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Language Acquisition: The State of the Art
Eric Wanner,Lila R. Gleitman +1 more
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This book discusses language acquisition through the lens of grammar, semantics, and ontology, and investigates the role of universals in the acquisition of gerunds and its role in lexical and syntactic development.Abstract:
List of contributors Preface Part I. The Logic of Language Acquisition: 1. Language acquisition: the state of the state of the art Lila R. Gleitman and Eric Wanner Part II. Preconditions for Language Acquisition: 2. The resilience of recursion: a study of a communication system developed without a conventional language model Susan Goldin-Meadow 3. Why short subjects are harder to find than long ones Charles Read and Peter Schreiber 4. On mechanisms of language acquisition: can features of the communicative environment account for development? Marilyn Shatz 5. Universal and particular in the acquisition of language Dan I. Slobin Part III. The Development of Grammar: 6. Functionalist approaches to grammar Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney 7. On what cases categories there are, why they are, and how they develop: an amalgam of a priori considerations, speculation and evidence from children Martin D. S. Braine and Judith A. Hardy 8. The child's construction of grammatical categories Michael Maratsos 9. The role of universals in the acquisition of gerunds Thomas Roeper 10. A principle theory for language acquisition Kenneth Wexler Part IV. Semantic and Lexical Development: 11. Reorganisational processes in lexical and syntactic development Melissa Bowerman 12. Semantic development: the state of the art Susan Carey 13. The young word maker: a case study of innovation in the child's lexicon Eve V. Clark Part V. Alternative Conceptions of Acquisition: 14. Some implications of the nonspecific bases of language T. G. Bever 15. Task specificity in language learning? Evidence from speech perception and American Sign Language Elissa L. Newport References Index.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
On the autonomy of language and gesture: evidence from the acquisition of personal pronouns in American Sign Language.
TL;DR: The study provides evidence for a discontinuity in the child's transition from prelinguistic to linguistic communication, and it is argued that aspects of linguistic structure and its acquisition appear to involve distinct, language-specific knowledge.
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Phoneme awareness and pathways into literacy: A comparison of German and American children
Virginia A. Mann,Heinz Wimmer +1 more
TL;DR: For instance, this paper found that the first and second-graders of the German children were more accurate decoders of pseudowords by the end of second grade, and the association between phoneme awareness and German decoding ability was weaker.
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Implicit statistical learning is directly associated with the acquisition of syntax.
TL;DR: The results showed that implicit statistical learning ability was directly associated with the long-term maintenance of the primed structure, the first empirical demonstration of a direct association between implicit statisticalLearning and syntactic acquisition in children.
On the different roles of vowels and consonants in speech processing and language acquisition
TL;DR: Within the tradition of generative grammar, the notion of result in phonology has as minimal requirement the account of all and only the existing patterns that concern the phenomenon under investigation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Infant preferences for infant-directed versus noninfant-directed playsongs and lullabies
TL;DR: The results indicate that mothers modify their singing in the presence of their infants, that infants attend to these changes, and that playsongs and lullabies are likely distinct musical styles differing in their rhythmic quality.