Early Stages Of Language Acquisition Research Articles

유아의 한국어 습득 초기에 나타나는 환유의 양상

The embodied approach assumes that metonymy plays an important role in generating abstract and complex concepts based on bodily experiences. Therefore, it is required to explore the aspects and contributions of metonymy in the early stage of language acquisition in infants when concepts and forms of language begin to form. Although in previous studies researchers found that metonymic uses were prevalent in the productions of children aged 3-5 years, metonymic abilities in children aged 1-2 years in the early stages of language acquisition have not been covered. In Esther

Usvajanje jezika kod djece uzrasta dvije i tri godine / Language Acquisition in Children Aged Two and Three

This paper discusses language acquisition in children aged two and three. The analysis was carried out on a corpus of child language compiled during research conducted at a kindergarten in Sarajevo among children aged two and three who acquire their native language in the area of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Qualitative and quantitative methods were applied in the corpus analysis. The development of child language production was measured by the Mean Length of Utterance, based on the number of words per utterance (MLUw). The distribution of parts of speech was established for both age groups. A special emphasis was placed on the ratio between the number of nouns and the number of verbs. The results have confirmed the nativist natural partitions hypothesis, according to which nouns are predominant in children’s early speech over verbs and other parts of speech. MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI) was applied in the semantic analysis of nouns. The analysis confirmed the hypothesis that nouns denoting animate beings have a higher prevalence over nouns denoting inanimate objects at the early stages of language acquisition. In addition, the presence of complex and abstract concepts was detected, which supports the theory of the existence of an innate language acquisition device in humans. The creative aspect of child language was also analysed, along with differences between the language of children and the language of adult speakers.

Semantic cues in language learning: an artificial language study with adult and child learners

ABSTRACT Grammatical regularities may correlate with semantics; e.g. grammatical gender is often partially predictable from the noun's semantics. We explore whether learners generalise over semantic cues, and whether the extent of exposure (1 versus 4 sessions) and number of exemplars for each semantic class (type-frequency) affect this. Six-year-olds and adults were exposed to semi-artificial languages where nouns co-occurred with novel particles, with particle usage fully or partially determined by the semantics of the nouns. Both adults and children generalised to novel nouns when semantic cues were fully consistent. Adults (but not children) also generalised when cues were partially consistent. Generalisation increased with exposure, however there was no evidence that increasing type-frequency (i.e. more nouns per semantic class) increased generalisation. Post-experiment interviews also suggested that successful generalisation depended on explicit awareness. These results suggest that semantic cues are particularly difficult for children to exploit during the early stages of language acquisition.

Внедрение профессионального перевода в практические занятия по иностранному языку на младших курсах

Задача статьи — доказать, что профессиональная подготовка будущих лингвистов-перевод-чиков начинается с самого начала обучения на первом курсе, то есть уже за два года до начала изучения теории и практики перевода. Если рассматривать лингвистическую составляющую переводческой компетенции с точки зрения вычленения значимых сем и их передачи иными лингвистическими средствами, то готовить к профессиональному переводу можно через «внутриязыковой перевод» и учебный перевод в условиях интеграции языковых и переводческих навыков, которые взаимно подкрепляют друг друга. Принятие творческих переводческих решений, не являясь задачей младших курсов, может применяться как средство более глубокого проникновения в коммуникативную интенцию автора художественного текста. На практических примерах статья призвана показать, что элементы профессиональной подготовки переводчика на младших курсах «врастают» в процесс совершенствования речевой компетенции как на иностранном, так и на родном языках. The author’s goal is to demonstrate that foreign language acquisition at translation/interpretation colleges may incorporate the development of professional skills from the very beginning, rather than wait for two years until students are offered a course in the Theory of Translation. If we regard the linguistic component of translator/interpreter professional education from the viewpoint of rendering the essential semantic features of a message in a different code, it is possible to use “intralinguistic translation”, in R. Jacobson’s idiom, — that is, to paraphrase native language utterances, since paraphrasing is one of the most universal skills, equally necessary for language proficiency and effective translation. It helps to weigh one translation decision against another, to see which semantic components are rendered and which are lost and to decide how the lost components of meaning can be reconstructed in another “translation”. Language acquisition is fostered by the so-called “pedagogical translation”, which has a purely utilitarian purpose of grammar and vocabulary skill formation. And here elements of professional translation may come in unobtrusively. Not only is it feasible to teach standard “algorithmic” translation strategies along with imparting language skills, but also individual (non-standard, “heuristic”) translator decisions. “Infiltration” of professional translation into the early stages of foreign language acquisition enhances language skills and shows students how a slight modification of the structure, wording or intonation can alter the message. Translation-focused semantic awareness makes language learning more motivated and intellectually satisfying.

