The Acquisition of Swahili
The Acquisition of Swahili

Author: Kamil Ud Deen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2005-01-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9789027253002

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This monograph is the first study of the acquisition of Swahili as a first language. It focuses on the acquisition of inflectional affixes, with a particular emphasis on subject agreement and tense. Other inflectional affixes are also investigated, including object agreement and mood. The study surveys the adult dialect in question, Nairobi Swahili, discussing social, phonological, morphological and syntactic properties. Data, analyses and copious examples are presented of the naturalistic speech of four Swahili speaking children. The data are tested against six influential theories of child language, and the results show that processing and metrical theories of telegraphic speech fail to account for the observed patterns, while grammatical theories of child language fair significantly better. The data and analyses presented in this book are indispensable for linguists and psychologists interested in the acquisition of inflectional material and other cross-linguistic properties of child language.

The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics

Author: Jeffrey Lidz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-07-28

Total Pages: 1183

ISBN-13: 0191644943

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In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning. The book is divided into six parts. Parts I and II examine the acquisition of phonology and morphology respectively, with chapters covering topics such as phonotactics and syllable structure, prosodic phenomena, compound word formation, and processing continuous speech. Part III moves on to the acquisition of syntax, including argument structure, questions, mood alternations, and possessives. In Part IV, chapters consider semantic aspects of language acquisition, including the expression of genericity, quantification, and scalar implicature. Finally, Parts V and VI look at theories of learning and aspects of atypical language development respectively.

The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language
The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language

Author: Edith L. Bavin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-11-26

Total Pages: 1781

ISBN-13: 1316352323

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The most authoritative resource for students and researchers, The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language has been thoroughly updated and extended. Enhancements include new chapters on the acquisition of words, processing deficits in children with specific language impairments, and language in children with Williams syndrome, new authors for the bilingualism and autism chapters, a refocused discourse chapter on written narratives, and a new section on reading and reading disorders, cementing the handbook's position as the best study of the subject available. In a wide-ranging survey, language development is traced from prelinguistic infancy to adolescence in typical and atypical contexts; the material is intuitively grouped into six thematic sections, enabling readers to easily find specific in-depth information. With topics as varied as statistical learning, bilingualism, and the neurobiology of reading disorders, this multidisciplinary Handbook is an essential reference for students and researchers in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, speech pathology, education and anthropology.

Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics
Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics

Author: Mineharu Nakayama

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-06-16

Total Pages: 631

ISBN-13: 1501500589

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The studies of the Japanese language and psycholinguistics have advanced quite significantly in the last half century thanks to the progress in the study of cognition and brain mechanisms associated with language acquisition, use, and disorders, and in particular, because of technological developments in experimental techniques employed in psycholinguistic studies. This volume contains 18 chapters that discuss our brain functions, specifically, the process of Japanese language acquisition - how we acquire/learn the Japanese language as a first/second language - and the mechanism of Japanese language perception and production - how we comprehend/produce the Japanese language. In turn we address the limitations of our current understanding of the language acquisition process and perception/production mechanism. Issues for future research on language acquisition and processing by users of the Japanese language are also presented. Chapter titles 1. Learning to become a native listener of Japanese (Reiko Mazuka) 2. The nature of the count/mass distinction in Japanese (Mutsumi Imai & Junko Kanero) 3. Grammatical deficits in Japanese children with Specific Language Impairment (Shinji Fukuda, Suzy E. Fukuda, & Tomohiko Ito) 4. Root infinitive analogues in Child Japanese (Keiko Murasugi) 5. Acquisition of scope (Takuya Goro) 6. Narrative development in L1 Japanese (Masahiko Minami) 7. L2 acquisition of Japanese (Yasuhiro Shirai) 8. The modularity of grammar in L2 acquisition (Mineharu Nakayama & Noriko Yoshimura) 9. Tense and aspect in Japanese as a second language (Alison Gabriele & Mamori Sugita Hughes) 10. Language acquisition and brain development: Cortical processing of a foreign language (Hiroko Hagiwara) 11. Resolution of branching ambiguity in speech (Yuki Hirose) 12. The role of learning in theories of English and Japanese sentence processing (Franklin Chang) 13. Experimental syntax: word order in sentence processing (Masatoshi Koizumi) 14. Relative clause processing in Japanese: psycholinguistic investigation into typological differences (Baris Kahraman & Hiromu Sakai) 15. Processing of syntactic and semantic information in the human brain: evidence from ERP studies in Japanese. (Tsutomu Sakamoto) 16. Issues in L2 Japanese sentence processing: similarities/differences with L1 and individual differences in working memory (Koichi Sawasaki & Akiko Kashiwagi-Wood) 17. Sentence production models to consider for L2 Japanese sentence production research (Noriko Iwasaki) 18. Processing of the Japanese language by native Chinese speakers (Katsuo Tamaoka)

Neuropsychology of Children in Africa
Neuropsychology of Children in Africa

Author: Michael J. Boivin

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1461468345

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​Increasingly, global humanitarian efforts are focusing on improving the lives of children. And among the developing world, the African nations are particularly affected by extreme weather conditions, devastating pandemics, and armed conflict. Neurocognitive science offers significant avenues toward bringing needed aid to the continent while creating a template for helping children worldwide. The studies in Neuropsychology of Children in Africa clearly illustrate how the brain develops and adjusts in the face of adversity. Contributors span assessment approaches and public health risk factors, and represent established topics and emerging lines of research, including biocultural constructs and genomic technologies. Together, these chapters argue for methodology that is culturally sensitive, scientifically rigorous, consistent, and sustainable. And although the focus is pediatric, the book takes a lifespan approach to prevention and intervention, modeling a universal framework for understanding neurocognitive development. Included in the coverage: Assessment of very young children in Africa in the context of HIV. Psychosocial aspects of malnutrition among African children. Assessment of neuropsychological outcomes in pediatric severe malaria. Neurodisability screening using the Ten Questions questionnaire. The neuropsychology of sickle cell disease in West African children. Computerized Cognitive Rehabilitation Thera py for African children. As a guide to current findings or a springboard for new studies, Neuropsychology of Children in Africa is a necessary reference for researchers, policymakers, and diverse professionals in global aid organizations, and across the discipline.

The Bantu Languages
The Bantu Languages

Author: Derek Nurse

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-03-21

Total Pages: 727

ISBN-13: 1135796831

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Gerard Philippson is Professor of Bantu Languages at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and is a member of the Dyamique de Langage research team of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon II University. He has mainly worked on comparative Bantu tonology. Other areas of interest include Afro-Asiatic, general phonology, linguistic classification and its correlation with population genetics.

Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective
Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective

Author: Yen-hui Audrey Li

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 0199945675

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Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective collects twelve new papers that explore the syntax of Chinese in comparison with other languages.

The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics
The Grammar of Japanese Mimetics

Author: Noriko Iwasaki

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1317295781

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Mimetic words, also known as ‘sound-symbolic words’, ‘ideophones’ or more popularly as ‘onomatopoeia’, constitute an important subset of the Japanese lexicon; we find them as well in the lexicons of other Asian languages and sub-Saharan African languages. Mimetics play a central role in Japanese grammar and feature in children’s early utterances. However, this class of words is not considered as important in English and other European languages. This book aims to bridge the gap between the extensive research on Japanese mimetics and its availability to an international audience, and also to provide a better understanding of grammatical and structural aspects of sound-symbolic words from a Japanese perspective. Through the accounts of mimetics from the perspectives of morpho-syntax, semantics, language development and translation of mimetic words, linguists and students alike would find this book particularly valuable.