Developmental Psycholinguistics Research Articles

Homesign: Contested Issues

The term homesign has been used to describe the signing of deaf individuals who have not had sustained access to the linguistic resources of a named language. Early studies of child homesigners focused on documenting their manual communication systems through the lens of developmental psycholinguistics and generative linguistics, but a recent wave of linguistic ethnographic investigations is challenging many of the established theoretical presuppositions that underlie the foundational homesign research. Sparked by a larger critical movement within Deaf Studies led by deaf scholars, this new generation of scholarship interrogates how researchers portray deaf individuals and their communication practices and questions the conceptualization of language in the foundational body of homesign research. In this review, we discuss these contested issues and the current moment of transition within research on homesign.

Картина на най-важните въпроси на общата психолингвистика

Yuliana Stoyanova’s book provides a complete overview of the most important issues in general psycholinguistics, especially in the field of developmental psycholinguistics. The Bulgarian contributions in this relatively young interdisciplinary field are clearly highlighted. An emphasis is placed on the acquisition of the Bulgarian language, which not only fills a gap in the psycholinguistic research worldwide, but also provides an opportunity to verify existing models by attracting plentiful data from another language.

Interaction history as a source of compositionality in emergent communication

Abstract In this paper, we explore interaction history as a particular source of pressure for achieving emergent compositional communication in multi-agent systems. We propose a training regime implementing template transfer, the idea of carrying over learned biases across contexts. In the presented method, a sender-receiver dyad is first trained with a disentangled pair of objectives, and then the receiver is transferred to train a new sender with a standard objective. Unlike other methods (e.g. the obverter algorithm), the template transfer approach does not require imposing inductive biases on the architecture of the agents. We experimentally show the emergence of compositional communication using topographical similarity, zero-shot generalization and context-independence as evaluation metrics. The presented approach is connected to an important line of work in semiotics and developmental psycholinguistics: it supports a conjecture that compositional communication is scaffolded on simpler communication protocols.

Close Gap Test Strategies for Students with Severe Speech Impairment

Introduction. The level of formedness of text competence at secondary school in the aspect of understanding the text’s factual information ensures the successful grasping of the learning content. The purpose of the research was to identify the specifics of the functioning of linear deployment mechanisms and probabilistic forecasting among learners of 5–10th grade (form) with specific language impairment. Материалы и методы. The modified close gap test method was used as the main research method at the level of the ascertaining experiment. The results of the close gap tests, filled by learners, were exposed to quantitative and qualitative analysis. The research was conducted by applying theoretical (interpretive) and empirical (ascertaining experiment based on author’s method) methods. The analytical stage involved the use of the method of correlation analysis, the mathematical processing was carried out with the help of one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results. Analysis of experimental data helped determine the close gap test strategies in adolescent students with specific language impairment. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of studentsʼ work was applied to determine three main groups of strategies for linear deployment and probabilistic forecasting: strategies for establishing semantic links at the level of the lexical component, a strategy for establishing links at the level of associations, and no strategy. Furthermore, the analysis of substitutes with regard to their compliance with grammatical requirements revealed the following typology of manifestations of agrammatism: the use of an inadequate part of speech, deficiencies of grammatical presentation in phrases, non-compliance of the grammatical form of the substitute with the requirements for the grammatical design of the sentence. Correlation analysis was applied to establish links between different types of close gap test strategies used by adolescents with specific language impairment, as well as their relationship with the levels of understanding the factual content of the text. Discussion and Conclusion. The results obtained contribute to the development of developmental psycholinguistics, special pedagogy, speech therapy and school methods of speech development.

