Download or read book Structure Building Processes and Functional Categories in Language Acquisition written by Sixta Quaßdorf and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2003-10-07 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: very good, University of Basel (English Seminar Basel), course: Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, language: English, abstract: Language acquisition seems to be subject to a paradox like probably all matters connected with the human language: every-one acquires his or her first language with relative ease in a few years – it is a matter of course (except if disabilities or social deprivations obstruct this natural process) - but even the most learned scholars cannot offer a satisfactory and all-encompassing explanation about how this process works. A number of different approaches exists which can be subsumed under the headings "behaviourist", "interactionist", "nativist", "cognitivist" or the like1, and each of these major currents bifurcates into sub-theories which often enough seem to be incompatible with each other again. In this essay I am going to present and discuss two hypotheses of language acquisition which follow the generative approach, i.e. which presuppose the existence of an innate language acquisition device (LAD) helping us solve the task of acquiring the complicated linguistic system by providing a "ready-made" underlying fundamental structure, the Universal Grammar (UG). Accordingly Andrew Radford, and Harald Clahsen et al. assume that the rules of UG are with the child from the very beginning, yet that the final build-up of the internal grammatical structure is triggered by lexical learning processes. Radford identifies three major stages of developmental phases with children acquiring English syntax, whereas Clahsen et al., studying children acquiring German, find plausible explanations for the developmental process by a notion of underspecified functional categories. 1 cf. Crystal p. 234 f., Clahsen p. xv

Download or read book The Acquisition of Functional Categories written by Joseph Galasso and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Language Acquisition and the Functional Category System written by Peter Jordens and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on spontaneous language acquisition both in children learning their mother tongue and in adults learning a second language has shown that language development proceeds in a stagewise manner. Learner utterances are accounted for in terms of so-called 'learner languages'. Learner languages of both children and adults are language systems that are initially rather simple. The present monograph shows how these learner languages develop both in child L1 and in adult L2 Dutch. At the initial stage of both L1 and L2 Dutch, learner systems are lexical systems. This means that utterance structure is determined by the lexical projection of a predicate-argument structure, while the functional properties of the target language are absent. At some point in acquisition, this lexical-semantic system develops into a target-like system. With this target-like system, learners have reached a stage at which their language system has the morpho-syntactic features to express the functional properties of finiteness and topicality. Evidence of this is word order variation and the use of linguistic elements such as auxiliaries, tense, and agreement markers and determiners. Looking at this process of language acquisition from a functional point of view, the author focuses on questions such as the following. What is the driving force behind the process that causes learners to give up a simple lexical-semantic system in favour of a functional-pragmatic one? What is the added value of linguistic features such as the morpho-syntactic properties of inflection, word order variation, and definiteness?

Download or read book Functional Categories in Learner Language written by Christine Dimroth and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-12-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language acquisition is a developmental process. Research on spontaneous processes of both children learning their mother tongue and adults learning a second language has shown that particular stages of acquisition can be discriminated. Initially, learner utterances can be accounted for in terms of a language system that is relatively simple. In studies on second language acquisition this learner system is called the Basic Variety (Klein and Perdue 1997). Utterance structure of the Basic Variety is determined by a grammar which consists of lexical structures that are constrained, for example, by semantic principles such as "The NP-referent with highest control comes first" and a pragmatic principle such as "Focus expression last". At some point in acquisition this lexical-semantic system is given up in favour of a target-like system with morpho-syntactic features to express the functional properties of finiteness, topicality, the determiner system, etc. Insights into how this process evolves may also provide an answer to the question of why it takes place. Within this functional perspective on language acquisition research focuses on questions such as the following. 1. What is the driving force behind the process that causes learners to give up a simple lexical-semantic system in favour of a morpho-syntactic functional category system? 2. What is the added value of morpho-syntactic properties of inflection, word-order variation, definiteness and agreement? 3. Why is it that in cases of specific language impairment it is mainly morpho-syntactic properties of the target language that are affected?

Download or read book Functional Categories in Language Acquisition written by Annette Hohenberger and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the acquisition of Functional Categories (e.g., INFL (AGR, TNS), DET, COMP) from the perspective of self-organization in generative grammar. Language is conceived of as a dynamical system which evolves in time and bifurcates when critical thresholds are reached. The emergence of syntax as evidenced by the acquisition of Functional Categories is the major bifurcation in child language acquisition. Target values of syntactic parameters are attractors which children approach on individual trajectories. A proposed tripartite scenario of change - from a simple stable state A, via symmetry-breaking in a liminal phase B characterized by variation, to a new complex stable state C - accounts for the dynamics in early grammatical development. Traditional generative issues, such as the acquisition of case-marking, finiteness, V2, and wh-questions, are discussed as well as new issues, such as functional neologisms, and sentential blends. Dynamical notions like precursor, oscillation, symmetry-breaking, and trigger are important explanatory tools. The growing child phrase marker is a fractal mental object which represents syntactic information by way of self-similar extended projections. The book addresses researchers in language acquisition from various theoretical camps: generative, functional, connectionist, by giving new answers to old questions in the light of a novel challenging theory: self-organization.

