Pub Date : 2021-08-23DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1954928
M. Kalashnikova, C. Onsuwan, D. Burnham
ABSTRACT Non-tone language infants’ native language recognition is based first on supra-segmental then segmental cues, but this trajectory is unknown for tone-language infants. This study investigated non-tone (English) and tone (Thai) language 6- to 10-month-old infants’ preference for English vs. Thai one-syllable words (containing segmental and tone cues) and two-syllable words (additionally containing stress cues). A preference for their native one-syllable words was observed in each of the two groups of infants, but this was not the case for two-syllable words where Thai-learning infants showed no native-language preference. These findings indicate that as early as six months of age, infants acquiring tone- and non-tone languages identify their native language by relying solely on lexical tone cues, but tone language infants no longer show successful identification of their native language when two pitch-based cues co-occur in the signal.
{"title":"Infants’ Sensitivity to Lexical Tone and Word Stress in Their First Year: A Thai and English Cross-Language Study","authors":"M. Kalashnikova, C. Onsuwan, D. Burnham","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1954928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1954928","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Non-tone language infants’ native language recognition is based first on supra-segmental then segmental cues, but this trajectory is unknown for tone-language infants. This study investigated non-tone (English) and tone (Thai) language 6- to 10-month-old infants’ preference for English vs. Thai one-syllable words (containing segmental and tone cues) and two-syllable words (additionally containing stress cues). A preference for their native one-syllable words was observed in each of the two groups of infants, but this was not the case for two-syllable words where Thai-learning infants showed no native-language preference. These findings indicate that as early as six months of age, infants acquiring tone- and non-tone languages identify their native language by relying solely on lexical tone cues, but tone language infants no longer show successful identification of their native language when two pitch-based cues co-occur in the signal.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"159 1","pages":"278 - 293"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80069763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-04DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1941968
S. Spit, Sible Andringa, J. Rispens, E. Aboh
ABSTRACT Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction in several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed that such explicit instruction does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether explicit instruction affected young learners in acquiring a morpho-syntactic element. A total of 103 Dutch-speaking kindergartners (M = 5;7) received training in a miniature language to learn a meaningful agreement marker. Results from a picture matching task, during which eye movements were recorded, provided no evidence that explicit instruction led to higher accuracy rates, but suggest that it did lead to earlier predictive eye movements. These data seem incompatible with the idea that explicit instruction does not make a difference when kindergartners learn a grammatical element, and tentatively suggest that explicit instruction has a different effect on explicit knowledge than on implicit knowledge in this age group.
{"title":"The Effect of Explicit Instruction on Implicit and Explicit Linguistic Knowledge in Kindergartners","authors":"S. Spit, Sible Andringa, J. Rispens, E. Aboh","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1941968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1941968","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction in several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed that such explicit instruction does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether explicit instruction affected young learners in acquiring a morpho-syntactic element. A total of 103 Dutch-speaking kindergartners (M = 5;7) received training in a miniature language to learn a meaningful agreement marker. Results from a picture matching task, during which eye movements were recorded, provided no evidence that explicit instruction led to higher accuracy rates, but suggest that it did lead to earlier predictive eye movements. These data seem incompatible with the idea that explicit instruction does not make a difference when kindergartners learn a grammatical element, and tentatively suggest that explicit instruction has a different effect on explicit knowledge than on implicit knowledge in this age group.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"122 1","pages":"201 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74374098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-30DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1941032
A. Popescu, A. Noiray
ABSTRACT Until at least the end of adolescence, children articulate speech differently than adults. While this discrepancy is often attributed to the maturation of the speech motor system, we sought to demonstrate that the development of spoken language fluency is shaped by complex interactions across motor and cognitive domains. In this study, we specifically tested for a relationship between reading proficiency and coarticulatory organization, a fundamental correlate of spoken language fluency, used for both reading aloud and conversational speech. We conducted reading assessments and ultrasound-based kinematic measurements of intersegmental coarticulation in a group of 32 German children. In German, a language which supports rather consistent grapheme-to-phoneme relationships, reading aloud uses similar phoneme to speech motor gesture correspondences as well as coarticulatory mechanisms as conversational speech. Using general additive modeling we found that better readers exhibited lower degrees of intersegmental coarticulation than poorer readers. This study therefore provides evidence that reading proficiency interacts with coarticulatory patterns in beginning readers. It suggests that in addition to maturational factors, interactions between speech motor ability and other co-developing skills must be considered to fully account for spoken language fluency.
