Study Of First Language Acquisition Research Articles

Lithuanian spoken corpora and studies of first language acquisition: a view from outside

The paper provides an overview of Lithuanian spontaneous speech corpora and certain studies of the acquisition of Lithuanian as a first language. The author focuses mainly on those resources and papers that are published in English and thus can be used by non-Lithuanian speaking researchers as methodological and/or theoretical inspiration for further studies on different languages. Among the spoken corpora discussed in the paper are: the speech corpus Liepa, Sakytinės kalbos įrašų bazė, the Corpus of Spoken Lithuanian. The author pays special attention to the latter as it is closely connected to the development of the Lithuanian corpus of child and child-directed speech. The studies of the acquisition of Lithuanian as a first language are overviewed in the second part of the paper. The majority of studies on corpus data (including those conducted within international cross-linguistic projects) describe the acquisition of grammar by native speakers of Lithuanian. In the most recent research, there is a shift towards new aspects of first language acquisition (including phonology and morphophonology) and new methods (experiments becoming more and more popular).

Susan Ervin-Tripp (1927-2018).

This article memorializes Susan Ervin-Tripp (1927-2018). Ervin-Tripp earned a doctoral degree in social psychology in 1955 from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examined the link between bilingualism and cognition, which led her to a career in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, two fields that she helped to establish. She worked on the Southwest Project in Comparative Psycholinguistics and studied effects of Native American languages on cognitive processes, and taught at the Harvard School of Education. In 1958, she took a position at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, where she remained until she retired as a full Professor of Psychology in 1999. Throughout her long and productive career, Ervin-Tripp was a path-breaker, and the paths she helped explore have become well-traveled roads. It is remarkable to see so many innovations in one life story: psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, new directions in the study of first-language acquisition as well as bilingualism, applying new technology in her research, and forging the way for gender equity in the UC system. Her investigations of the status of women faculty led to the creation of a Standing Committee on the Status of Women, which she chaired. She was also an active leader in other groups on campus, including the League of Academic Women. Ervin-Tripp repeatedly documented pay inequity for both faculty and staff, representing the UC system to legislative committees in Sacramento. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

First Language Acquisition: Psychological Considerations and Epistemology

This article aims to provide an overview of major theoretical approaches and psychological considerations related to child language (first language acquisition). The field is multidimensional, as illustrated by the many courses on child language or language acquisition that are taught in departments of Linguistics, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Speech Pathology, Education, and Anthropology. This cross-disciplinary nature of the field is also reflected in many handbooks and articles yearly published across the world. In this article I mainly present a general overview of theoretical/epistemological and classical/modern accounts and approaches to the study of first language acquisition. In other words, the present paper is to investigate the psychological/epistemological considerations of first language acquisition with the aim of shedding a bit of light on this human-species phenomenon.

Grammatical development in adolescent first-language learners

Studies of first-language acquisition in adolescence are very rare and depend primarily on comprehension measures to evaluate grammatical knowledge. These studies have led to the general conclusion that grammatical development in adolescence is severely impaired and performance is highly variable both within and across individuals. This article is the first to present longitudinal production data on two deaf adolescents as they are acquiring their first language, American Sign Language (ASL), at the ages of 12;1 and 13;7. Analyses of the production of two complex predicate types indicate that these individuals made consistent progress in the acquisition of these structures during the first 31 months of their exposure to ASL. A subsequent study investigates their comprehension abilities after seven years' exposure to ASL and reveals similar disruptions in comprehension relative to other adult signers who learned ASL in adolescence. However, the degree of disruption varies with the level of processing demands. One explanation of the data is that adolescent first-language learners are particularly sensitive to performance factors and can only show their knowledge of language under ideal conditions. This implies that adolescent first-language learners continue to suffer from linguistic isolation even after being exposed to language because they cannot process the language efficiently enough to recognize patterns in the input under normal conditions. According to this view, deficits in performance relative to native signers are due not solely to lack of grammatical competence, but to closely related problems in processing.

INTRODUCTION

In the past century major changes in the study of language learning, and its attendant effects on language instruction, derived from the espousal of behavioral psychology by structural linguistics of the Bloomfieldian persuasion. Did not the founder of this strand of structuralism, who collaborated in the Army language manual for the teaching of Russian under the revealing pseudonym of I. M. Lisnin, declare: “Language learning is overlearning, nothing else is of any use”? Noam Chomsky's (1959) brilliant demonstration of the reductionism of the most extreme form of behaviorism—Skinner's operant conditioning (Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Language, 35, 26–58)—triggered the demise of the influence of behavioristic views of language acquisition. This demise was accompanied by that of the structural approach to second language teaching associated with such applied linguists as Robert Lado, although it must be acknowledged that the combination of these two theoretical strands did lead to significant changes in foreign language classrooms—for example, the abandonment of grammar translation and a shift of focus from written texts to speech. However, what applied linguists of that generation failed to do was to observe how actual second language learners in both naturalistic and instructed contexts process and reorganize linguistic input, how they intake it, and how they turn it into output in communicative interactions. It was not until the impact of Chomskian-inspired studies of first language acquisition and Pit Corder's (1967) seminal “The significance of learners' errors” (International Review of Applied Linguistics, 5, 161–170) that the second language learner came into focus and that the field of second language acquisition research began to flourish. In this connection, it is noteworthy that bringing to a wider international audience the proceedings of the Neuchâtel colloquia led by Corder served as a catalyst for the launching of SSLA.

