Download or read book Principle B VP Ellipsis and Interpretation in Child Grammar written by Rosalind Thornton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring expressions. The principle that is relevant for pronouns, Principle B, has provided a fertile ground for the study of linguistic development. Although it has long been known that children make certain kinds of errors that appear to contradict this principle, further experimental and theoretical investigation reveals that the child does know the grammatical principle, but implements the pragmatic knowledge incorrectly. In fact, discoveries concerning children's knowledge of Principle B are among the most well-known in the study of language acquisition because of the dissociation between syntactic and pragmatic knowledge (binding versus reference). In this book the authors deepen and extend the results of years of developmental investigation of Principle B by studying the interaction of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis--properties of "strict" and "sloppy" interpretation. This is the first experimental study of these topics in the developmental literature. The striking results show that detailed predictions from the "pragmatic deficiency" theory seem to be correct. Many novel experimental results concern the question of how children interpret pronouns, including elided pronouns, and how they understand VP ellipsis. The authors present the necessary theoretical background on Principle B, review and critique previous accounts of childrens errors, and present a novel account of why children misinterpret pronouns. The book will thus be of interest not only to readers interested in the development of the binding theory, but to those interested in the development of interpretation and reference by children.

Download or read book Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension written by Petra Hendriks and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else. Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults. Gathering contemporary insights from theoretical linguistic research, psycholinguistic studies and computational modeling, Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension presents a unified explanation of this phenomenon. “Through a lucid, comprehensive review of acquisition studies on reference-related phenomena, Petra Hendriks builds a striking case for the pervasiveness of asymmetries in comprehension/production. In her view, listeners systematically misunderstand what they hear, and speakers systematically fail to prevent such misunderstandings. She argues that linguistic theory should take stock of current psycholinguistic and developmental evidence on optionality and ambiguity, and recognize language as a signaling system. The arguments are compelling yet controversial: grammar does not specify a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning; and the demands of the mapping task differ for listeners and speakers. Her proposal is formalized within optimality theory, but researchers working outside this framework will still find it of great interest. In the language-as-code vs. language-as-signal debate, Hendriks puts the ball firmly in the other court.” Ana Pérez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Canada

Download or read book Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2005 written by Sergio Baauw and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conference series Going Romance is the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages, where ideas about language and linguistics and about Romance languages are put in an interactive perspective, giving space to both universality and Romance-internal variation. The current volume features a selection of 18 articles (out of 28) that were presented during the 19th meeting at Utrecht University, December 8-10, 2005. Included in this volume are four papers that were presented by invited speakers: Belletti, Delais-Roussarie & Rialland, Notley & Van der Linden & Hulk, and Ordóñez; these reflect both issues discussed in the general session as well as themes of the workshop on acquisition. A number of reknown Romance linguists (Saltarelli, di Sciullo, Zubizarreta) also contributed to the volume. In general, contributions bear on a variety of topics in the field of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and include the perspective from acquisition.

Download or read book New Directions in the Acquisition of Romance Languages written by João Costa and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book puts together a selection of papers presented at The Romance Turn V Workshop, held in Lisbon in 2012. The papers presented at the workshop discussed general problems in the field of Language Acquisition, with a special focus on data from several Romance varieties. The papers in the volume cover a wide array of topics and subfields of acquisition studies, including L1 and L2 acquisition, typical and atypical development, acquisition of syntax, semantics, and phonology.

Download or read book Grammatical Features and the Acquisition of Reference written by Sergio Baauw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses to what extent errors young children make with their interpretation of definite articles and pronouns are due to their immature pragmatic skills, and to what extent incomplete syntactic development plays a role.

Download or read book Empirical Perspectives on Anaphora Resolution written by Anke Holler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally, anaphor resolution focused on structural cues of the antecedent. Recently, the interaction between discourse factors and information structure affecting antecedent salience has been more thoroughly explored. This volume depicts selected peer-reviewed research papers that tackle issues in anaphor resolution from theoretical, empirical and experimental perspectives. These collected articles present a wide spectrum of cross-linguistic data (Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, Yurakaré) and also offer new results from L1 and L2 acquisition studies. Data interpretation span from typological to psycholinguistic viewpoints and are related to recent developments in linguistic theory. One data analysis puts the issue of anaphor resolution in a historical context. The experimental findings are complemented by reviews of the current literature on the role of discourse units. This volume gives a comprehensive overview of the state of discussion how the interaction between information structure and contextual discourse affects salience. That's why it will be welcomed by all linguists and psycholinguists who are theoretically and / or experimentally investigating several aspects of anaphor resolution.

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 Reference written by Ludovica Serratrice and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children’s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on the acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of referential acquisition will make the volume appealing to a wide audience of researchers, including linguists and psycholinguists working on phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of language development. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted by several of the contributors will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the relevance of typological differences. The state-of-the-art approach makes the research accessible to specialist and non-specialist researchers alike, and will provide an invaluable resource for graduate-level courses.

Download or read book Production Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language written by Angela Grimm and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabrück in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshop developed from the observation that children's production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.