{"title":"Learning to Read Interacts with Children’s Spoken Language Fluency","authors":"A. Popescu, A. Noiray","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1941032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1941032","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Until at least the end of adolescence, children articulate speech differently than adults. While this discrepancy is often attributed to the maturation of the speech motor system, we sought to demonstrate that the development of spoken language fluency is shaped by complex interactions across motor and cognitive domains. In this study, we specifically tested for a relationship between reading proficiency and coarticulatory organization, a fundamental correlate of spoken language fluency, used for both reading aloud and conversational speech. We conducted reading assessments and ultrasound-based kinematic measurements of intersegmental coarticulation in a group of 32 German children. In German, a language which supports rather consistent grapheme-to-phoneme relationships, reading aloud uses similar phoneme to speech motor gesture correspondences as well as coarticulatory mechanisms as conversational speech. Using general additive modeling we found that better readers exhibited lower degrees of intersegmental coarticulation than poorer readers. This study therefore provides evidence that reading proficiency interacts with coarticulatory patterns in beginning readers. It suggests that in addition to maturational factors, interactions between speech motor ability and other co-developing skills must be considered to fully account for spoken language fluency.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"64 1","pages":"151 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85337765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-20DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1922282
Irmtraud Kaiser
ABSTRACT The present study analyses 3- to 6-year-old children’s dialect-standard repertoires in an Austrian-Bavarian sociolinguistic setting and investigates how far individual repertoires can be explained by input and sociodemographic factors. Adults’ linguistic repertoires in the area typically comprise a certain spectrum on the dialect-standard continuum but individual acquisition processes have hardly been studied yet. We collected language data from 49 children in five different communicative interactions each and analyzed the repertoire each child exhibits. The majority of children could be shown to have a bi-varietal repertoire at their disposal, but there were substantial numbers of children who exhibited either standard-only or dialect-only repertoires. We then examined the relationships between a child’s repertoire and potentially relevant input and sociodemographic variables. While language variety use in the home and maternal education did not prove significant predictors of children’s repertoires, gender, age, location, bilingualism and frequency of being read to did.
{"title":"Children’s Linguistic Repertoires Across Dialect and Standard Speech: Mirroring Input or Co-constructing Sociolinguistic Identities?","authors":"Irmtraud Kaiser","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1922282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1922282","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The present study analyses 3- to 6-year-old children’s dialect-standard repertoires in an Austrian-Bavarian sociolinguistic setting and investigates how far individual repertoires can be explained by input and sociodemographic factors. Adults’ linguistic repertoires in the area typically comprise a certain spectrum on the dialect-standard continuum but individual acquisition processes have hardly been studied yet. We collected language data from 49 children in five different communicative interactions each and analyzed the repertoire each child exhibits. The majority of children could be shown to have a bi-varietal repertoire at their disposal, but there were substantial numbers of children who exhibited either standard-only or dialect-only repertoires. We then examined the relationships between a child’s repertoire and potentially relevant input and sociodemographic variables. While language variety use in the home and maternal education did not prove significant predictors of children’s repertoires, gender, age, location, bilingualism and frequency of being read to did.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"45 1","pages":"41 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76777993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-20DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1924177
I. Gabbatore, C. Longobardi, F. Bosco
ABSTRACT Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex pathology that includes impaired social interaction abilities. Insufficient attention has been paid to programs specifically devoted to improving communicative-pragmatic skills. Moreover, the majority of studies have focused on children, while programs specifically developed for the adolescents are lacking. The present study aims to test the feasibility and acceptability of the adapted version of the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment for adolescents (A-CPT), a 15-session group training, as well as its ability to improve the communicative-pragmatic performance of adolescents with ASD. Twenty-one verbally fluent adolescents with ASD took part in the training; they were assessed in three phases, i.e., before, after and at three-month follow-up, using the equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), a tool for testing a wide range of pragmatic phenomena, such as direct and indirect speech acts, irony, deceit and violation of Grice’s maxims, expressed through linguistic, non-verbal, i.e., gestures, or paralinguistic expressive means. Furthermore, Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks and tests investigating the main cognitive domains, for example, Executive Functions (planning, shifting, working memory) and long-term memory, were administered. The results showed an improvement in participants’ performance in all the four scales of the ABaCo, i.e., linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic and context scale; this improvement was maintained at follow-up assessment three months after the end of the program. No improvement was observed in the cognitive and ToM domains investigated, with the only exception of expressive vocabulary task. Despite the lack of a control group, the high degree of feasibility of the CPT, highlight the importance of more work needed in this research line.
