Course Of Language Development Research Articles

Unnaturalness of Negation – an Old Wives’ Tale Retold

Negation has a very long history of study. In the realm of logic, negation is seen as a simple operation that turns an affirmative to a negative. This assumption strongly affected the linguistic study of negation, and led to some misconceptions. For example, negation in natural languages is seen as something unnatural, artificial and syntactically as well as semantically dependant on affirmation. It is perceived as a logical/mathematical operation that turns affirmatives into negatives by way of syntactic transformation and semantic cancellation of multiple negatives. To refute some of these misconceptions, the paper investigates the nature of negation as a linguistic phenomenon, and shows that negation in logic and linguistics should not and cannot be treated in the same fashion. Special attention is paid to the problems of structural complexity, the syntactic notion of multiple negation and its different semantic interpretations. With regard to the semantic interpretation of multiple negation, languages, by and large, allow for two possibilities: negative concord and double negation. Negative concord, which interprets two negatives as a single negation, seems to represent the natural course of language development, while double negation, which allows the cancellation of two negatives resulting in affirmation, was introduced into languages under the influence of logic in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The vocal development of a girl who sings but does not speak

Background in music psychology The development of singing involves not only the acquisition of melodies and words but also precise attunement to the timing structure and melodic features given by the social environment, which leads to a considerable conventionalization of performance. Background in linguistics In the course of language development, children adapt their phonetic output to the sound patterns of the target language. In singing songs, the rendition of the lyrics naturally leans on these native language sound patterns, even if the semantic content of the lyrics plays little role. Aims We report a long-term study of a child with infantile autism and severe mental handicap who sings songs but has no language. The only aspect of speech she produces is the phonetic realization of the songs she sings. This exceptional case in which musical development is dissociated from language development bears relevance to the question of the interrelationship of singing and speaking. Method The material consists of two hours of audio data or 269 reproductions of familiar songs extracted from a long-term video documentation of the single case covering the period from age 3–15. Based on phonetic and musical transcriptions, the girl's musical abilities were qualitatively assessed by expert rating. Her phonetic repertoire was quantitatively assessed. Her vocal production (phonetic and musical) was examined longitudinally with respect to its approximation to the original songs. Results At three years the autistic girl displays precocious musical competence in singing, which, however, does not grow further from this initial level. Musical creativity and expressiveness grow to a peak in middle childhood and then decline again in adolescence. The girl's phonetic inventory of sounds is highly restricted and shows no progression, but her articulation grows more and more deliberate and, within her bounds, nearer to the original words. The non-verbal girl apparently has a mental representation of the lyrics. Conclusion Musical competence, creativity and expressiveness in singing can reach a high level even in the total absence of language, and by singing, some residual language-like capacity like articulatory control may be enhanced.

How social contexts support and shape language development

The human potential for language is based in human biology but makes requirements of the social environment to be realized. This paper reports evidence regarding (1) the nature of those environmental requirements, (2) the ways in which the varied social contexts in which children live meet those requirements, and (3) the effects of environmental variability in meeting those requirements on the course of language development. The evidence suggests that all human environments support language acquisition by providing children with opportunities for communicative experience, which motivate the language acquisition process, and a language model, which serves as data for the language acquisition mechanism. Different environments do so to different degrees, thereby producing group and individual differences in the rate and course of language development.

Current Status of Treatments for Dyslexia: Critical Review

The acquisition of reading is a complex neurobiologic process. Identifying the most effective instruction and remedial intervention methods for children at risk of developing reading problems and for those who are already struggling is equally complex. This article aims to provide the clinician with a review of more current findings on the prevention and remediation of reading problems in children, along with an approach to considering the diagnosis and treatment of a child with dyslexia. The first part of the review describes interventions targeted at preventing reading difficulties in the at-risk younger child. The second part of the review discusses the efficacy of approaches to treat the older, reading-disabled child ("intervention studies"). Factors that impact the response to treatment are also discussed, as are neuroimaging studies that offer insight into how the brain responds to treatment interventions. With appropriate instruction, at-risk readers can become both accurate and fluent readers. In contrast, although intensive, evidence-based remedial interventions can markedly improve reading accuracy in older, reading-disabled children, they have been significantly less effective in closing the fluency gap. Owing to the dynamic course of language development and the changes in language demands over time, even after a child has demonstrated a substantial response to treatment interventions, his or her subsequent progress should be carefully tracked to ensure optimal progress toward the development of functional reading and written language skills.