GESTURE IN ACTOR TRAINING: EMBODIED PARTIAL NARRATIVES

This paper seeks to integrate research from both cognitive science as well as phenomenology to explore the ways in which gesture and language interact in intentional action. My aim in this research is directed towards actor training and the use of gesture in naturalism. By sharing research from developmental psycholinguists the role of gestures in the training of actors can be examined more closely and it may be possible to elucidate modes within actor-training that enhance subtle and in-depth performed communication Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Law Publication Details Hayes, J. (2013). Gesture in actor training: embodied partial narratives. Southern Semiotic Review, (1), 1-14. This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/1088 Gesture in Actor Training: Embodied Partial Narratives

Syntax and working memory in typically-developing children

Abstract A growing trend in developmental psycholinguistics is to relate linguistic development to the development of other cognitive systems. Jakubowicz (2005, 2011) in particular argued that the processing of a complex sentence requires considerable working memory (WM) resources and that these resources are limited in young children, which would explain their non-adult grammar. The present research aims to clarify the relationship between WM and complex syntax, in comprehension, repetition, and spontaneous production, in 48 typically-developing children aged 5 to 12. Our results demonstrate a strong age effect for all measures of WM and syntax. They also reveal strong correlations between scores on simple and complex spans and syntactic performance. Finally, we show the highly predictive value of WM capacities on the acquisition of syntactic skills in both comprehension and production. In particular, the complex-span task, measuring counting span, explains the largest part of the variance in the spontaneous production of embedded clauses.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

According to study –Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects.The field is attached with psychological and neurobiological factors that help humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. The process is mainly attached with the mechanisms in which languages are processed and represented in the brain.Modern research is based on biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science. It studies in which process the brain creats language and the known processes of social sciences, human development, communication theories and infant development among others. There are a number of techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were found in philosophical and educational fields because of their location in departments other than applied sciences. Psycholinguistics is applicable in education and philosophy. Psycholinguistics is also useful for “cognitive processes” which generates a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures. It helps to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Children’s ability to learn language is included in Developmental psycholinguistics studies.

Преувеличение и преуменьшение как маркеры речевого развития ребёнка: акмеологический подход

The article deals with the actualization of diminution and hyperbole in the child's speech and «language of nurses» as exemplified in German and Russian. The child of senior preschool and primary school age is a developing language personality mastering communicative (including metaphorical and meta-communicative) competence at the interface between thesaurus and motivational levels, according to Yu.N. Karaulov, or between the speed level and saturation level, according to G.I. Bogin. The description of the developing language personality of the child is carried out on the basis of the methodology of developmental psycholinguistics and linguistic personology. The acmeological approach allows to trace the ascent of the language personality to the top of the speech development. The mastering of parametric semantic categories is one of the markers of the cognitive development manifested in speech. The author describes external and internal factors of the child's mastering of parametric categories and analyses language means which are to actualize diminution and hyperbole.

"Look up!" Using easy words to explain how we learn hard words and other aspects of language, an interview with Lila Gleitman

Lila Gleitman is undoubtedly one of the world’s foremost experts on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics. Starting in the 60s, she rose to prominence by bringing experimental methods from psychology to bear on the questions raised by linguistics and philosophers of language, namely how children could learn the rules of a language when there is so much ambiguity both in the language and in the world surrounding them. She has done much work in this vein, focusing both on how children learn words that refer to abstract concepts such as think or believe, as well as how they acquire concepts when they lack certain inputs, such as in the case of blind or deaf children. Though her contributions and collaborations span many questions and problems in language acquisition, she is perhaps best known for proposing and showing that, from an early age, children are capable of using syntactic cues to learn the meaning of words, particularly verbs (especially those she describes as “hard words” because they are difficult or impossible to observe, like think). Through this process, termed syntactic bootstrapping, young children would be able rely on the linguistic context in which the words appear to discover aspects of the meanings of words that they don’t know yet (e.g., Landau & Gleitman, 1985; Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005). More specifically, Lila and her collaborators proposed that syntax could serve as a “zoom lens” allowing language learners to figure out which part of the world is being talked about, which would then help them identify candidate meanings for novel words (e.g., Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz, & Gleitman, 1994). ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2018.v14n3a22643

