Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2014

This paper outlines an argument for how development in child speech and gesture could shed light on language evolution: child acquisition can be thought of as two types of acquisition, one of which goes extinct (gesture-first, Acquisition 1) and is replaced by another (gesture–speech unity, Acquisition 2). For ontogenesis, this implies that children acquire two languages, one of which is extinct, and which again goes extinct in ontogenesis (it continues as “gestures of silence” rather than as gestures of speech). There is no way to get from Acquisition 1 to Acquisition 2. They are on different tracks. Even when they converge in the same sentence, as they sometimes do, they alternate and do not combine. I propose that the 3~4 year timing of Acquisition 2 relates to the natural selection of a kind of gestural self–response I call “Mead’s Loop”, which took place in a certain psychological milieu at the origin of language. This milieu emerges now in ontogenesis at 3~4 years and with it Mead’s Loop. It is self-aware agency, on which a self-response depends. Other developments, such as theory of mind and shared intentionality, likewise depend on it and also emerge around the same time. The prefrontal cortex, anchoring a ring of language centers in the brain, matures at that point as well, another factor influencing the late timing. On the other hand, a third acquisition, speech evoking adult attachment, begins at (or even before) birth, as shown by a number of studies, and provides continuity through the two acquisitions and extinction.

This paper is a longitudinal investigation of adjective use by children aged 1;8−2;8, speaking Dutch, German, French, Hebrew, and Turkish, and by their caregivers. Each adjective token in transcripts of spontaneous speech was coded for semantic class. The development of adjective use in each semantic class was analysed by means of a multilevel logistic regression. The results show that toddlers and their parents use adjectives more often as the child grows older. However, this holds only for semantic classes denoting concrete concepts, such as physical properties, colour, and size. Adjectives denoting more abstract properties are barely used by children and parents throughout the first year of adjective acquisition. The correlations between adjective frequencies in child speech and child-directed speech are very strong at the beginning, but decrease with time as the child develops independent adjective use. The composition of early adjective lexicons is very similar in the five languages under study.

This paper presents the findings of a longitudinal study of seven Basque-French bilingual children and three monolingual Basque-speaking children concerning the acquisition of the morphological marking of the ergative case in Basque. Following the hypotheses put forth to account for the development of early bilingualism, the aim of the study was to establish whether bilingual children follow the same developmental sequences as monolingual children during the acquisition of the ergative case. The research protocol we have developed involves relatively unguided as well as constrained data focusing on the production of the ergative case in these two contexts. The data show significant inter-individual and inter-task differences in the production of the ergative case that contribute to some variation in language acquisition. The findings lead us to question classifications of early bilinguals based on age of acquisition alone.

The production of alternatives to factual events implies a counterfactual thinking in which reality is compared to an imagined view of what might have been. Previous studies in linguistics have analyzed counterfactuality in the context of conditional constructions if P (then) Q (Bates 1976; Bloom 1981; Reilly 1982; Au 1983; Liu 1985; Bernini 1994; Chini 1995; Schouten 2000; Yeh & Gentner 2005). This article aims to describe the use of simple conditional sentences in a mutation task by 30 Spanish-speaking learners of French. In quantitative terms, the frequency of use of the conditional tense in the learner group is similar to that of the French control group for the same task. In qualitative terms, however, the way in which learners use the conditional differs from the native pattern in several ways: the use of the conjunction -que at the head of the mutation core (i.e., Qu’elle aurait pu choisir son repas ‘That she could have chosen her meal’); the omission of a modal in the mutation core (i.e., Son supérieur aurait choisi les moules ‘Her superior would have chosen the mussels’) or the use of a modal verb elsewhere than in the past participle position (i.e., Elle pourrait avoir commandé elle-même ‘She could have ordered herself’). Our results show that in the production of counterfactual scenarios, the learners combine flexional features that match the native pattern with syntactic and lexical elements dominant in the organizational principles of information in the L1

This article addresses multilingual students’ lexical retrieval in L3 French at the university level. The aim was to study how Finnish L3 learners construct the meaning of cognate words that induce a high probability of cross-linguistic or intra-linguistic influence. The task was to orally translate 40 French words into L1 words (Finnish). These words were used to deliberately activate L3, L2 or L1 cognates. The corpus consisted of the productions of 12 first-year students (480 cases). The results show that participants gave the correct answer to a given word in 40% of cases. The results also show that intra-linguistic influence is the most probable source of both negative and positive effects and that cross-linguistic influence from L2 English was more important than that of L1. Nevertheless, well-learned common words seemed to resist this (combined) cross-linguistic influence. On the basis of the task, it can be concluded that cross-linguistic influence can vary considerably and that the source of the influence is not always clear. The analysis also revealed that on an oral translation task, the participants had recourse to different strategies based on form or form and meaning at various levels of success.