Download or read book Language Acquisition and the Functional Category System written by Peter Jordens and published by ISSN. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finiteness, as a concept of information structure, determines the perspective from which the present investigation has been carried out. The linguistic status of finiteness in learner languages changes as a function of language development. This accounts for the fact that at consecutive stages of acquisition finiteness is expressed differently. Finiteness, as it plays a role at different stages of development, serves thus as the anchoring point from which the dynamics of the process of language development both in L1 and L2 learners can be explained. The present study shows that in this process the auxiliary verb (heb/heeft) serves a crucial role due to its function as a topicalization device.

Download or read book Categories and Processes in Language Acquisition written by Yonata Levy and published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This book was released on 1988 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Feature Based Syntax of Functional Categories written by Michael Hegarty and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops ideas of Minimalist syntax to derive functional categories from the partially-ordered features expressed by functional elements, thereby dispensing with functional categories as primitives of the theory. It generalizes attempts to do this in the literature, while drawing significant empirical consequences from general constraints formulated to block overgeneration. The resulting theory of the construction of functional categories is applied to various problems in syntactic analysis and comparative and historical syntax, including variation across Germanic languages in patterns of verb-second and in the occurrence of expletive subjects in existential constructions, verb positions in Old and Middle English, problems regarding the placement of clitic pronouns in Romance languages and Modern Greek, and some previously unexamined structures of reduced clause coordination in colloquial English. Facts from early stages of the acquisition of syntax are shown to follow from the mechanisms for the projection of functional features as functional categories, exercised before all of the features for a language, along with their ordering and feature co-occurrence restrictions, have been acquired. It is observed that child acquisition of functional elements exhibits successive developmental stages, each characterized by the number of clausal functional elements which can be represented together within a clause. This, and facts regarding the lag in development of functional categories by children with specific language impairment, are shown to be not entirely reducible to limitations in working memory or processing capacity, but to depend in part on the growth of representational resources for the projection of functional categories.

Download or read book The Role of Functional Categories in First Language Acquisition written by Yarden Kedar and published by VDM Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is part of an ongoing and exciting scientific quest for uncovering the mechanisms that guide the acquisition and use of language in the human species. It focuses on a key mystery - children's acquisition of syntax, which is a critical component in all languages. The book investigates when and how some core syntactic constituents become accessible to the child, in particular, Functional Categories - the grammatical categories that are realized in language by a set of function words (e.g., the, and) and verb inflections. A comprehensive review on functional categories is followed by new empirical findings, which reveal that already around one year of age, infants incorporate syntactic information regarding function words in sentence processing. This grammatical sensitivity demonstrates that content categories (e.g., nouns, verbs) and functional categories are developing in tandem during early periods in language acquisition. The book provides new information about the linguistic development of children and is thus intended for both students and researchers in the cognitive sciences, as well as for a general audience, including health educators, parents, and teachers.

Download or read book The Prefunctional Stage of First Language Acquisition written by Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1996 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Constraints on Language Acquisition written by Helen Tager-Flusberg and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of research most scholars generally agree that language acquisition is a complex and multifaceted process that involves the interaction of innate biologically-based mechanisms devoted to language, other non-linguistic cognitive and social mechanisms, linguistic input, and information about the social and physical world. Theoretical work in the field of language acquisition now needs to focus in greater depth and detail on some specific aspects of this general model, which is the main goal of this book. The chapters in this volume provide some new insights into one of the most remarkable accomplishments achieved by almost all children. The particular questions that are raised by contributors include: * What kinds of constraints operate on the process of language development? * Which aspects of the acquisition process depend on language-specific mechanisms? * Are there critical brain structures necessary for the acquisition of language? * What role do cognitive and social mechanisms play in language development? * How critical is perceptual input about the physical and social world? * What is the specific role played by linguistic input in the child's construction of a linguistic system? Questions are addressed from the perspective of children who come to the task of acquiring language with many hurdles to overcome, including deafness and blindness, mental retardation, autism, and prenatal or perinatal brain damage involving the left hemisphere. Each section contributes some insight on how an innate language-specific biological substrate interacts with cognitive and social factors, as well as external information, to support the child's construction of a linguistic system. Studies of atypical children offer a singular contribution to this enterprise by allowing us to see the specific influences of each component, and in turn, they shed new light on how all children are able to acquire language so effortlessly and during such a brief period of development.