The Corpus of Lithuanian Children Language: Development and application for modern studies in language acquisition

[full article and abstract in English]
 This paper describes The Corpus of Lithuanian Children’s Language and its possible applications for modern studies on the first language acquisition. First of all, the procedure of data collection for the Corpus is discussed. Furthermore, the main methodological principles of longitudinal and experimental data compilation and transciption are decribed. Finally, different studies in developmental psycholinguistics which have been carried out so far and which demonstrate possible ways of the application of the Corpus data for different scientific purposes are introduced.
 The Corpus of Lithuanian Children’s Language developed at Vytautas Magnus University comprises typical and atypical, longitudinal and experimental data of the Lithuanian language development. The Corpus was compiled using different methodological approaches, such as natural observation and semi-experiment. The longitudinal data (conversations between the target children and their caretakers) compiled according to the requirement of natural observation includes transcribed and morphologically annotated speech of two typically-developing children, one late talker, one early talker, one child from a low SES family, and a pair of twins. The data was collected during the period of 1993–2017 and and it can be divided into three cohorts. The semi-experimentaldata (~ 124 hours) comes from numerous studies in narratives and spontaneous dialogues elicited from typically-developing and language-impaired monolingual and bilingual (pre-) school age children.
 From the very beginning of data collection for the The Corpus of Lithuanian Children’s Language, studies in the develomental changes of typical child language have been carried out. Over the past decade, these studies have been supplemented by statistical analysis of elicited semi-experimental data; the majority of these studies deal with typical vs. atypical (delayed or impaired) language acquisition and with differences between acquision of Lithuanian in a monolingual vs. bi-/polylingual settings.
 The paper provides an overview of data of The Corpus of Lithuanian Children’s Language, which have been collected from 1993 but still needed to be structurized according to the employed methodology of data compilation and possible applications for different scientific purposes.

– Linguistic knowledge of the selected groups of people with disabilities in the course of educational research – constraints and opportunities

The aim of the article is to identify certain limitations in the research conducted in a group of people with intellectual disabilities and people with hearing impairments. On the basis of reports from the field of developmental psycholinguistics it has been assumed that some of the limitations of research in the above-mentioned study groups will result from the shortcomings of linguistic knowledge of these people. It should be emphasised that linguistic difficulties have completely different backgrounds in the selected groups of people with disabilities, which was sought to be explained here. The authors attempt to identify opportunities posed by qualitative methods increasingly used in the social sciences, including special education. The success of the research procedure, both in the paradigm of the quantitative and qualitative strategies, depends on the level of communication skills and language subjects of the research (respondents, but also researchers).

The scope of children’s scope: Representation, parsing and learning

This paper reviews some developmental psycholinguistic literature on quantifier scope. I demonstrate how scope has been used as a valuable probe into children’s grammatical representations, the nature of children’s on-line understanding mechanisms, and the role that experience plays in language acquisition. First, children’s interpretations of certain scopally ambiguous sentences reveals that their syntactic representations are hierarchical, with the c-command relation playing a fundamental role in explaining interpretive biases. Second, children’s scope errors are explained by incremental parsing and interpretation mechanisms, paired with difficulty revising initial interpretations. Third, a priming manipulation reveals that children’s clauses, like those of adults, are represented with predicate-internal subjects. Finally, data on scope variation in Korean reveals that in the absence of disambiguating evidence, parameter setting is an essentially random process. Together, these discoveries reveal how the developmental psycholinguistics of scope has proved a valuable tool for probing issues of grammar, parsing and learning.

