Download or read book Child Language written by Barbara C. Lust and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-21 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable way in which young children acquire language has long fascinated linguists and developmental psychologists alike. Language is a skill that we have essentially mastered by the age of three, and with incredible ease and speed, despite the complexity of the task. This accessible textbook introduces the field of child language acquisition, exploring language development from birth. Setting out the key theoretical debates, it considers questions such as what characteristics of the human mind make it possible to acquire language; how far acquisition is biologically programmed and how far it is influenced by our environment; what makes second language learning (in adulthood) different from first language acquisition; and whether the specific stages in language development are universal across languages. Clear and comprehensive, it is set to become a key text for all courses in child language acquisition, within linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive science.
Download or read book The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10 written by Carol Chomsky and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge written by Robert C. Berwick and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The computer model. Computation and language acquisition. The acquisition model. Learning phrase structure. Learning transformations. A theory of acquisition. Acquisition complexity. Learning theory: applications. Locality principles and acquisition.
Download or read book Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar written by David Lebeaux and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar attempts to re-think the ideal organization of the grammar, given its need to be learned. The book proposes a fundamental connection between the form of the adult grammar and the sequence of grammars which the child adopts in first language acquisition. Challenging the conventional division between language acquisition and syntax, this influential work constructs a new understanding of phrase structure, bringing syntactic data to bear on phrase structure composition. Two new phrase structure composition operations are proposed, Adjoin-a, which adjoins adjuncts into the structure, and Project-a, which fuses open class and closed class structures. The author also introduces the novel concept of subgrammars, successively larger grammars that take the child from the initial state to the adult grammar. This work will be of interest to those in the areas of syntax, language acquisition, learnability, and cognitive science in general.
Download or read book Child Language Acquisition written by Ben Ambridge and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction to the two major contrasting theoretical approaches: generativist and constructivist. For each debate, the predictions of the competing accounts are closely and even-handedly evaluated against the empirical data. The result is an evidence-based review of the central issues in language acquisition research that will constitute a valuable resource for students, teachers, course-builders and researchers alike.
Download or read book First Language Acquisition of Morphology and Syntax written by Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-06-26 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers comprising this volume focus on a broad range of acquisition phenomena (subject dislocation, structural case, word order, determiners, pronouns, quantifiers and logical words) from different languages and language combinations. These include languages with large numbers of speakers (French, German, Spanish) and less frequently spoken ones (Norwegian, Russian, Swiss-German, Hebrew, Basque and Serbo-Croatian) within different language acquisition scenarios and a wide range of populations. Most contributions adopt a common theoretical background within the generative approach with the aim to advance, discuss and critically analyse other research on first, bilingual and language impaired acquisition. The various sections of this stimulating volume reflect different theoretical and methodological perspectives of current research investigating morphology and syntax and offer diverging interpretations.
Download or read book The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages written by Vincent Torrens and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes a selection of papers that address a wide range of acquisition phenomena from different Romance languages and all share a common theoretical approach based on the Principles and Parameters theory. They favour, discuss and sometimes challenge traditional explanations of first and second language acquisition in terms of maturation of general principles universal to all languages. They all depart from the view that language acquisition can be explained in terms of learning language specific rules, constraints or structures. The different parts into which this volume is organized reflect different approaches that current research has offered, which deal with issues of development of reflexive pronouns, determiners, clitics, verbs, auxiliaries, Inflection, wh-movement, rssumptive pronouns, topic and focus, mood, the syntax/discourse interface, topic and focus, and null arguments.
Download or read book Language Acquisition written by Susan Foster-Cohen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-16 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a snapshot of the field of language acquisition at the beginning of the 21st Century. It represents the multiplicity of approaches that characterize the field and provides a review of current topics and debates, as well as addressing some of the connections between sub-fields and possible future directions for research.
Download or read book Acquisition of Second Language Syntax written by Susan Braidi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the questions asked about the L2 acquisition process within different research paradigms, examines the results found in each approach, and evaluates the contributions of each to our understanding of L2 acquisition of syntax and to possible implications for L2 instruction.
Download or read book The Acquisition of Syntax written by Marc-Ariel Friedemann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a collection of studies that survey recent research in developmental linguistics, illustrating the fruitful interaction between comparative syntax and language acquisition. The contributors each analyse a well defined range of acquisition data, aiming to derive them from primitive differences between child and adult grammar. The book covers cross-linguistic and cross-categorial phenomena, shedding light on major developments in this novel and rapidly growing field. Extensions to second language acquisition and neuropathology are also suggested.
Download or read book Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory written by A.E. Pierce and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of language acquisition is a young but increasingly active field. Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory presents one of the first detailed studies of comparative syntax acquisition. It is informed by the view that linguists and acquisitionists are essentially working on the same problem, that of explaining grammar learnability. The author takes cross-linguistic data from child language as evidence for recent proposals in syntactic theory. Developments in the structure of children's sentences during the first few years of life are traced to changes in the setting of specific grammatical parameters. Some surprising differences between the early child grammars of French and English are uncovered, differences that can only be explained on the basis of subtle distinctions in inflectional structure. This motivates the author's claim that functional or nonthematic categories are represented in the grammars of very young children. The book also explores the relationship between acquisition and diachronic change in French and English. It is argued that findings in acquisition, when viewed from a parameter setting perspective, provide answers to important questions arising in the study of language change. The book promises to be of interest to all those involved in the formal, psychological or historical study of linguistic knowledge.
