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Trends in Language Acquisition Research
TiLAR publishes monographs, edited volumes and text books on theoretical and methodological issues in the field of child language research. The focus of the series is on original research on all aspects of the scientific study of language behavior in children, linking different areas of research including linguistics, psychology & cognitive science.
21 - 32 of 32 results
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Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings
Editor(s): Sharon Armon-Lotem and Kleanthes K. GrohmannPublication Date November 2021More LessCOST Action IS0804 “Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment” aimed to profile bilingual specific language impairment (biSLI) by establishing a network for research on the linguistic and cognitive abilities of bilingual children with SLI across different migrant communities. A battery of tools for Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) was designed within the Action to achieve these aims, including the Parental Bilingual Questionnaire, the Sentence Repetition Task, the Crosslinguistic Lexical Tasks, the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, and two nonword repetition tasks that are not language-specific. The chapters in this volume present research on one or more of the LITMUS tasks in bilingual children with typical language development and on use of the LITMUS testing battery for identifying possible language impairment. The work presented here will be of interest for researchers and clinicians alike, and have profound impact in our understanding of bilingual language development and impairment.
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Language in Interaction
Editor(s): Inbal Arnon, Marisa Casillas, Chigusa Kurumada and Bruno EstigarribiaPublication Date July 2014More LessUnderstanding 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.
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Linguistic Rhythm and Literacy
Editor(s): Jenny Thomson and Linda JarmulowiczPublication Date March 2016More LessThe intersection of sound processing, speech production, and literacy is a promising and growing area of study. This volume showcases recent empirical research exploring the association between linguistic rhythm and reading. Linguistic rhythm does not easily assume a single definition, which is part of the motivation for this volume, and subsumes constructs including suprasegmental phonology, prosody, intonation and stress. The twelve papers collected here are the product of a gathering of like-minded researchers from the disciplines of linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience and education. The resulting chapters cover topics including the following: developmental interactions between linguistic rhythm and reading and spelling, relationships between rhythm and dyslexia, and cross-linguistic variation in the relationship between lexical stress and orthography. This book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in the fields of linguistics, human communication, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology and literacy.
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Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition
Editor(s): Danielle MatthewsPublication Date June 2014More LessPragmatic development is increasingly seen as the foundation stone of language acquisition more generally. From very early on, children demonstrate a strong desire to understand and be understood that motivates the acquisition of lexicon and grammar and enables ever more effective communication. In the 35 years since the first edited volume on the topic, a flourishing literature has reported on the broad set of skills that can be called pragmatic. This volume aims to bring that literature together in a digestible format. It provides a series of succinct review chapters on 19 key topics ranging from preverbal skills right up to irony and argumentative discourse. Each chapter equips the reader with an overview of current theories, key empirical findings and questions for new research. This valuable resource will be of interest to scholars of psychology, linguistics, speech therapy, and cognitive science.
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Semantics in Language Acquisition
Editor(s): Kristen Syrett and Sudha ArunachalamPublication Date August 2018More LessThis volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface, and the relation between logical content and inferences on language meaning (semantics and pragmatics), the papers in this volume introduce the reader to the variety of ways in which children come to realize that semantic content is encoded in word meaning (for example, in the event semantics of the verbal domain or the scope of logical operators), and at the level of the sentence, which requires the composition of semantic meaning. The authors represent some of the most established and promising researchers in this domain, demonstrating collective expertise in a range of methodologies and topics relevant to the acquisition of semantics. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for students and faculty, and junior and seasoned researchers alike.
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Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development
Editor(s): F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı ÖzyürekPublication Date July 2017More LessLanguage development is driven by multiple factors involving both the individual child and the environments that surround the child. The chapters in this volume highlight several such factors as potential contributors to developmental change, including factors that examine the role of immediate social environment (i.e., parent SES, parent and sibling input, peer interaction) and factors that focus on the child’s own cognitive and social development, such as the acquisition of theory of mind, event knowledge, and memory. The discussion of the different factors is presented largely from a crosslinguistic framework, using a multimodal perspective (speech, gesture, sign). The book celebrates the scholarly contributions of Prof. Ayhan Aksu-Koç – a pioneer in the study of crosslinguistic variation in language acquisition, particularly in the domain of evidentiality and theory of mind. This book will serve as an important resource for researchers in the field of developmental psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics across the globe.