“Do You Remember Going to the Beach?”: References to Internal States in Polish and American Mother-Preschooler Shared Narratives

Abstract The present study examined references to cognitive states and emotions in narratives produced by mothers and preschoolers (aged 3 or 5 years) in Polish and American families. Participants were 32 mother-child dyads from Poland and 32 mother-child dyads from the United States. The two samples were matched with regard to child age, child gender, maternal age, and maternal education. The mother-child dyads were asked to tell three personal narratives. The co-constructed narratives were coded for mother and child references to cognitive states and emotions. Polish mothers were found to include significantly more references to cognitive states in their narratives than American mothers. Results also revealed significant correlations between mothers’ and children’s references to cognitive states across both samples. Related to child development, 5-year-olds produced significantly more tokens in the narratives than 3-year-olds. This study shows that mothers’ use of cognitive state terms in shared narratives with their young children differs across two Western cultural contexts. The results of this study are discussed with regard to two themes in developmental psycholinguistics: relations between maternal and child language use, and cross-cultural variation.

Why shouldn’t she spit on his grave? Critical discourse analysis of the revenge narratives in american popular film from the developmental point of view

Abstract One of the premises of developmental psycholinguistics is that we live our life according to certain narratives that are learned through language and media. These narratives teach children to express emotions and to attribute actions in a variety of life situations; they construct the way in which the threatening feelings such as anger, injustice, or the urge of vengeance are experienced. In this paper, we present a critical analysis of the gendered discourse in popular American cinema, based on the plot analysis of 60 films featuring male or female protagonist seeking revenge. We use critical discourse analysis to decipher the patterns of the gender roles, behaviors, and emotions, which these movies intent to force upon the viewer. As the psychological research does not clearly testify to gender differences in the experience and expression of the trait anger, we would like to argue that it is a matter of the socially moderated narrative patterns, rather than inborn tendencies, that urges boys and girls to play such different roles in those situations as well as experience them in distinct ways. Our most crucial conclusion is that Western societies have developed the narrative-based mechanisms which later helped to successfully discourage women from expressing anger in the form of physical aggression, under the threat of being left out of the discourses of femininity and, in some cases, humanity.

Isabelle Rapin, MD (1927–2017)

On May 24, 2017, academic neurology lost one of its legendary pioneers who shattered our preconceptions of developmental disorders and created entirely new paradigms of thought, realms of nosology, pathogenic mechanisms, and interdisciplinary studies. Isabelle Rapin, MD, professor emerita in the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology and the Department of Pediatrics, died after a bout with pneumonia. She was 89. A lifelong faculty member at Einstein and founding member of both the Child Neurology Society and the International Child Neurology Association, Rapin's many accomplishments in the scientific realm reflected her lifelong passion for science and singular dedication to alleviating the suffering of patients and families often stigmatized by disorders of unknown provenance and unusual behaviors. An inspirational leader who shunned the limelight, she was often referred to as “a luminary in her field” and “always the guiding light.” Rapin was performing “translational research” before the term was introduced, authoring more than 250 unique scholarly contributions in numerous areas, including genetic metabolic diseases/lysosomal storage disorders and DNA repair disorders. However, her passion was language and hearing and other communication disorders, particularly autism spectrum disorders, which she viewed as “syndrome complexes.” To accomplish her goals, she enlisted the aid of talented and visionary otolaryngologists, neuropsychologists, and developmental psycholinguists among many nontraditional collaborators. Her last article was a brilliant treatise on dyscalculia,1 a subject avoided by many but beautifully explained by her incisive writing and clarity of thought.

A Multimedia Corpus of Child Mandarin: The Tong Corpus

This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-speaking child from the age of 1;7 to 3;4. We review the state of the art in the use of corpora for first language acquisition of Mandarin, and highlight the importance of corpus studies in evaluating children's language developmental patterns vis-a-vis adult input. The transcripts in our new corpus are annotated with a morphological tier indicating parts of speech, and linked to audio or video files. This corpus goes beyond existing published corpora of child Mandarin in having more data for a single child, as well as media linking. It contributes to a number of fields including language acquisition, Chinese linguistics, corpus linguistics, developmental psycholinguistics, education, and speech and language therapy.

Developmental psycholinguistics teaches us that we need multi-method, not single-method, approaches to the study of linguistic representation.