Generalized Effects of Naturalistic Social Communication Intervention for Minimally Verbal Children with Autism.

JASP-EMT, the combined Enhanced Milieu Teaching (EMT) and Joint Attention, Structured Play, and Emotion Regulation (JASPER) interventions, has been found to be effective for promoting social communication in young children with autism (Kasari et al. in J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 53(6):635-646, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2014.01.019 , 2014). The current study examined the effects of this naturalistic intervention on social language use in three children with autism who were in the early stages of language acquisition. Generalization to communication partners who did not utilize the intervention strategies was systematically examined using a multiple-baseline design. The results from this study indicate that this blended intervention is effective in increasing target social language for young children with autism, however, generalization to communication partners does not readily occur. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Comparative analysis of a specific type of lexical collocation (light verb + noun) in Croatian, Italian and English language and its use in classroom teaching of lexis

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview and the analysis of collocations, one of the most significant aspects of idiomatic use of language. A special emphasis has been put on a comparative review of the most common Light Verb Constructions consisting of light verbs (cro. lagani glagoli, ital. verbi supporto) and nouns in Croatian, English and Italian language. The aforementioned construction is chosen since it is extremely common in the early stages of language acquisition. Moreover, the aim of the conducted contrastive analysis has been to determine overlaps in order to use the examples of positive transfer in teaching lexis (English/Italian – L2), as well as to prevent negative interference such as false analogies. The research is based on the assumption that the number of completely concordant collocations taught in the early stages of foreign language acquisition is limited. Thus, prompt detection and putting emphasis on their relevance is essential. Following the discussion of the results of the contrastive analysis, the relevance of teaching collocations, i.e. presenting the most common collocations simultaneously with new vocabulary will be stressed. In accordance with the above­mentioned, we believe that collocational approach is the most useful and effective in teaching languages.

Twelve to 24-month-olds can understand the meaning of morphological regularities in their language.

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build links between these other parts of language and their meaning. Here, we investigated the acquisition of morphology in infants learning Italian, a language with a rich inflectional morphology that marks both gender and number on both the article and final vowel of nouns. We demonstrate that infants can build these links between concepts and morphological regularities much earlier than previously thought. Italian-learning 12-18- and 24-month-olds were shown pairs of images of faces that differed either in number (1 female vs. 2 females; 1 male vs. 2 males) or gender (1 female vs. 1 male; 2 females vs. 2 males). On each trial infants were directed to look at one of the images with the morphological regularities as the only distinguishing cue. Overall, across all ages, the infants looked to the labeled image, indicating that they had at least some understanding of the morphology. While infants succeeded on both gender comparisons, they only showed evidence of understanding the feminine number distinction. These results indicate that in the early stages of language acquisition, infants are able to identify recurring morphemes and to map those morphological regularities to the concepts that they mark in the language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Bilingualism and statistical learning: Lessons from studies using artificial languages

AbstractStudies of statistical learning have shaped our understanding of the processes involved in the early stages of language acquisition. Many of these advances were made using experimental paradigms with artificial languages that allow for careful manipulation of the statistical regularities in the input. This article summarizes how these paradigms have begun to inform bilingualism research. We focus on two complementary goals that have emerged from studies of statistical learning in bilinguals. The first is to identify whether bilinguals differ from monolinguals in how they track distributional regularities. The second is determining how learners are capable of tracking multiple inputs, which arguably is an important facet of becoming proficient in more than one language.

