivation at the point of the indirect object gap. They also differed from low-span native speakers, however, in that they s...

/pdf/processing-wh-dependencies-in-a-second-language-a-cross-2aw5kwcvs0.pdf

Leah Roberts

Papers

The processing of ambiguous sentences by first and second language learners of English

Gaps in Second Language Sentence Processing.

Gaps in Second Language Sentence Processing

Individual differences in second language acquisition

Processing wh-dependencies in a second language: A cross-modal priming study