The Processing Cost of Reference Set Computation: Acquisition of Stress Shift and Focus

This article is concerned with the correspondence conditions that hold between certain semantic relations—including part-whole relations, possession, location, and the semantic features [± animate] or [± count]—and certain syntactic structures including genitives and relative clauses. The objective is to determine the extent to which these correspondence conditions derive from Universal Grammar or are "learned" by children in response to input from caretakers and others. Interface conditions imposed by Universal Grammar (UG) are expected to appear early in the course of language development despite the vagaries of the primary linguistic data. In this article, we show that children as young as 3 years old adhere to specific semantic distinctions and to specific constraints on the mapping of these distinctions onto syntactic structures. Moreover, the children show more stringent adherence to interface conditions than adult speakers of the same languages do, indicating that children's mapping relations between syntax and semantics are not based on their experience but rather are projected from UG.

Theoretical influences on research on language development and intervention in individuals with mental retardation

In this article, we consider the theoretical debates and frameworks that have shaped research on language development and intervention in persons with mental retardation over the past four decades. Our starting point is the nativist theory, which has been espoused most forcefully by Chomsky. We also consider more recent alternatives to the nativist approach, including the social-interactionist and emergentist approaches, which have been developed largely within the field of child language research. We also consider the implications for language development and intervention of the genetic syndrome-based approach to behavioral research advocated by Dykens and others. We briefly review the impact and status of the debates spurred by the nativist approach in research on the course of language development in individuals with mental retardation. In addition, we characterize some of the achievements in language intervention that have been made possible by the debates spurred by nativism and the various alternatives to it. The evidence we consider provides support for all three alternatives to the nativist approach. Moreover, successful interventions appear to embody elements of several of these approaches as well as other theoretical approaches (e.g., behaviorism). We conclude that language intervention must be theoretically eclectic in its approach, with different strategies appropriate for teaching different features of language, at different points in development, and for children displaying different characteristics or learning histories.

The Odds of Becoming a Precocious Reader of Finnish.

The authors examined the developmental relations between language acquisition and emergence of reading prior to formal literacy instruction. Sixty-one Finnish-speaking children were followed up once a year from infancy to school start (1 year 0 months–7 years 3 months). Before entering first grade, 43% of the children were classified as emergent readers and 30% as precocious readers. The readers had displayed more rapid vocabulary, inflectional, and metaphonological development than their agemates. Increased awareness of sound patterns emerged well before word reading. However, the striking growth spurt in phonemic awareness can be regarded more as a consequence of than a precursor to reading. The findings suggest that early mastery of words and word inflections increases the likelihood of becoming aware of sound patterns in words. Is the course of language development in very early childhood related to the emergence of reading skills prior to formal literacy instruction in Finnish children? To our knowledge, no study in any language has followed up a representative age group using a large set of measures to tap the relevant milestones of language development from the first year of life until the final months before entering school. In a recent cross-linguistic study by Seymour, Aro, and Erskine (2003), 13 European alphabetic languages were compared. The age at which children enter primary school in different countries did not influence reading acquisition. Nor did the gender of the child. In most languages studied, children became accurate and fluent readers by the end of first grade, but for some Germanic languages, such as Danish and particularly English, the rate of learning to read was more than twice as slow. The delayed wordreading skill was mainly attributed to the complexity of the syllabic structure and the inconsistent system of grapheme–phoneme correspondences. If phonology and orthography influence the rate of learning to read words, studies on English do not apply universally to all children (for oral-language learning, see Vihman, 1996).

Assessment of thinking style preferences and language proficiency for South African students whose native languages differ.

The language proficiency of first-year students at the University of Pretoria (56 men and 59 women, M age=19.40 yr., SD=.80, range from 18.00 to 20.70) was assessed by means of the English Language Skills Assessment. More than one-third of the students did not show proficiency at Grade 10, as expected. This language assessment was not correlated with academic achievement equally well for students in a group. The diversity of thinking style preferences of the students enrolled in a language development course was also assessed on the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. Scores indicated a range of thinking style preferences but the group's overall mean scores represented detail-oriented and feeling-based modes of thinking processes. These preferences were correlated with academic achievement and learning of languages. The data are consistent with the hypothesis that thinking styles could be a focus of educational strategies in South Africa, using the perspective that qualitatively different approaches to teaching might be associated with students' qualitatively different approaches to learning.

