Grammatical Features and the Acquisition of Reference
Grammatical Features and the Acquisition of Reference

Author: Sergio Baauw

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1136711333

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book discusses to what extent errors young children make with their interpretation of definite articles and pronouns are due to their immature pragmatic skills, and to what extent incomplete syntactic development plays a role.

Basic Functions of Language, Reading and Reading Disability
Basic Functions of Language, Reading and Reading Disability

Author: Evelin Witruk

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1461510112

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This highly interdisciplinary project presents new results and the state of the art of knowledge in the psychology and neurophysiology of language, reading and dyslexia. It concentrates on basic cognitive functions of understanding and producing language and disorders within its spoken and written execution. The book grew out of the Basic Mechanisms of Language and Language Disorders conference (Leipzig, Sept. 1999).

Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition
Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition

Author: (Vol.1)Barbara Lust

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 131772884X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars. The issues surrounding cross-linguistic variation in "Heads, Projections, and Learnability" (Volume 1) and in "Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability" (Volume 2) are arguably the most fundamental in UG. How can principles of grammar be learned by general learning theory? What is biologically programmed in the human species in order to guarantee their learnability? What is the true linguistic representation for these areas of language knowledge? What universals exist across languages? The two volumes summarize the most critical current proposals in each area, and offer both theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on them. Research on first language acquisition and formal learnability theory is placed at the center of debates relative to linguistic theory in each area. The convergence of research across several different disciplines -- linguistics, developmental psychology, and computer science -- represented in these volumes provides a paradigm example of cognitive science.

Linguistics of Vietnamese
Linguistics of Vietnamese

Author: Daniel Hole

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2013-05-28

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 3110289415

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The present collection of articles grew out of a workshop on Vietnamese linguistics in 2009 at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. To our knowledge, no workshop with a comparable scope has been held outside of Vietnam for the past 20 years, or even longer. Given the important typological status of Vietnamese as a paradigm case of an isolating language, the volume covers the most relevant fields in linguistics: syntax, semantics, phonology, and the lexicon. A guiding principle in assembling the chapters for this volume has been to take an inclusive stance as far as the commitment to different frameworks and research methodologies is concerned. All the contributors are proponents of recent developments in their individual areas of specialization. The editors have taken special care to cater for a readership which should be as broad as possible. This means that each contribution is self-contained and does not presuppose any knowledge of Vietnamese. The volume is recommended to general linguistis, comparative linguists, typologists and to researchers specializing in languages of East and South East Asia.

Functional Categories in Language Acquisition
Functional Categories in Language Acquisition

Author: Annette Hohenberger

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-04-20

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 3110923521

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Approaches to Bootstrapping
Approaches to Bootstrapping

Author: Jürgen Weissenborn

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9789027224910

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Volume 1 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on early word learning and syntactic development with special emphasis on the bootstrapping mechanisms by which the child using properties of the speech input enters the native linguistic system. Topics discussed in the area of lexical acquisition are: cues and mechanisms for isolating words in the input; special features of motherese and their role for early word learning; the determination of first word meanings; memory and related processing capacities in early word learning and understanding; and lexical representation and lexical access in early language production. The papers on syntactic development deal with the acquisition of grammatical prosodic features for learning language specific syntactic regularities.Volume 2 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on the interaction between the development of prosodic and morphosyntactic knowledge as evidenced in the early speech of Dutch, English, German, Portugese, Spanish, Danish, Islandic, and Swedish children sheding new light on the relation between universal and language specific aspects of language acquisition. Another section of this volume deals with new approaches to language acquisition using ERP- techniques. The papers discuss in detail the relation between the development of language skills and changes in neurophysiological aspects of the brain. The potentials of these techniques for the development of new tools for an early diagnosis of children who are at risque for developmental language disorders are also pointed out. The closing section contains a synopsis of interactionist approaches to language acquisition, a discussion of the genetic and experiential origin of primitive linguistic elements in acquisition, and a discussion of structural and developmental aspects of bird song in comparison to human language. The two volumes making up Approaches to Bootstrapping present a state-of-the art interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic overview of recent developments in first language acquisition research.

Parameter Setting in Language Acquisition
Parameter Setting in Language Acquisition

Author: Dalila Ayoun

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2005-02-28

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1847143369

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book provides a broad overview of parameter-setting theory in first and second language acquisition and refines the theory by revisiting and challenging the traditional assumptions that underlie it, based on cross-linguistic language data that cover a range of syntactic and phonological phenomena. From an historical perspective on parameter-setting theory to an introduction to its role in computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, and language change, the reader will find a critique of the most commonly made arguments, as well as an index of all the syntactic, phonological, lexical, and morphological parameters presented in the literature to date. A closer look at the theory itself addresses the following questions: What does a parameter-setting approach to language acquisition entail? What are the underpinnings of the theory? What issues and problems remain to be solved? The empirical studies carried out to test the null subject parameter and verb movement parameter are reviewed to re-examine long-standing theoretical assumptions as well as the learnability implications for first and second language acquisition.