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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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The Ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition (Target article + commentaries)
Caroline F. Rowland,Ben Ambridge +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that any successful account of language acquisition must be frequency sensitive to the extent that it can explain the effects documented in this review, and outline some types of account that do and do not meet this criterion.
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Local and topological processing in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children.
Michèle Kail,Agnès Charvillat +1 more
TL;DR: The analysis of cue strengths reveals that, while for French children a linguistic cue is all the stronger the more topological it is, the fact that Spanish children's latencies are always shorter than those of French children must be related to the effect of the preposition a which permits efficient role assignments with minimal cost.
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Determinants of Cue Strength in Adult First and Second Language Speakers of French.
TL;DR: The authors investigated the determinants of adult usage of various syntactic and semantic cues in sentence interpretation in French and found that the failure of English word order strategies to correctly interpret many naturally occurring French sentences may be responsible for the adaptation of strategies appropriate to the second language.
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Learning To Represent Word Meaning: What Initial Training Events Reveal about Children's Developing Action Verb Concepts.
TL;DR: This paper explored how three different initial training contexts affect children's and adults' interpretation of novel action verbs and found that 3-year-olds' interpretations were significantly context specific, preferentially favoring instrument and outcome elements of meaning in one context, but manner in another, and consistently, though moderately biased to favor the manner of action.