{"title":"Improvement of Communicative-pragmatic Ability in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: The Adapted Version of the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment","authors":"I. Gabbatore, C. Longobardi, F. Bosco","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1924177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1924177","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex pathology that includes impaired social interaction abilities. Insufficient attention has been paid to programs specifically devoted to improving communicative-pragmatic skills. Moreover, the majority of studies have focused on children, while programs specifically developed for the adolescents are lacking. The present study aims to test the feasibility and acceptability of the adapted version of the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment for adolescents (A-CPT), a 15-session group training, as well as its ability to improve the communicative-pragmatic performance of adolescents with ASD. Twenty-one verbally fluent adolescents with ASD took part in the training; they were assessed in three phases, i.e., before, after and at three-month follow-up, using the equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), a tool for testing a wide range of pragmatic phenomena, such as direct and indirect speech acts, irony, deceit and violation of Grice’s maxims, expressed through linguistic, non-verbal, i.e., gestures, or paralinguistic expressive means. Furthermore, Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks and tests investigating the main cognitive domains, for example, Executive Functions (planning, shifting, working memory) and long-term memory, were administered. The results showed an improvement in participants’ performance in all the four scales of the ABaCo, i.e., linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic and context scale; this improvement was maintained at follow-up assessment three months after the end of the program. No improvement was observed in the cognitive and ToM domains investigated, with the only exception of expressive vocabulary task. Despite the lack of a control group, the high degree of feasibility of the CPT, highlight the importance of more work needed in this research line.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"34 1","pages":"62 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82603580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-25DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1916502
A. Abdelwahab, Samuel H. Forbes, A. Cattani, Jeremy Goslin, Caroline Floccia
ABSTRACT Assessing a child’s language in the early years is critical to plan for an early intervention and maximize their learning potential. In a unique pan-Arabic approach to language development, we developed a new Arabic assessment tool, usable by parents and Early Years professionals to screen vocabulary in children between 8 months and 30 months across 17 Arab countries. Departing from the two relevant original Communicative Development Inventory forms (CDI: Words and Gestures and CDI: Words and Sentences, Fenson, Marchman, Thal, Reznick, & Bates, 2007), our Arabic CDI focuses on Words Only (Short Form), and assesses comprehension and production of a list of 100 words in 17 main dialects or Arabic, through a parental report. Data were collected from 436 Egyptian children and 168 children from the remaining 16 countries. Quasi-binomial model fits on Egyptian and Other Dialects comprehension and production data showed that Egyptian vocabulary norms could be reasonably extrapolated to the Other Dialects sample, as a first indication that the tool might be usable across the different countries.
