Psychology of Language and Communication 

About: Psychology of Language and Communication is an academic journal published by De Gruyter Open. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Psychology & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 1234-2238. It is also open access. Over the lifetime, 255 publications have been published receiving 1449 citations.

Strategies of Translation

Abstract: Abstract The paper is concerned with the strategies of written translation. The first section deals with various definitions of the notion of translation strategy, terms used to describe that notion and classifications of translation strategies. The second section presents the results of some empirical studies on translation strategies. In the third section, Krzysztof Hejwowski’s concept of translation strategies is laid out and the results of a pilot study based on this concept are described

Putting interaction back into child language: Examples from Turkish

Abstract: As in the case of other non-English languages, the study of the acquisition of Turkish has mostly focused on aspects of grammatical morphology and syntax, largely neglecting the study of the effect of interactional factors on child morphosyntax. This paper reviews indications from past research that studying input and adult-child discourse can facilitate the study of the acquisition of morphosyntax in the Turkish language. It also provides some recent studies of Turkish child language on the relationship of child-directed speech to the early acquisition of morphosyntax, and on the pragmatic features of a certain kind of discourse form in child-directed speech called variation sets. As in the case of other non-English languages, the study of the acquisition of Turkish has mostly focused on aspects of grammatical morphology and syntax reflected in the productions of native learners at different age periods. Descriptive linguists and psycholinguists have long regarded the properties of the Turkish morphological system and complex syntax interesting from a crosslinguistic point of view. These cross-linguistically interesting, even exotic, properties of the language led students of acquisition to prioritize their research focus on these aspects in this relatively recent area. Some of the well-known findings in Turkish child language involve the ease and the relative rapidity of the acquisition of case-inflectional and verbal-inflectional paradigms (Aksu-Koc & Slobin, 1985; Ozcan, 1996; Topbas, Mavis & Basal, 1997), the late emergence of the use of relative clauses (Slobin, 1986), the early mastery of flexible word order (Ekmekci, 1979), and the protracted development of the different functions of the evidential marker –mis (Aksu-Koc, 1988). All of these features of Turkish child language presuppose some implicit comparison to the properties of the English language, either being non-existent or exhibiting different characteristics there. It is trivially obvious that linguistic categories such as case-marking, verbal inflections, word order, and evidentiality do not present themselves transparently to the child learner of a language. Both intuitively, and theoretically from a discourse-functional theoretical approach to language development (Budwig, 1995; Clancy, in press; DuBois, to appear), all these interesting components of the grammatical code come to the young learner in the give and take of everyday life, mostly embedded in early adult-child discursive interaction. However, as in most child language research, these “real” interactive events get reduced to textual transcripts that only represent interaction “in vitro.” For child language researchers, these transcripts constitute a mining source for grammatical elements that are combed through with painstaking eyeballing and more recently with sophisticated concordance software. Once the forms are picked out along with the propositional content surrounding them and made available for further statistical analysis, the real-time interactions that originally mediated these forms get entirely neglected. The tendency to decontextualize textual content or linguistic forms from discursive interactions troubles the entire field of child language, but it is accentuated in the study of the acquisition of non-Indo-European languages that have more recently

Early bilingualism: children of immigrants in an english-language childcare center

Abstract: In this study, language views and home language practice of sixteen immigrant parents were documented and related to the dual language behaviors of their young children (ages 1:09 to 3;06) who were enrolled in a Toronto English-language childcare center. De Houwer’s (1999) model of early bilingualism was applied to the minority language context and external factors were used to explain the short-lived active bilingualism of the younger children and the passive bilingualism of the preschoolers. Presenting mothers and fathers with separate questionnaires proved to be a valuable methodological tool, which revealed similar language thinking but different home language practice. Immigrant mothers were more committed to their children’s L1 development than were fathers, a finding, which supports and extends the parental gender difference noted in earlier work (Gleason, 2005; Lyon, 1991; Lyon & Ellis, 1999). Negative effects of early L2 exposure on minority language children’s incomplete L1, reported in earlier studies, were confirmed. A concrete outcome of the present study was the creation mylanguage.ca, a website intended to help immigrant parents understand their children’s dual language learning. Even though the study presents a somewhat bleak picture of the continuation of L1, it concludes on an optimistic note, encouraging immigrant fathers to join forces with their L1committed spouses and to help provide a nurturing L1 environment for their young children.

Social Structure and Language Structure: the New Nomothetic Approach

Abstract: Recent studies have taken advantage of newly available, large-scale, cross-linguistic data and new statistical techniques to look at the relationship between language structure and social structure. These ‘nomothetic’ approaches contrast with more traditional approaches and a tension is observed between proponents of each method. We review some nomothetic studies and point out some challenges that must be overcome. However, we argue that nomothetic approaches can contribute to our understanding of the links between social structure and language structure if they address these challenges and are taken as part of a body of mutually supporting evidence. Nomothetic studies are a powerful tool for generating hypotheses that can go on to be corroborated and tested with experimental and theoretical approaches. These studies are highlighting the effect of interaction on language.

Attentional actions – an ecological-enactive account of utterances of concrete words

Abstract: textThis paper proposes an ecological-enactive account of utterances of concrete words-words used to indicate observable situations, events, objects, or characteristics. Building on the education of attention model of learning, utterances of concrete words are defined as attentional actions: A repeatable form of behaviour performed by a person to indicate (i.e. point out) a particular aspect of the current situation to someone in order to achieve something. Based on recent empirical evidence on categorical colour perception, attentional actions are proposed to constrain the ongoing phenotypic reorganisation of persons into task-specific devices. The paper ends by situating the proposed account in a wider theoretical perspective on language. This paper serves two purposes: First, it undermines the scope objection against the ecological-enactive approach, and second, it provides a novel explanation for recent empirical evidence with respect to the role of language in categorical colour perception.