Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2024

A key question in child language research is the relative impact of language-universal and language-specific factors during acquisition, and a prolific domain in addressing it has been the expression of motion events. This study examines motion event descriptions by 96 children and 24 adult speakers of Uyghur, an understudied Turkic language. The data were analysed for lexicalisation pattern, semantic density and syntactic packaging. Findings suggest that Uyghur children’s acquisition of motion expressions is shaped by both language-universal (e.g. difficulty with expressing events involving boundary crossing) and language-specific factors (e.g. early sensitivity to adult lexicalisation pattern, use of typologically congruent syntactic packaging strategies). Interestingly, while children reached adult levels for measures of lexicalisation pattern and syntactic packaging, they fell short in terms of semantic density. We propose that these measures may tap into different aspects of linguistic knowledge, which may be on different developmental timelines.

Complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) have become established measures of L2 production, being used extensively to gauge learning outcomes in teen and adult learners. Nonetheless, very few studies have looked into longitudinal development and even less so with young learners. The present study seeks to explore the development of CAF in the oral production of eight L1 French young learners of EFL enrolled in a secondary school in a suburb of Paris, France, over a two-year span. Oral production was elicited by means of a picture narrative at regular intervals every 3-4 months. The findings indicate that CAF dimensions build on each other in the early stages of EFL and that children are capable of parallel processing in L2 production, attending to all three dimensions simultaneously. Task repetition and characteristics seem to mitigate trade-offs among CAF.

Previous research has found that vocal feedback, referred to as backchannels, has positive effects on social interaction, especially by indicating listener engagement. For second language (L2) learners, however, backchannels can be challenging, because their use is bound by cultural and language-specific conventions. This study focuses on backchannels as used in dyadic task-oriented dialogue of native speakers of German and native speakers of Italian, the latter both in their native (L1) Italian and in their L2 German, at two proficiency levels. We provide an in-depth multidimensional analysis of backchannel rate, duration, intonation, lexical form, and turn-taking function. We found that dyad-specific behaviour generally outweighs effects of proficiency. Despite considerable variability across dyads, learners tended to reproduce behaviour from their L1 in their L2 in the form of a complex mapping between intonation, lexical form and turn-taking function.

Cette étude concerne la gestion de la concurrence entre référents et l’usage d’expressions référentielles (ER) lors de reprises immédiates, dans deux conditions d’interlocution : des mères racontant une histoire avec leur enfant, comparées à d’autres adultes la racontant à un expérimentateur. Les résultats montrent l’influence combinée de plusieurs facteurs sur les choix des pronoms, des noms et des dislocations : la situation d’interlocution, le statut des personnages, le degré de concurrence entre ceux-ci et la fonction syntaxique. L’influence de chaque facteur varie selon les types d’unités. De plus, les mères manifestent des spécificités, en particulier dans l’usage des dislocations et dans la réduction des risques de concurrence entre référents. Ces spécificités sont interprétées comme relevant de l’étayage qu’elles fournissent à leurs enfants pour soutenir leur participation dans la tâche, et comme potentiels modèles auxquels ils sont exposés.