Speech Rhythm Convergence as a Social Coalition Signal.

Patterns of nonverbal and verbal behavior of interlocutors become more similar as communication progresses. Rhythm entrainment promotes prosocial behavior and signals social bonding and cooperation. Yet, it is unknown if the convergence of rhythm in human speech is perceived and is used to make pragmatic inferences regarding the cooperative urge of the interactors. We conducted two experiments to answer this question. For analytical purposes, we separate pulse (recurring acoustic events) and meter (hierarchical structuring of pulses based on their relative salience). We asked the listeners to make judgments on the hostile or collaborative attitude of interacting agents who exhibit different or similar pulse (Experiment 1) or meter (Experiment 2). The results suggest that rhythm convergence can be a marker of social cooperation at the level of pulse, but not at the level of meter. The mapping of rhythmic convergence onto social affiliation or opposition is important at the early stages of language acquisition. The evolutionary origin of this faculty is possibly the need to transmit and perceive coalition information in social groups of human ancestors. We suggest that this faculty could promote the emergence of the speech faculty in humans.

The acquisition and use of negation in the early child language

This paper investigates how negation develops in the speech of a Turkish-speaking child in the very early stages of language acquisition. The study features the video recordings of a child between the ages of 19 and 22 months and the analyses of negative forms in the recorded data. The development of negation in parent-child interactions is discussed with demonstrative examples between the boy and his parents. The data was recorded by the mother in a regular fashion, particularly at play and lunch times. For the detailed data analysis, the recordings have been divided into three sets according to the age of the child as 1;8, 1;9 and 1;10. The initial step is to identify and explain how negation is formed in Turkish, which is followed by the data analysis in order to track the development of negation in the child’s speech. The ways in which his formation of negation improves have been given special attention and interpreted as the child’s linguistic knowledge expands. The data evidences that the child not only starts to use most forms of negation as early as the age of 1;10, but also does this strategically by performing them for a successful communication in a clear developmental sequence. Some of his strategies traced in the data are using variety sets, complementing one negative form with the other to emphasize his point and providing reasons and results for his statements. The findings confirm that the child acquires the forms in an order from more independent to the dependant as well as in a sequence from the easy to the linguistically and cognitively more challenging.

Functional shortcuts in language co-occurrence networks.

Human language contains regular syntactic structures and grammatical patterns that should be detectable in their co-occurence networks. However, most standard complex network measures can hardly differentiate between co-occurence networks built from an empirical corpus and a body of scrambled text. In this work, we employ a motif extraction procedure to show that empirical networks have much greater motif densities. We demonstrate that motifs function as efficient and effective shortcuts in language networks, potentially explaining why we are able to generate and decipher language expressions so rapidly. Finally we suggest a link between motifs and constructions in Construction Grammar as well as speculate on the mechanisms behind the emergence of constructions in the early stages of language acquisition.

Word Processing in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials.

This investigation was conducted to determine whether young children with autism spectrum disorders exhibited a canonical neural response to word stimuli and whether putative event-related potential (ERP) measures of word processing were correlated with a concurrent measure of receptive language. Additional exploratory analyses were used to examine whether the magnitude of the association between ERP measures of word processing and receptive language varied as a function of the number of word stimuli the participants reportedly understood. Auditory ERPs were recorded in response to spoken words and nonwords presented with equal probability in 34 children aged 2-5 years with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder who were in the early stages of language acquisition. Average amplitudes and amplitude differences between word and nonword stimuli within 200-500 ms were examined at left temporal (T3) and parietal (P3) electrode clusters. Receptive vocabulary size and the number of experimental stimuli understood were concurrently measured using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Across the entire participant group, word-nonword amplitude differences were diminished. The average word-nonword amplitude difference at T3 was related to receptive vocabulary only if 5 or more word stimuli were understood. If ERPs are to ever have clinical utility, their construct validity must be established by investigations that confirm their associations with predictably related constructs. These results contribute to accruing evidence, suggesting that a valid measure of auditory word processing can be derived from the left temporal response to words and nonwords. In addition, this measure can be useful even for participants who do not reportedly understand all of the words presented as experimental stimuli, though it will be important for researchers to track familiarity with word stimuli in future investigations. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5614840.

