Trends in Language Acquisition Research (vols. 1–16, 2001–2015)

This book examines the language development of two children from the ages of two till four, who are growing up exposed to English, Swiss German and French. Its aim is to ascertain the importance of different environmental factors in fostering active trilingualism. These factors include the quantity of input for each language, whether or not the societal language is spoken in the home, and the conversational style of the caregivers. Although increasing numbers of children are being raised trilingually, research in this field is scarce; this study thus makes an important contribution to our knowledge of trilingual language acquisition. A special point of interest lies in a comparison of the acquisition of two minority languages by a single child, since this allows us to pinpoint more precisely how the development of non-societal languages can be influenced. This book will be of considerable interest to researchers and students working on multilingualism and language acquisition alike.

Communication in Autism adopts a multidisciplinary approach to explore one of the most common developmental disorders associated with communication impairment. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about communication in autism is that variation is as extreme as it could possibly be. While some individuals with autism have age-appropriate language, a number have exceptional language skills; others have little or no spoken language. In between these extremes are individuals who experience significant linguistic impairments. These impairments can affect peer relations and literacy skills. The chapters in this volume provide comprehensive coverage of both the theoretical underpinnings and the practical aspects of autistic communication. The result is a volume that showcases the wide range of methodologies being used in this field of research. It is invaluable for scientists, service providers, parents, individuals with autism, and students learning about communication and autism (e.g., in psychology, speech pathology, and education).

Understanding how communicative goals impact and drive the learning process has been a long-standing issue in the field of language acquisition. Recent years have seen renewed interest in the social and pragmatic aspects of language learning: the way interaction shapes what and how children learn. In this volume, we bring together researchers working on interaction in different domains to present a cohesive overview of ongoing interactional research. The studies address the diversity of the environments children learn in; the role of para-linguistic information; the pragmatic forces driving language learning; and the way communicative pressures impact language use and change. Using observational, empirical and computational findings, this volume highlights the effect of interpersonal communication on what children hear and what they learn. This anthology is inspired by and dedicated to Prof. Eve V. Clark – a pioneer in all matters related to language acquisition – and a major force in establishing interaction and communication as crucial aspects of language learning.

Ergativity is one of the main challenges both for linguistic and acquisition theories. This book is unique, taking a cross-linguistic approach to the acquisition of ergativity in a large variety of typologically distinct languages. The chapters cover languages from different families and from different geographic areas with different expressions of ergativity. Each chapter includes a description of ergativity in the language(s), the nature of the input, the social context of acquisition and developmental patterns. Comparisons of the acquisition process across closely related languages are made, change in progress of the ergative systems is discussed and, for one language, acquisition by bilingual and monolingual children is compared. The volume will be of particular interest to language acquisition researchers, linguists, psycholinguists and cognitive scientists.

Are all children exposed to the same linguistic input, and do they follow the same route in acquisition? The answer is no: The language that children hear differs even within a social class or cultural setting, as do the paths individual children take. The linguistic signal itself is also variable, both within and across speakers - the same sound is different across words; the same speech act can be realized with different constructions. The challenge here is to explain, given their diversity of experience, how children arrive at similar generalizations about their first language. This volume brings together studies of phonology, morphology, and syntax in development, to present a new perspective on how experience and variation shape children's linguistic generalizations. The papers deal with variation in forms, learning processes, and speaker features, and assess the impact of variation on the mechanisms and outcomes of language learning.

This book establishes a dialog between experimental psychology and electrophysiology in the study of infant language development. On the one hand, traditional methods of investigation into language development have reached a high level of refinement despite being confined to observing infants’ overt behavioral responses. On the other hand, more recent methods such as neuroimaging and, in particular, event-related potentials provide access to implicit responses from the infant brain while often relying on rather gross experimental contrasts. The aims of this book are both to provide neuroscientists with an overview of the ingenious behavioral paradigms that have been developed in the field of language development and to introduce the power of neurophysiological indices to behavioral experimentalists. The two approaches are compared at various levels of processing: phonetic discrimination, categorical perception, speech segmentation, syllable and word recognition, semantic priming. A general discussion brings together the two approaches, highlights their respective contributions and limitations and proposes constructive ideas for future integration.

This volume brings together work by scholars with backgrounds in linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, education, and language pathology. As such, the book adds psycholinguistic and crosslinguistic perspectives to the clinical and classroom approaches that have dominated the study of “later language development”. Incorporating insights from prior language acquisition research, it goes beyond preschool age to consider both isolated utterances and extended discourse, conversational interactions and monologic text construction, and both written and spoken language use from early school-age across adolescence. Data from French, Hebrew, Spanish, and Swedish as well as English cover varied domains: morphology and lexicon, syntax and verb–argument structure, as well as peer interaction, spelling, processing of on-line writing, and reading poetry. The epilogue suggests explanations for the findings documented. Across the book, the authors show how cognitive and social maturation combines with increased literacy in the path taken by schoolchildren and adolescents towards the flexible deployment of a growing repertoire of lexical elements in varied morpho-syntactic constructions and different discourse contexts that constitutes the hallmark of maturely proficient language use.

The chapters in this volume provide the first comprehensive overview of trends in research on early phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic development in children acquiring two (or more) languages simultaneously. Ongoing as well as emerging issues are examined and discussed by leading researchers in the field. Collectively, these studies extend our knowledge of bilingual acquisition and broaden our understanding of the child's ability to acquire and use language. This volume is of interest to researchers working on language acquisition by monolingual and bilingual children, graduate students of psychology, linguistics and communication sciences, and researchers and professionals concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of bilingual children with language impairment.