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

A grammar of spoken Chinese = 中國話的文法

This article shows how language processing is intimately tuned to input frequency. Examples are given of frequency effects in the processing of phonology, phonotactics, reading, spelling, lexis, morphosyntax, formulaic language, language comprehension, grammaticality, sentence production, and syntax. The implications of these effects for the representations and developmental sequence of SLA are discussed. Usage-based theories hold that the acquisition of language is exemplar based. It is the piecemeal learning of many thousands of constructions and the frequency-biased abstraction of regularities within them. Determinants of pattern productivity include the power law of practice, cue competition and constraint satisfaction, connectionist learning, and effects of type and token frequency. The regularities of language emerge from experience as categories and prototypical patterns. The typical route of emergence of constructions is from formula, through low-scope pattern, to construction. Frequency plays a large part in explaining sociolinguistic variation and language change. Learners' sensitivity to frequency in all these domains has implications for theories of implicit and explicit learning and their interactions. The review concludes by considering the history of frequency as an explanatory concept in theoretical and applied linguistics, its 40 years of exile, and its necessary reinstatement as a bridging variable that binds the different schools of language acquisition research.

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Frequency Effects in Language Processing: A Review with Implications for Theories of Implicit and Explicit Language Acquisition.

Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE - BACKGROUND Introduction 1. Second language acquisition research: an overview PART TWO - THE DESCRIPTION OF LEARNER LANGUAGE Introduction 2. Learner errors and error analysis 3. Developmental patterns: order and sequence in second language acquisition 4. Variability in learner language 5. Pragmatic aspects of learner language PART THREE - EXPLAINING SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: EXTERNAL FACTORS Introduction 6. Social factors and second language acquisition 7. Input and interaction and second language acquisition PART FOUR - EXPLAINING SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: INTERNAL FACTORS Introduction 8. Language transfer 9. Cognitive accounts of second language acquisition 10. Linguistic universals and second language acquisition PART FIVE - EXPLAINING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Introduction 11. Individual learner differences 12. Learning strategies PART SIX - CLASSROOM SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Introduction 13. Classroom interaction and second language acquisition 14. Formal instruction and second language acquisition PART SEVEN - CONCLUSION Introduction 15. Data, theory, and applications in second language acquisition research Glossary Bibliography Author index Subject index

第二语言习得研究 = The study of second language acquisition

Thank you for downloading constructions a construction grammar approach to argument structure. As you may know, people have search numerous times for their favorite readings like this constructions a construction grammar approach to argument structure, but end up in harmful downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they cope with some harmful virus inside their computer.

Constructions A Construction Grammar Approach To Argument Structure

The Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology: A Prototype Account.

This paper offers an alternative interpretation for what has been called the defective tense hypothesis, the primacy of aspect hypothesis, or simply the aspect hypothesis in the literature on first and second language acquisition of tense and aspect. The aspect hypothesis states that first and second language learners will initially be influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs or predicates in the acquisition of tense and aspect markers associated with or affixed to these verbs. Our account focuses on the observation that adult native speakers also appear to adhere to this primacy of inherent semantic aspect in the relative quantitative distribution of tense-aspect markers in their speech. We argue that a small set of cognitive operating principles and the notion of prototypicality account for this behavior in learners. Moreover, we argue that these principles are a consequence of how learners and native speakers alike organize information and their perspectives on it in ongoing discourse.

Discourse Motivations for Some Cognitive Acquisition Principles

Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.

The Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect

The Primacy of Aspect in First and Second Language Acquisition

In SLA, it has been often assumed that the effect of the first language (L1) is not very strong in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes (e.g., Ellis, 1994; Mitchell & Myles, 2004). However, such an assumption has not been systematically examined in the literature. This article reviews the morpheme studies conducted with native speakers of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Spanish to test the effect of the L1 in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. The review reveals that although Spanish L1 learners’ acquisition order generally conforms to the “so-called” natural order (Krashen, 1977), native speakers of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese mostly acquire plural –s and articles later than, and possessive ’s earlier than, is predicted by the natural order. This indicates that learners can acquire a grammatical morpheme later or earlier than predicted by the natural order, depending on the presence or absence of the equivalent category in their L1. This suggests that L1 transfer is much stronger than is portrayed in many SLA textbooks and that the role of L1 in morpheme acquisition must be reconsidered.

Yasuhiro Shirai

Papers

The Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology: A Prototype Account.

Discourse Motivations for Some Cognitive Acquisition Principles

The Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect

The Primacy of Aspect in First and Second Language Acquisition

Is the Acquisition Order of Grammatical Morphemes Impervious to L1 Knowledge? Evidence From the Acquisition of Plural ‐s, Articles, and Possessive ’s