Rapid Statistical Learning Supporting Word Extraction From Continuous Speech

The identification of words in continuous speech, known as speech segmentation, is a critical early step in language acquisition. This process is partially supported by statistical learning, the ability to extract patterns from the environment. Given that speech segmentation represents a potential bottleneck for language acquisition, patterns in speech may be extracted very rapidly, without extensive exposure. This hypothesis was examined by exposing participants to continuous speech streams composed of novel repeating nonsense words. Learning was measured on-line using a reaction time task. After merely one exposure to an embedded novel word, learners demonstrated significant learning effects, as revealed by faster responses to predictable than to unpredictable syllables. These results demonstrate that learners gained sensitivity to the statistical structure of unfamiliar speech on a very rapid timescale. This ability may play an essential role in early stages of language acquisition, allowing learners to rapidly identify word candidates and “break in” to an unfamiliar language.

Modeling the Development of Audiovisual Cue Integration in Speech Perception.

Adult speech perception is generally enhanced when information is provided from multiple modalities. In contrast, infants do not appear to benefit from combining auditory and visual speech information early in development. This is true despite the fact that both modalities are important to speech comprehension even at early stages of language acquisition. How then do listeners learn how to process auditory and visual information as part of a unified signal? In the auditory domain, statistical learning processes provide an excellent mechanism for acquiring phonological categories. Is this also true for the more complex problem of acquiring audiovisual correspondences, which require the learner to integrate information from multiple modalities? In this paper, we present simulations using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) that learn cue weights and combine cues on the basis of their distributional statistics. First, we simulate the developmental process of acquiring phonological categories from auditory and visual cues, asking whether simple statistical learning approaches are sufficient for learning multi-modal representations. Second, we use this time course information to explain audiovisual speech perception in adult perceivers, including cases where auditory and visual input are mismatched. Overall, we find that domain-general statistical learning techniques allow us to model the developmental trajectory of audiovisual cue integration in speech, and in turn, allow us to better understand the mechanisms that give rise to unified percepts based on multiple cues.

Learning to navigate the American retail servicescape: Online forums as consumer acculturation platforms and consumer gift systems

With consumer mobility on the rise, marketers need to understand how to best serve the increasing number of immigrants, expatriates, and foreign nationals. We examine an independent (non-corporate, brand agnostic) online forum that operates as a consumer acculturation platform and a consumer gift system, where Chinese-speaking consumers assist one another with navigating and even exploiting the American retail servicescape. Forum participants bestow the gift of experience on the collective to enhance the market-oriented communicative competence of forum participants necessary to master the American retail environment. Consumers on the platform systematically employ American English to reference brands and describe retail marketing promotions in a forum dominated by Chinese language. Specifically, we find that code switching, typically expected in early stages of language acquisition, becomes a robust norm to communicate specifically about American retail phenomena (metaphorical code switching) and bridge the gulf between home and host cultures. We offer firms four tactical strategies to attract and retain Chinese-language consumers.

Temporal Attention as a Scaffold for Language Development.

Language is one of the most fascinating abilities that humans possess. Infants demonstrate an amazing repertoire of linguistic abilities from very early on and reach an adult-like form incredibly fast. However, language is not acquired all at once but in an incremental fashion. In this article we propose that the attentional system may be one of the sources for this developmental trajectory in language acquisition. At birth, infants are endowed with an attentional system fully driven by salient stimuli in their environment, such as prosodic information (e.g., rhythm or pitch). Early stages of language acquisition could benefit from this readily available, stimulus-driven attention to simplify the complex speech input and allow word segmentation. At later stages of development, infants are progressively able to selectively attend to specific elements while disregarding others. This attentional ability could allow them to learn distant non-adjacent rules needed for morphosyntactic acquisition. Because non-adjacent dependencies occur at distant moments in time, learning these dependencies may require correctly orienting attention in the temporal domain. Here, we gather evidence uncovering the intimate relationship between the development of attention and language. We aim to provide a novel approach to human development, bridging together temporal attention and language acquisition.