{"title":"An Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI in 17 Arabic Dialects for Children Aged 8 to 30 Months","authors":"A. Abdelwahab, Samuel H. Forbes, A. Cattani, Jeremy Goslin, Caroline Floccia","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1916502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1916502","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Assessing a child’s language in the early years is critical to plan for an early intervention and maximize their learning potential. In a unique pan-Arabic approach to language development, we developed a new Arabic assessment tool, usable by parents and Early Years professionals to screen vocabulary in children between 8 months and 30 months across 17 Arab countries. Departing from the two relevant original Communicative Development Inventory forms (CDI: Words and Gestures and CDI: Words and Sentences, Fenson, Marchman, Thal, Reznick, & Bates, 2007), our Arabic CDI focuses on Words Only (Short Form), and assesses comprehension and production of a list of 100 words in 17 main dialects or Arabic, through a parental report. Data were collected from 436 Egyptian children and 168 children from the remaining 16 countries. Quasi-binomial model fits on Egyptian and Other Dialects comprehension and production data showed that Egyptian vocabulary norms could be reasonably extrapolated to the Other Dialects sample, as a first indication that the tool might be usable across the different countries.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"94 1","pages":"425 - 446"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75014851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-06DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1909483
Erica H Wojcik
ABSTRACT Children often hear many new words in one conversation, and yet word learning research overwhelmingly focuses on how children learn and retrieve the meanings of single words. The current experiment tests how the number of labeled objects affects preschoolers’ novel word referent selection immediately after encoding and after a one-week delay. Seventy 3- to 6-year-olds were exposed to four novel objects. Half of the participants were given novel labels for two of the objects and half were given novel labels for all four. Label-referent mapping was tested with a four alternative forced-choice pointing task both immediately after exposure and one week later. Children performed worse overall after a week delay, replicating past work on novel word retention. While children performed significantly worse overall in the Four-Label condition, exploratory analyses revealed that this effect was driven solely by the second test trial immediately after exposure. Analyses suggest that referent selection is strongly influenced by in-the-moment constraints, such as label salience and pragmatic biases, and that these constraints are strongest immediately after novel word exposure.
{"title":"The Effect of the Number of Labeled Objects on Novel Referent Selection Across Short and Long Time Delays","authors":"Erica H Wojcik","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1909483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1909483","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Children often hear many new words in one conversation, and yet word learning research overwhelmingly focuses on how children learn and retrieve the meanings of single words. The current experiment tests how the number of labeled objects affects preschoolers’ novel word referent selection immediately after encoding and after a one-week delay. Seventy 3- to 6-year-olds were exposed to four novel objects. Half of the participants were given novel labels for two of the objects and half were given novel labels for all four. Label-referent mapping was tested with a four alternative forced-choice pointing task both immediately after exposure and one week later. Children performed worse overall after a week delay, replicating past work on novel word retention. While children performed significantly worse overall in the Four-Label condition, exploratory analyses revealed that this effect was driven solely by the second test trial immediately after exposure. Analyses suggest that referent selection is strongly influenced by in-the-moment constraints, such as label salience and pragmatic biases, and that these constraints are strongest immediately after novel word exposure.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"22 1","pages":"411 - 424"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84726851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-21DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1876698
Titia Benders, J. StGeorge, R. Fletcher
ABSTRACT Although both fathers and mothers speak differently in infant-directed speech (IDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), the acoustic characteristics of present-day paternal IDS are still insufficiently understood. To extend this understanding, 11 fathers and 17 mothers in The Netherlands were recorded interacting with their infant (260–476 days old; for IDS) and with an adult experimenter (for ADS). Both fathers and mothers were found to raise their average pitch, expand their pitch variability within utterance, and increase their pitch variability across utterances in IDS. Moreover, fathers increased their pitch variability within and across utterances more than mothers. The IDS produced by present-day Dutch-speaking fathers is thus acoustically highly dynamic, in line with fathers’ energetic interaction style.
{"title":"Infant-directed Speech by Dutch Fathers: Increased Pitch Variability within and across Utterances","authors":"Titia Benders, J. StGeorge, R. Fletcher","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1876698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1876698","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Although both fathers and mothers speak differently in infant-directed speech (IDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), the acoustic characteristics of present-day paternal IDS are still insufficiently understood. To extend this understanding, 11 fathers and 17 mothers in The Netherlands were recorded interacting with their infant (260–476 days old; for IDS) and with an adult experimenter (for ADS). Both fathers and mothers were found to raise their average pitch, expand their pitch variability within utterance, and increase their pitch variability across utterances in IDS. Moreover, fathers increased their pitch variability within and across utterances more than mothers. The IDS produced by present-day Dutch-speaking fathers is thus acoustically highly dynamic, in line with fathers’ energetic interaction style.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"1 1","pages":"292 - 325"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83035749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-19DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1876697
Carmen Saldana, Kenny Smith, S. Kirby, J. Culbertson
ABSTRACT Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it – removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use on context. Previous studies using artificial language learning experiments have documented regularizing behavior in the learning of lexical, morphological, and syntactic variation. These studies implicitly assume that regularization reflects uniform mechanisms and processes across linguistic levels. However, studies on natural language learning and pidgin/creole formation suggest that morphological and syntactic variation may be treated differently. In particular, there is evidence that morphological variation may be more susceptible to regularization. Here we provide the first systematic comparison of the strength of regularization across these two linguistic levels. In line with previous studies, we find that the presence of a favored variant can induce different degrees of regularization. However, when input languages are carefully matched – with comparable initial variability, and no variant-specific biases – regularization can be comparable across morphology and word order. This is the case regardless of whether the task is explicitly communicative. Overall, our findings suggest an overarching regularizing mechanism at work, with apparent differences among levels likely due to differences in inherent complexity or variant-specific biases. Differences between production and encoding in our tasks further suggest this overarching mechanism is driven by production.