Supporting communication in the child with a learning disability

Learning disabilities can result from a range of genetic, social and specific medical conditions. In addition to a restricted ability to learn, children may present with speech, language or communication difficulties of varying degrees. Associated physical, hearing or visual impairments will influence the nature and course of language development. Best practice in this area involves collaborative working between families, education and health professionals directed towards agreed functional communication goals. Augmentative and alternative communication techniques, such as signing, symbols and communication aids, can have a major role in the development of effective social communication, appropriate behaviour and curriculum access.

The Acquisition of Mayan Morphosyntax

This paper assesses predictions for the acquisition of Mayan verbal inflections derived from structural, comparative and metrical theories. The structuralist theory of Wexler (1998) fails to predict K'iche' (Kiche) children's use of the language's agreement morphology and existential verb. A comparison of verbal inflection across the Mayan languages successfully predicts the children's early use of the status suffixes on verbs, but fails to predict the relative acquisition of the ergative and absolutive agreement affixes. Demuth's metrical theory (1994) is the most successful of these three models in predicting the course of language development in K'iche' It is the only model that can explain why children would break morphemes along syllable boundaries as well as combine separate inflections into a single unit of production.

Student playwriting for language development

In this article I recommend the use of a particular type of drama activity—playwriting, and subsequent playreading—in English language teaching. I review the potential of playwriting activities for language development as described in the literature. I then describe how I organized playwriting and playreading activities within the framework of a language development course taught to first‐year undergraduate students of TESL at the University of Brunei Darussalam. Playwriting provides a natural context for the integration of the four skills, as students write and rewrite their scripts and rehearse their lines. As an example of an authentic and recognized text type—a play for the theatre—the playwriting activity results in a text of more than transitory value, which is written not for the teacher, but for the benefit of current and unknown future audiences.

Development of constructed phrases in a child with language impairment

The emerging use of constructed utterances by a pre-school boy who initially used single words and routine phrases is described during a 7-month period, from 4;8-5;3. Emerging constructed phrases were consistent with a mixture of gestalt and analytic acquisition strategies. Some constructed phrases were variations on earlier routine phrases, and others were combinations of words that did not appear in earlier routines. Discussion of the child's course of language development is related to the literature on typical language acquisition and a model of language development in individuals with autism.

Infants' sensitivity to temporal parameters of the visual expectation paradigm

Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of sentences from a finite number of words. How this unique, productive power of human language unfolds over the course of language development is still hotly debated. When they listen to sentences comprising newly-learned words, do children generalize from their knowledge of the legal combinations of word categories or do they instead rely on strings of words stored in memory to detect syntactic errors? Using novel words taught in the lab, we recorded Evoked Response Potentials (ERPs) in two-year-olds and adults listening to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences containing syntactic contexts that had not been used during training. In toddlers, the ungrammatical use of words, even when they have been just learned, induced an early left anterior negativity (surfacing 100–400 ms after target word onset) followed by a late posterior positivity (surfacing 700–900 ms after target word onset) that was not observed in grammatical sentences. This late effect was remarkably similar to the P600 displayed by adults, suggesting that toddlers and adults perform similar syntactic computations. Our results thus show that toddlers build on-line expectations regarding the syntactic category of upcoming words in a sentence.

The Organization of Human Language Cortex: Special Adaptation or Common Cortical Design?

Understanding the neural basis of language is one of the oldest and most difficult pursuits in neuroscience. Despite decades of accumulated data on aphasic subjects with cortical damage, we still know relatively little of how language functions are represented within the neural circuitry of the brain. A major issue of debate is whether language is a species-specific adaptation built into the neocortex, or a by-product of neocortical expansion. Cognitive studies emphasizing the universal nature of language abilities, the consistencies of language structure, and the consistent time course of language development have all indicated that language abilities are innate and must be built into the brain by evolutionary forces. Comparative studies of primates are equivocal since we have little evidence indicating that primate communication is homologous to human language systems. Much of this confusion is related to a lack of information regarding the neural basis of human communication. Recent anatomical data from human brains indicates that left hemisphere regions can have unique types of organization that may be responsible for functional specialization.

