Acquisition Of Linguistic Structures Research Articles

There is no prime for time: the missing link between form and concept of progressive aspect in L2 production

The acquisition of linguistic structures that require perspective-taking at the level of message generation is challenging. We investigate use of progressive aspect in L2 event encoding, using a sentence priming paradigm. We focus on Dutch, in which use of progressive aspect is optional. The progressive consists of a prepositional phrase (‘aan het,’ at-the), plus a verbal infinitive. We ask, to what extent L2 speakers, in comparison to native speakers, show priming effects in relation to form (prepositional phrase) or conceptual (progressive aspect) prime sentences. In native Dutch speakers we find a priming effect for the ‘progressive prime,’ compared to a ‘neutral prime’ (aspectually neutral event description). In L2 speakers this effect was absent. For the form prime, no priming effects were obtained in native speakers, rather, we find evidence for a partial blocking effect in L2 speakers. Results suggest that the strength of the link between concept and form of progressive aspect differs in native and L2 speakers. Specific factors contributed to the L2 findings, e.g., level of L2 proficiency and degree of L2 exposure. We conclude that (1) the conceptual basis of grammatical aspect can be primed in native speakers, and (2) in L2 speakers, access to conceptual information is less automatized.

Overcoming Memory Limitations in Rule Learning

Adults, infants, and other species are able to learn and generalize abstract patterns from sequentially presented stimuli. Rule learning of this type may be involved in children's acquisition of linguistic structure, but the nature of the mechanisms underlying these abilities is unknown. While inferences regarding the capabilities of these mechanisms are commonly made based on the pattern of successes and failures in simple artificial-language rule-learning tasks, failures may be driven by memory limitations rather than intrinsic limitations on the kinds of computations that learners can perform. Here we show that alleviating memory constraints on adult learners through concurrent visual presentation of stimuli allowed them to succeed in learning regularities in three difficult artificial rule-learning experiments where participants had previously failed to learn via sequential auditory presentation. These results suggest that memory constraints, rather than intrinsic limitations on learning, may be a parsimonious explanation for many previously reported failures. We argue that future work should attempt to characterize the role of memory constraints in natural and artificial language learning.

Language acquisition: the acquisition of linguistic structure in normal and special populations.

This review examines how language learners master the formal structure of their language. Three possible routes to the acquisition and mastery of linguistic structure are investigated: (a) the use of prosodic and phonological information, which is imperfectly correlated with syntactic units and linguistic classes; (b) the use of function words to syntactically classify co-occurring words and phrases, and the effect of location of function-word processing on structural mastery; and (c) the use of morphology internal to lexical items to determine language structure, and the productive recombination of these subunits in new items. Evidence supporting these three routes comes from normal language acquirers and from several special populations, including learners given impoverished input, learners with Williams syndrome, specific language-impaired learners, learners with Down syndrome, and late learners of first and second languages. Further evidence for the three routes comes from artificial language acquisition experiments and computer simulations.

What's so conceptual about the acquisition of linguistic structures?

What's so conceptual about the acquisition of linguistic structures?

Performing without competence

ABSTRACTSpeech in children should be viewed as a developing skill. During acquisition the child becomes increasingly capable of organizing linguistic structure at a number of different levels concurrently. One boy seemed to have strategies for simplifying the tasks of speech reception and production. He would incorporate the immediately prior utterance, or some portion of it, intact into his utterance as if to avoid structuring his entire utterance from scratch. Another strategy was to extend his repertoire of structures to express more complex ideas simply by combining two existing structures without reordering any of the elements to match adult syntax. If such strategies are widespread they may account for the recorded facts about the development of children's question forms. Psychological variables, commonly called performance factors, should not be regarded merely as putting restrictions on the extent to which a child's linguistic knowledge can be expressed. Rather, they affect the manner in which syntactic structures develop. Just as the acquisition of linguistic structure is affected by psychological processes, so is the efficiency of these processes affected in its turn by the child's growing linguistic knowledge.

Mediation Processes and the Acquisition of Linguistic Structure]: Discussion

Mediation Processes and the Acquisition of Linguistic Structure]: Discussion

Mediation Processes and the Acquisition of Linguistic Structure

When psychologists have addressed themselves to questions concerning mediation and language, they have dealt in the main with two general classes of problems: (a) language as a mediating behavior and (b) nonlinguistic mediating responses as explicators of the meaning of lexical items. In the first case, exemplified by the work of Birge (I941), Kuenne (1946), Jeffrey (1953), Cantor (1955), Shepard (1956), Spiker (1956), Spiker, Gerjuoy, and Shepard (1956), Shepard and Schaeffer (I956), and Norcross and Spiker (I958), language is treated as of special importance because it furnishes a label, tag, or response which may be elicited in common by diverse members of some stimulus class.2 Here it appears possible to show that such an intermediary response (whether overt or covert) serves an important role in the other, sometimes nonlinguistic, behaviors of the subjects. In the second case, investigators such as Osgood (1953), Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (I957), Bousfield (I96I), and Staats and Staats (I957) have been concerned to show that meanings of items may be accounted