Download or read book Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development written by Melissa Bowerman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-11 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars examine the relationship between child language acquisition and cognitive development.

Download or read book Language Acquisition and Development written by Misha Becker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the study of children's language development that provides a uniquely accessible perspective on generative/universal grammar–based approaches. How children acquire language so quickly, easily, and uniformly is one of the great mysteries of the human experience. The theory of Universal Grammar suggests that one reason for the relative ease of early language acquisition is that children are born with a predisposition to create a grammar. This textbook offers an introduction to the study of children's acquisition and development of language from a generative/universal grammar–based theoretical perspective, providing comprehensive coverage of children's acquisition while presenting core concepts crucial to understanding generative linguistics more broadly. After laying the theoretical groundwork, including consideration of alternative frameworks, the book explores the development of the sound system of language—children's perception and production of speech sound; examines how words are learned (lexical semantics) and how words are formed (morphology); investigates sentence structure (syntax), including argument structure, functional structure, and tense; considers such “nontypical” circumstances as acquiring a first language past infancy and early childhood, without the abilities to hear or see, and with certain cognitive disorders; and studies bilingual language acquisition, both simultaneously and in sequence. Each chapter offers a summary section, suggestions for further reading, and exercises designed to test students' understanding of the material and provide opportunities to practice analyzing children's language. Appendixes provide charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet (with links to websites that allow students to listen to the sounds associated with these symbols) and a summary of selected experimental methodologies.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition written by Julia Herschensohn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is language and how can we investigate its acquisition by children or adults? What perspectives exist from which to view acquisition? What internal constraints and external factors shape acquisition? What are the properties of interlanguage systems? This comprehensive 31-chapter handbook is an authoritative survey of second language acquisition (SLA). Its multi-perspective synopsis on recent developments in SLA research provides significant contributions by established experts and widely recognized younger talent. It covers cutting edge and emerging areas of enquiry not treated elsewhere in a single handbook, including third language acquisition, electronic communication, incomplete first language acquisition, alphabetic literacy and SLA, affect and the brain, discourse and identity. Written to be accessible to newcomers as well as experienced scholars of SLA, the Handbook is organised into six thematic sections, each with an editor-written introduction.

Download or read book Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science written by Henri Cohen and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2005-10-25 with total page 1136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Categorization, the basic cognitive process of arranging objects into categories, is a fundamental process in human and machine intelligence and is central to investigations and research in cognitive science. Until now, categorization has been approached from singular disciplinary perspectives with little overlap or communication between the disciplines involved (Linguistics, Psychology, Philosophy, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Cognitive Anthropology). Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre have gathered together a stellar collection of contributors in this unique, ambitious attempt to bring together converging disciplinary and conceptual perspectives on this topic. "Categorization is a key concept across the range of cognitive sciences, including linguistics and philosophy, yet hitherto it has been hard to find accounts that go beyond the concerns of one or two individual disciplines. The Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science provides just the sort of interdisciplinary approach that is necessary to synthesize knowledge from the different fields and provide the basis for future innovation." Professor Bernard Comrie, Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany "Anyone concerned with language, semantics, or categorization will want to have this encyclopedic collection." Professor Eleanor Rosch, Dept of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Download or read book Language Acquisition Across Linguistic and Cognitive Systems written by Michèle Kail and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why do all children learn language? Why do some have difficulties while others are early language learners? What are the consequences of early bilingualism? Is it possible to reach native-like competence in a foreign language? Although we still cannot fully answer these questions, research during the last two decades has begun to solve some pieces of the puzzle. This book proposes an interdisciplinary collection of writings from some of the best specialists across several fields in cognitive science, offering a wide sample of recent advances in the study of first language acquisition, bilingualism, second language acquisition, and disorders of oral language. It is addressed to all researchers and students interested in language acquisition, as well as to teachers, clinicians and parents, who will find therein many new findings and varied methodological approaches, as well as challenging questions that are still debated and in need of further research.

Download or read book The Prefunctional Stage of First Language Acquistion RLE Linguistics C Applied Linguistics written by Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a theory of first language acquisition in the syntactic framework of the theory of Universal Grammar. It addresses issues related to the earliest stage of development which ends roughly around the child’s second birthday. The theory put forward capitalises on the traditional observation that early child grammars characteristically lack lexical and morphological elements which belong to the ‘closed-class’ system. This book provides an account of the grammatical differences between the set of functional categories and the substantive categories.