Download or read book Syntactic Development written by William O'Grady and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syntactic Development presents a broad critical survey of the research literature on child language development. Giving balanced coverage to both theoretical and empirical issues, William O'Grady constructs an up-to-date picture of how children acquire the syntax of English. Part 1 offers an overview of the developmental data pertaining to a range of syntactic phenomena, including word order, subject drop, embedded clauses, wh-questions, inversion, relative clauses, passives, and anaphora. Part 2 considers the various theories that have been advanced to explain the facts of development as well as the learnability problem, reporting on work in the mainstream formalist framework but also considering the results of alternative approaches. Covering a wide range of perspectives in the modern study of syntactic development, this book is an invaluable reference for specialists in the field of language acquisition and provides an excellent introduction to the acquisition of syntax for students and researchers in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.
Download or read book Investigations in Universal Grammar written by Stephen Crain and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammar, a theory of the human faculty for language. The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Elicited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Judgment task, a comprehension task. Their methodologies are designed to overcome the numerous obstacles to empirical investigation of children's language competence. They produce research results that are more reproducible and less likely to be dismissed as an artifact of improper experimental procedure. In the first section of the book, the authors examine the fundamental assumptions that guide research in this area; they present both a theory of linguistic competence and a model of language processing. In the following two sections, they discuss in detail their two experimental techniques.
Download or read book Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar written by Teun Hoekstra and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of essays on the native and non-native acquisition of syntax within the Principles and Parameters framework. In line with current methodology in the study of adult grammars, language acquisition is studied here from a comparative perspective. The unifying theme is the issue of the 'initial state' of grammatical knowledge: For native language, the important controversy is that between the Continuity approach, which holds that Universal Grammar is essentially constant throughout development, and the Maturation approach, which maintains that portions of UG are subject to maturation. For non-native language, the theme of initial states concerns the extent of native-grammar influence. Different views regarding the continuity question are defended in the papers on first language acquisition. Evidence from the acquisition of, inter alia, Bernese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian and Japanese, is brought to bear on issues pertaining to clause structure, null subjects, verb position, negation, Case marking, modality, non-finite sentences, root questions, long-distance questions and scrambling. The views defended on the initial state of (adult) second language acquisition also differ: from complete L1 influence to different versions of partial L1 influence. While the target language is German in these studies, the native language varies: Korean, Spanish and Turkish. Analyses invoke UG principles to account for verb placement, null subjects, verbal morphology and Case marking. Though many issues remain, the volume highlights the growing ties between formal linguistics and language acquisition research. Such an approach provides the foundation for asking the right questions and putting them to empirical test.
Download or read book The Acquisition of French written by Philippe Prévost and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a thorough description of morphosyntactic knowledge developed by learners of French in four different learning situations first language (L1) acquisition, second (L2) language acquisition, bilingualism, and acquisition by children with Specific Language Impairment within the theoretical framework of generative grammar. This approach allows for multiple comparisons across acquisition contexts, which provides the reader with invaluable insights into the nature of the acquisition process. The book is divided into four parts each dealing with a major morphosyntactic domain of acquisition: the verbal domain, the pronominal domain, the nominal domain, and the CP domain. Each part contains four chapters, the first one presenting an overview of the basic facts and analyses of the relevant properties of French, and the next three focusing on the different acquisition contexts. This book will be useful to anyone interested in the acquisition of French and in language development in general. It is also meant to stimulate cross-linguistic research from a theoretical perspective."
Download or read book The Acquisition of Verbs at the Syntax Semantics Interface written by Paolo Lorusso and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents theoretical and experimental analyses of the nature of early verbs. At around the age of two years old, children start to combine words and produce their first verbs. Verbal items appear later than nouns in a child’s speech and refer to the relational concepts in the world that are represented in syntax through the argument structure. The central set of data investigated here is based on the analysis of the features of first verbal productions in Italian. Since the appearance of verbs implies the mastery of a mapping procedure between syntactic positions and semantic roles, the syntactic regularities found for each lexical verb class suggest that the relation at the syntax-semantics interface is well-established early on. The non-adult-like sentences are those which involve the mastery of the scope-discourse semantic interface or higher functional syntactic categories. The analysis of the delay in the production and comprehension of some constructions here uncovers some general characteristics of language acquisition devices.
Download or read book The Acquisition of Italian written by Adriana Belletti and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major contribution to the study of language acquisition and language development inspired by theoretical linguistics has been made by research on the acquisition of Italian syntax. This book offers an updated overview of results from theory-driven experimental and corpus-based research on the acquisition of Italian in different modes (monolingual, early and late L2, SLI, etc.), as well as exploring possible developments for future research. The book focuses on experimental studies which address research questions generated by linguistic theory, providing a detailed illustration of the fruitful interaction between linguistic theorizing and developmental studies. The authors are leading figures in theoretical linguistics and language acquisition; their own work is featured in the research presented here. Students and advanced researchers will benefit from the systematic review offered by this book and the critical assessment of the field that it provides.