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Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition
Editor(s): Maya Hickmann, Edy Veneziano and Harriet JisaPublication Date February 2018More LessDevelopmental research has long focused on regularities in language acquisition, minimizing factors that might be responsible for variation. Although researchers are now increasingly concerned with one or another of these factors, this volume brings together research on three different sources of variation: language-specific properties, the nature of the input to children across contexts, and several aspects of the learners themselves. Chapters explore these sources of variation within an interdisciplinary and comparative approach allying theories and methodologies stemming from linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, and neuroscience. The comparative perspective involves different languages, contexts of use, types of learners (first/second language acquisition, monolingual/bilingual learners, autism, language impairment), as well as vocal and visuo-gestural communicative modalities (co-verbal gestures, sign language acquisition). The volume points to the need to enhance interdisciplinary research using complementary methodologies to further examine sources of variation and to integrate variation into a more general developmental theory.
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Starting Over – The Language Development in Internationally-Adopted Children
Editor(s): Fred Genesee and Audrey DelcenseriePublication Date March 2016More LessInternationally-adopted children are a unique population of language learners. They discontinue acquisition of their birth language when they are adopted by families that speak other languages. Their unique language learning history raises important practical, clinical and theoretical issues. Practically speaking: what is the typical language learning trajectory of these children after adoption and what factors affect their language learning: age at adoption, country of origin, quality and nature of the pre-adoption learning environment, and others. They also raise important theoretical questions: How resilient is their socio-emotional, cognitive and language development following adoption? Does their language development resemble that of first or second language learners, or something else? Do they experience total attrition of their birth language? Are there neuro-cognitive traces of the birth language after adoption and what neuro-cognitive processes underlie acquisition and processing of the adopted language; are they the same as those of monolingual native speakers or those of early second language learners? And, how do we interpret differences, if any, between adopted and non-adoptive children? Chapters in this volume by leading researchers review research and provide insights on these issues.
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Syntactic Priming in Language Acquisition
Editor(s): Katherine MessengerPublication Date September 2022More LessSyntactic priming is a naturally-occurring psycholinguistic phenomenon that has been used as an experimental manipulation to great effect: over the last 20 years, syntactic priming research with children of different backgrounds has added to our understanding of the mechanisms and stages of syntactic development and priming. This collection of original articles explores the state of the art in that literature. Ten chapters review the findings of syntactic priming research with monolingual and multilingual, typically-developing and atypically-developing child populations from a variety of language backgrounds. The expert authors explore what syntactic priming has revealed about children’s development of syntax and propose ways in which methodological innovations and broadening the scope of future research can build on this. The collection will be a useful resource for researchers from diverse areas of the field of child language, particularly those with a focus on grammatical development.
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Trends in Bilingual Acquisition
Editor(s): Jasone Cenoz and Fred GeneseePublication Date November 2001More LessThe 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.
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Trilingual Language Acquisition
Author(s): Sarah ChevalierPublication Date October 2015More LessThis 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.
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Understanding Deafness, Language and Cognitive Development
Editor(s): Gary MorganPublication Date February 2020More LessThe study of childhood deafness offers researchers many interesting insights into the role of experience and sensory inputs for the development of language and cognition. This volume provides a state of the art look at these questions and how they are being applied in the areas of clinical and educational settings. It also marks the career and contributions of one of the greatest scholars in the field of deafness: Bencie Woll. As the field of deafness goes through rapid and profound changes, we hope that this volume captures the latest perspectives regarding the impacts of these changes for our understanding of child development. The volume will be of essential interest to language development researchers as well as teachers and clinical researchers.
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