Download or read book Syntax Theory and Analysis Volume 3 written by Tibor Kiss and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

Download or read book Minimal Answers written by Ana Lúcia Santos and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-11 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the acquisition of the syntax-discourse interface. It provides evidence that children acquiring European Portuguese have a very early ability to spontaneously produce VP ellipsis as answers to yes-no questions. It is also argued that the distribution of VP ellipsis in European Portuguese (including its co-existence with Null Complement Anaphora) supports the hypothesis that the identification condition on ellipsis is derivable from some innate knowledge of the syntax-discourse interface. Answers to yes-no questions also provide evidence concerning children’s interpretation of questions containing a cleft or the operator só ‘only’. The analysis of spontaneous production is complemented by a comprehension experiment, showing that children have two problems in the interpretation of these questions: (i) they do not understand that the cleft and só introduce a presupposition and (ii) they start with a default focus assignment strategy and may not access other focus interpretations.

Download or read book Language Acquisition and Development written by Cornelia Hamann and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection contains 34 papers originally presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA) conference in 2013, held in Oldenburg, Germany. It represents theoretically guided, high quality work, and provides impressive insights into state-of-the-art research in the fields of first and second language acquisition and developmental impairments. The studies brought together here cover a wide variety of different (mainly European) languages, focusing on the areas of phonology, morpho-syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces. Since their first publication, the proceedings of GALA have become an invaluable reference for cutting-edge research in First and Second Language Acquisition and its impairments – and this volume continues that tradition.

Download or read book Pronouns as Elsewhere Elements written by Elaine Grolla and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the acquisition of pronominal elements by monolingual children acquiring English and Brazilian Portuguese as their native languages. Previous studies have found non-adult behavior in children’s use and comprehension of pronouns in two syntactic contexts: resumptive pronouns in relative clauses and anaphoric pronouns bound by argumental noun phrases. Children perform similarly on both contexts, incorrectly accepting these cases at chance level. The age-range when this chance performance is detected is the same in both cases, around 4 and 5 years. The present study offers a unifying account for such behavior, assuming that bound pronouns are always last resort, whose use requires trans-derivational comparison. Along the lines of previous work done by Grodzinsky and Reinhart (1993), it is claimed that such a comparison is too demanding for young children, as their limited working memory cannot handle complex computations. Two sets of experiments were carried out, testing the same children on both contexts. The results show that those behaving at chance in one context had the same behavior in the other. They also showed that children had chance level performance not only with pronouns bound by referential antecedents, but also with quantified ones. These results are compatible with the view that children’s problems with bound pronouns are related to processing difficulties rather than to the lack of some linguistic knowledge.

Download or read book The Ups and Downs of Child Language written by Andrea Gualmini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new experimental evidence presented in The Ups and Downs of Child Language shows that it is possible to extend research on child language to children's semantic competence, adopting the same theoretical framework that has proven useful to the study of children's syntactic competence. Andrea Gualmini investigates the role of entailment relations for child language in a series of interconnected experiments assessing children's negation and their interpretation of words like or, every, and some. Comparing his study to other models of language acquisition and characterizing the observed differences between children and adults, Gualmini asserts that even in the domain of semantic competence there is no reason to assume that child language differs from adult language in ways that would exceed the boundary conditions imposed by Universal Grammar.

Download or read book Language Acquisition second edition written by Maria Teresa Guasti and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new edition of a comprehensive introduction to a rapidly developing field, combining developmental data with theory. How do children begin to use language? How does knowledge of language emerge in early infancy, and how does it grow? This textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to knowledge acquisition, drawing on empirical evidence and linguistic theory. The theoretical framework used is the generative theory of Universal Grammar; students should have some familiarity with concepts in linguistic research. Aimed at upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, the book offers end-of-chapter summaries, key words, study questions, and exercises. This second edition has been thoroughly updated, with new content throughout. It has been reorganized according to the three main components of language acquisition. The computational components and the interfaces are covered in chapters on structure building in the verbal and nominal domains, movement-derived structure, and the relation between syntax and semantics and semantic and pragmatic. The sensory motor interface is treated in chapters on infants' perception of language and on the acquisition of words. The intentional-conceptual interface is discussed in chapters on the acquisition of words. This edition features additional cross-linguistic content, a new focus on brain imaging findings and the motor aspect of language, new material on Williams and Down Syndromes and dyslexia, and a new chapter on bilingualism, early second language acquisition, and bimodalism. Revisions reflect the burgeoning research in the field. New pedagogical features include chapter outlines, summaries of chapters, hypotheses, and linguistic milestones; methodological information; explanatory boxes; and suggestions for further reading.

Download or read book Stevens Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Developmental and Social Psychology written by and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 991 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IV. Developmental & Social Psychology: Simona Ghetti (Volume Editor) (Topics covered include development of visual attention; self-evaluation; moral development; emotion-cognition interactions; person perception; memory; implicit social cognition; motivation group processes; development of scientific thinking; language acquisition; development of mathematical reasoning; emotion regulation; emotional development; development of theory of mind; category and conceptual development; attitudes; executive function.)

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics written by Jeffrey Lidz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 1041 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning. The book is divided into six parts. Parts I and II examine the acquisition of phonology and morphology respectively, with chapters covering topics such as phonotactics and syllable structure, prosodic phenomena, compound word formation, and processing continuous speech. Part III moves on to the acquisition of syntax, including argument structure, questions, mood alternations, and possessives. In Part IV, chapters consider semantic aspects of language acquisition, including the expression of genericity, quantification, and scalar implicature. Finally, Parts V and VI look at theories of learning and aspects of atypical language development respectively.