In developmental psycholinguistics, we have, for many years, been generating and testing theories that propose both descriptions of adult representations and explanations of how those representations develop. We have learnt that restricting ourselves to any one methodology yields only incomplete data about the nature of linguistic representations. We argue that we need a multi-method approach to the study of representation.

The Long-Term English Language and Literacy Outcomes of First-Generation Former Child Immigrants in the United States

Background/Context Children from Asian ethnic backgrounds currently constitute the second largest group of child immigrants in the United States. Although stereotyped as model minority students due to their academic and economic success, studies have revealed that many Asian immigrant students struggle in school. Research has also shown that, compared to child immigrants from an Indo-European language background such as Spanish and French, Asian child immigrants experience more challenges in learning English as a second language (L2) due to greater cross-linguistic differences. However, little is known about the long-term English language outcomes of first-generation Asian child immigrants. Purpose/Objective The present study examines the effects of learner-level and input-level factors on first-generation Asian child immigrants’ long-term English outcomes. Research Design Data for the current study are selected from a larger correlational and cross-sectional study that examined the effect of the age of arrival variable on Chinese immigrants’ English L2 outcomes. We used two criteria to select participants from the larger study: (1) those who had arrived in the United States between the ages of 5 to 18 (to qualify as a “child immigrant”), and (2) those who had resided in the United States for at least 10 years (to examine long-term outcomes). These criteria resulted in the current sample of 69 participants. The English language proficiency data include participants’ phonological production ratings, performances on a grammaticality judgment task, and their self-ratings of English proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Conclusions/Recommendations The current study showed a complex interplay of factors affecting former child immigrants’ English L2 acquisition. Although age of arrival played a critical role in their L2 learning outcomes, it exerted varying degrees of influence by L2 domain. Age of arrival was a strong predictor of L2 phonological production, grammar knowledge, and oral language proficiency, but not literacy skills. L2 input, language learning aptitude, and child immigrants’ affective status also contributed to their L2 outcomes, and carried more weight than age of arrival. We interpreted the results to be in line with the multiple sensitive period hypothesis in developmental psycholinguistics research. The results also suggested that literacy is not susceptible to age-related effects in the same way in which oral language and more specifically the phonological and syntactic systems are. Literacy as a cultural construct rather than a biologically unique human system is intensively taught throughout the school years and curriculum. Malleable factors, such as instruction and reading strategies, are thus perhaps more important in determining child immigrants’ long-term literacy outcomes.

The influence of prosodic input in the second language classroom: does it stimulate child acquisition of word order and function words?

This paper reports on an intervention study with young Polish beginners (mean age: 8 years, 3 months) learning English at school. It seeks to identify whether exposure to rhythmic input improves knowledge of word order and function words. The ‘prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis’, relevant in developmental psycholinguistics, provided the theoretical framework for the study. Eighty-seven children were randomly assigned to a treatment group exposed to rhythm-salient input in the form of nursery rhymes, a comparison group exposed to prose input, or a control group with no extra input. Results established that prosody can be an important factor in second language acquisition, as in first language acquisition. Children in the treatment group showed improvement in metalinguistic knowledge of English word order but not of function words. This has implications for teaching methods and classroom materials.

Introduction: Language acquisition and sociolinguistic variation

The special issue appears in a new scientific landscape of innovative attempts to link sociolinguistics and cognitive psycholinguistics. Studies on acquisition of variation have been conducted since the late 1960s, but the changing scientific landscape gives them a new impetus. On the one hand, our work draws on and contributes to sociolinguistics. As a result, it focuses on the acquisition of sociolinguistic patterns conceived of as properties shared by communities of speakers consisting of both children and adults. At the same time, our work draws on the traditions of developmental psycholinguistics. These connections lead us to discuss the cognitive mechanisms that are involved in the acquisition of sociolinguistic variants and social meaning. The contributions of the special issue address four questions which may be the key driving issues in research in the years to come.