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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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Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, part I: Theoretical considerations
John Tooby,Leda Cosmides +1 more
TL;DR: The human psyche appears to consist of a large number of mechanisms, many or most of which are special purpose and domain-specific as mentioned in this paper, and the output of these mechanisms taken together constitutes the private culture of each individual, and the interactions of these private cultures lead to the cross-individual patterns of similarity that have led anthropologists to think typologically of social groups as having "a" culture.
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Metaphor as Structure Mapping: The Relational Shift.
TL;DR: Gentner et al. as discussed by the authors used structure-mapping theory to make distinctions among kinds of metaphors and found that children can understand metaphors based on shared object attributes before those based on a shared relational structure.
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Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density
TL;DR: A principle of efficient language production based on information theoretic considerations is proposed: Uniform Information Density predicts that language production is affected by a preference to distribute information uniformly across the linguistic signal, and this prediction is tested against data from syntactic reduction.
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The eyes have it: lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm.
TL;DR: A new method to assess language comprehension in infants and young children is introduced in three experiments which test separately for the comprehension of nouns, verbs, and word order.
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From rote learning to system building: acquiring verb morphology in children and connectionist nets
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that the network undergoes reorganizations that result in a shift from a mode of rote learning to a systematic treatment of verbs, and it is concluded that a connectionist approach offers a viable alternative account of the acquisition of English verb morphology.