Prominencia estructural y prominencia fonética en el funcionamiento de la memoria fonológica a corto plazo

It seems that children are born with sophisticated abilities to perceive speech sounds. Phonological short-term memory plays a key role in the process of language acquisition in the storage of unknown phonological forms while more permanent representations are stored in the long-term memory. In this paper we present the results of a study on the influence of two factors in the short-term memory: the degree of perceptibility (phonetic prominence) and the type of syllable structure (structural prominence) of the stimuli used. The results showed a larger influence of the latter at the expense of the amount of phonetic substance. This reinforces the importance of the role of syllabic structure in the early stages of language acquisition, used as a clue for learning the stress rules on speech and, subsequently, in the process of learning how to read.

How arbitrary is language?

It is a long established convention that the relationship between sounds and meanings of words is essentially arbitrary--typically the sound of a word gives no hint of its meaning. However, there are numerous reported instances of systematic sound-meaning mappings in language, and this systematicity has been claimed to be important for early language development. In a large-scale corpus analysis of English, we show that sound-meaning mappings are more systematic than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, this systematicity is more pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and reduces in later vocabulary development. We propose that the vocabulary is structured to enable systematicity in early language learning to promote language acquisition, while also incorporating arbitrariness for later language in order to facilitate communicative expressivity and efficiency.

Frequency effects and second language lexical acquisition

Frequency effects in an L1 and L2 longitudinal corpus were investigated using Zipfian distribution analyses and linear curve estimations. The results demonstrated that the NS lexical input exhibited Zipfian distributions, but that the L2 lexical output did not match the NS Zipfian patterns. Word frequency analyses indicated that NS interlocutors modify their lexicon such that frequency scores decrease as a function of time that L2 learners have studied English. In contrast, the word frequency scores for the L2 output increased as a function of time. Post-hoc analyses indicated that differences in frequency scores between NS input and L2 output were best explained by the repetition of infrequent words, but not frequent words by L2 learners in the early stages of language acquisition. The results question absolute frequency interpretations of lexical acquisition for L2 learners and provide evidence for usage-based approaches for language learning.

Enhancement of Gamma Oscillations Indicates Preferential Processing of Native over Foreign Phonemic Contrasts in Infants

Young infants discriminate phonetically relevant speech contrasts in a universal manner, that is, similarly across languages. This ability fades by 12 months of age as the brain builds language-specific phonemic maps and increasingly responds preferentially to the infant's native language. However, the neural mechanisms that underlie the development of infant preference for native over non-native phonemes remain unclear. Since gamma-band power is known to signal infants' preference for native language rhythm, we hypothesized that it might also indicate preference for native phonemes. Using high-density electroencephalogram/event-related potential (EEG/ERP) recordings and source-localization techniques to identify and locate the ERP generators, we examined changes in brain oscillations while 6-month-old human infants from monolingual English settings listened to English and Spanish syllable contrasts. Neural dynamics were investigated via single-trial analysis of the temporal-spectral composition of brain responses at source level. Increases in 4-6 Hz (theta) power and in phase synchronization at 2-4 Hz (delta/theta) were found to characterize infants' evoked responses to discrimination of native/non-native syllable contrasts mostly in the left auditory source. However, selective enhancement of induced gamma oscillations in the area of anterior cingulate cortex was seen only during native contrast discrimination. These results suggest that gamma oscillations support syllable discrimination in the earliest stages of language acquisition, particularly during the period in which infants begin to develop preferential processing for linguistically relevant phonemic features in their environment. Our results also suggest that by 6 months of age, infants already treat native phonemic contrasts differently from non-native, implying that perceptual specialization and establishment of enduring phonemic memory representations have been initiated.