Early language development in full-term and premature infants

Designed to provide practical information to those who are concerned with the development of young children, this book has three goals. First, the authors offer details about patterns of language development over the first three years of life. Although intensive studies have been carried out by examining from one to 20 children in the age range of zero to three years, there has been no longitudinal study of a sample as large as this--53 children--nor have as many measures of language development been obtained from the same children. Examining language development from a broad perspective in this size population allows us to see what generalizations can be made about patterns of language development. This volume's second goal is to examine the impact of such factors as biology, cognition, and communication input--and the interaction of these factors--which traditionally have been held to play an important role in the course of language development. The comparative influence of each--and the interaction of all three--were examined statistically using children's scores on standard language tests at age three. The volume's third goal is to provide information to beginning investigators, early childhood educators, and clinicians that can help them in their practice. This includes information about what appear to be good early predictors of language development at three years; language assessment procedures that can be used with children below age three, how these procedures can be used, what they tell us about the language development of young children; and what warning signs should probably be attended to, and which can most likely be ignored. In addition, suggestions are made about what patterns of communicative interaction during the different periods of development seem to be most successful in terms of language development outcomes at three years, and what overall indications the study offers regarding appropriate intervention.

Charting the course of language development

Charting the course of language development

The subject-object division in language acquisition and ego development

Cognitive development can be construed as children's progress in making a division between what is true of their experiences and what is true of the world. Linguistically this represents the distinction between intension and extension. A view of language acquisition is presented which takes co-designation of extensions by intensions as the child's central task, rather than abstraction. Some speculations are offered about the course of language development. Using similar conceptual tools, ego development is interpreted as the process of constructing “expressive” and “reflective” intensions to the self.

Error assimilation as a mechanism in language learning.

ABSTRACTThe present study tests the hypothesis that many of the grammatical errors that occur during the course of language development can serve as ‘auto-input’ leading directly to the acquisition of new expressive forms. A free-speech corpus of grammatically incorrect sentences was gathered from each of 4 four-year-old subjects. Three additional sets of sentences were constructed: sentences containing errors similar to those actually produced, sentences containing ‘baby errors’ and correct sentences. The children were asked to judge these sentences as correct or incorrect. Significantly fewer corrections were made in the sentences with subject-generated errors than in the sentences with similar errors or ‘baby errors’. These results can be explained by assuming that children learn their own errors.

On interpreting developmental changes in the dichotic right-ear advantage

Some conflicting data bearing on the development of the dichotic right-ear advantage and of language laterality are discussed. It is argued that the conflicts might be reconciled if different dichotic tests were viewed as assessing different levels of language processing. For example, more slowly maturing mnemonic processes may be tapped by four digit-pairs-per-trial dichotic tasks, whereas earlier maturing auditory and phonetic processes may be tapped when single pairs of nonsense-syllables are used. A levels-of-processing model may lend insight into the pathological as well as the normal course of language development.

Young children's imitation and comprehension of sentential singularity and plurality.

The number of the subject is marked in most third-person sentences both in the subject-noun (e.g., " dog/dogs ") and in the verb (e.g., " barks/bark "). The verb inflection for number is redundant with the noun inflection except in those rare instances in which the subject-noun is not marked for number (e.g., " sheep/sheep "). Since the verb inflection for number is rarely crucial for determining the meaning of a sentence, and since number is marked in exactly the opposite manner in regularly formed verbs from the manner in which it is marked in regularly formed nouns, children might be expected to acquire the verb inflection for number relatively late in the course of language development. Sentences in which number was marked in (a) the verb only, and (b) the subject-noun and the verb were presented to a sample of 24 children 4 years of age in both imitation and comprehension tests. The results indicated that the children did not comprehend the verb inflection for number even when the noun was unmarked and the verb inflection was the only cue for number. Despite explicit training on the meaning of unmarked nouns, the children understood the unmarked subject-noun as singular and responded to the entire sentence as if it were singular. At four years of age, the apparent number of the subject-noun is the only effective cue for sentential singularity or plurality.