Language Acquisition in Crosslinguistic Perspective

This review examines crosslinguistic research that has increased our understanding of the acquisition process over the past 15 years. It begins by outlining different aspects of the study of first language acquisition, for example, infants’ preverbal attention to language and strategies in segmenting language input. A major section of the review stresses the importance of ethnographic studies because acquisition must be considered in relation to language socialization patterns in the particular culture in which the language is acquired. Another section examines crosslinguistic research and the impact of Slobin’s work, as well as factors that seem to influence the child’s mastery of formfunction mappings in spatial, temporal, and gender domains. Examples from diverse languages are used to illustrate that children use different clues, depending on the system being acquired. The final section of the review examines findings of a crosslinguistic research project designed to collect and analyze narrative data; only through an examination of a particular language’s discourse data can we study the full range of its structure’s functions. The review concludes by stressing the need to consider the interaction between linguistic factors and the cultural context of acquisition.

On the Study of First Language Acquisition

We study the discovery problem faced by developmental psycholinguists, namely, to characterize the learning mechanism deployed in first language acquisition. Within our model, the psycholinguist has access to the graph of the function that maps children's linguistic data to their grammatical hypotheses. They must converge in the limit to an adequate theory of the child, in a weak sense of "adequate." It is shown that even strong hypotheses about the learning strategy embodied by the child do not suffice to render solvable the psycholinguist's task.

The Inter-Nordic Study of Language Acquisition

The typological variation between the Nordic languages offers a “natural laboratory” for the cross-linguistic study of first language acquisition. Based on an on-going inter-Nordic project, the present article discusses research designs for the exploration of this laboratory together with pilot analyses of acquisition data across Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. On the basis of evidence from longitudinal case studies, from narrative tasks, and from morphological and phonetic experiments, the project aims at producing an integrated picture of the development of grammatical morphology and its interaction with (a) the semantic domains of spatial and temporal relations and (b) the prosodic domains of tonal word accents and duration. In the present article the focus is on spatial relations and prosody. Comparisons of developmental data between languages that show considerable typological differences (Finnish vs Icelandic vs the Mainland Scandinavian languages) allow us to establish broad cross-linguistic commonalities in acquisition structure. It is shown that, across all five languages, very similar relational concepts are encoded by the first grammatical morphemes emerging in the field of spatial relations. The impact of linguistic details on acquisition structure can be explored with greater precision through comparisons between languages that show minimal typological differences (the internal differences between the Mainland Scandinavian languages: Danish vs Norwegian vs Swedish). Here, the early development of the Verb + particle construction in two Danish and two Swedish children is analysed. Language-specific effects on acquisition structure of syntactical and prosodic traits are demonstrated. Further, language-specific effects on the development of verb argument structure in spatial descriptions are discussed.

From Language Behaviour to Database: Some Comments on Plunkett's Paper

It is evident that the Child Language Exchange System—CHILDES—will play a catalytic role in the study of first language acquisition. Plunkett rightly concludes that this system has the potential of bringing together work on first language acquisition from a wide range of theoretical and practical perspectives. The compilation of the CHILDES package, including a workbench with a set of computational tools, is an admirable achievement, which most certainly will have an impact on other branches in the study of language behaviour (e.g. discourse analysis, sociolinguistics).

A data base for the study of first language acquisition. Childes: Child language data exchange system

A data base for the study of first language acquisition. Childes: Child language data exchange system

The Anthropology of Learning

Although anthropologists have often reported child-training practices and formal efforts to transmit culture, they have not been overly concerned with the ways that individuals within a society actually “acquire” cu1ture. This paper calls for more attention to culture acquisition and suggests how the study of first-language acquisition seems to offer a useful model. Attention is also given to inventorying myriad concepts and ideas about learning that anthropologists have contributed but have not subjected to systematic inquiry. ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION, CULTURAL ACQUISITION, CULTURAL TRANSMISSION, ENCULTURATION, LEARNING.

LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT: WHERE, WHAT AND HOW

Although anthropologists have often reported child-training practices and formal efforts to transmit culture, they have not been overly concerned with the ways that individuals within a society actually "acquire" culture. This paper calls for more attention to culture acquisition and suggests how the study of first-language acquisition seems to offer a useful model. Attention is also given to inventorying myriad concepts and ideas about learning that anthropologists have contributed but have not subjected to systematic inquiry. ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION, CULTURAL ACQUISITION, CULTURAL TRANSMISSION, ENCULTURATION, LEARNING.

Imitation and Correction in Foreign Language Learning

T HE AIM of this article is to explore the degree to which accepted methods of correction may contribute to poor student performance and suggest modifications of current practices. Our suggestions rest on the conviction that student communication in the foreign language may be actively discouraged by the instructor who insists upon grammatical accuracy. Recent linguistic data supports the thesis that overt correction is unnecessary and, indeed, inadvisable. The approach we present is based on recent studies of first language acquisition coupled with conclusions based on evaluation of video tapes. The tapes in question were made in conjunction with a graduate course in applied linguistics and the teaching of German.2

Imitation and Correction in Foreign Language Learning1

T HE AIM of this article is to explore the degree to which accepted methods of correction may contribute to poor student performance and suggest modifications of current practices. Our suggestions rest on the conviction that student communication in the foreign language may be actively discouraged by the instructor who insists upon grammatical accuracy. Recent linguistic data supports the thesis that overt correction is unnecessary and, indeed, inadvisable. The approach we present is based on recent studies of first language acquisition coupled with conclusions based on evaluation of video tapes. The tapes in question were made in conjunction with a graduate course in applied linguistics and the teaching of German.2