{"title":"Is Regularization Uniform across Linguistic Levels? Comparing Learning and Production of Unconditioned Probabilistic Variation in Morphology and Word Order","authors":"Carmen Saldana, Kenny Smith, S. Kirby, J. Culbertson","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1876697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1876697","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it – removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use on context. Previous studies using artificial language learning experiments have documented regularizing behavior in the learning of lexical, morphological, and syntactic variation. These studies implicitly assume that regularization reflects uniform mechanisms and processes across linguistic levels. However, studies on natural language learning and pidgin/creole formation suggest that morphological and syntactic variation may be treated differently. In particular, there is evidence that morphological variation may be more susceptible to regularization. Here we provide the first systematic comparison of the strength of regularization across these two linguistic levels. In line with previous studies, we find that the presence of a favored variant can induce different degrees of regularization. However, when input languages are carefully matched – with comparable initial variability, and no variant-specific biases – regularization can be comparable across morphology and word order. This is the case regardless of whether the task is explicitly communicative. Overall, our findings suggest an overarching regularizing mechanism at work, with apparent differences among levels likely due to differences in inherent complexity or variant-specific biases. Differences between production and encoding in our tasks further suggest this overarching mechanism is driven by production.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"298 1","pages":"158 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79676176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-17DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1875830
M. Garraffa, Francesca Smart, M. Obregón
ABSTRACT The present study investigated the effect of classroom-based syntactic training on children’s abilities to produce passive sentences. Thirty-three monolingual English children (mean age 5;2), were involved in passive-voice training based on storytelling sessions within a priming design. The training was delivered in a classroom setting, with two classes randomly allocated to either an active sentence or a passive sentence training structure. All children were individually tested at post-training. Children in the passive condition generated 3.6 more passives than the children in the active voice condition. Pre-training language and memory abilities, as measured by both grammatical level with a standardized sentence comprehension task (TROG-2) and a verbal working memory task (Digit Span), were unrelated to number of passives produced at post training. The study supports and expands recent evidence on the benefit of rich language exposure in the classroom context and on the quick dynamic adaptation of the implicit learning mechanisms to language exposure activities.
{"title":"Positive Effects of Passive Voice Exposure on Children’s Passive Production During a Classroom Story-telling Training","authors":"M. Garraffa, Francesca Smart, M. Obregón","doi":"10.1080/15475441.2021.1875830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2021.1875830","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The present study investigated the effect of classroom-based syntactic training on children’s abilities to produce passive sentences. Thirty-three monolingual English children (mean age 5;2), were involved in passive-voice training based on storytelling sessions within a priming design. The training was delivered in a classroom setting, with two classes randomly allocated to either an active sentence or a passive sentence training structure. All children were individually tested at post-training. Children in the passive condition generated 3.6 more passives than the children in the active voice condition. Pre-training language and memory abilities, as measured by both grammatical level with a standardized sentence comprehension task (TROG-2) and a verbal working memory task (Digit Span), were unrelated to number of passives produced at post training. The study supports and expands recent evidence on the benefit of rich language exposure in the classroom context and on the quick dynamic adaptation of the implicit learning mechanisms to language exposure activities.","PeriodicalId":46642,"journal":{"name":"Language Learning and Development","volume":"39 1","pages":"241 - 253"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83574457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：