Nativist versus constructivist goals in studying child language

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 459-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAMEERA AKHTAR
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Development Change ◽  
Linguistic Ability ◽  
Syntactic Development ◽  
Continuity Assumption ◽  
Innateness Hypothesis

Crain & Thornton (1998: 5) are admirably clear in stating the aims of their research programme: they ‘hope to convince a greater number of students and researchers in child language of the correctness of the Innateness Hypothesis and the theory of Universal Grammar’. As Drozd notes, however, their assumptions under Modularity Matching ‘set the stage for a research programme unlike those typically adopted by developmental psycholinguists’. Whereas C&T are avowedly committed to the continuity assumption (clearly preferring ‘special nativism’ over ‘general nativism’; O'Grady, 1997), constructivists are more interested in the question of how children ‘get from here to there’ (Tomasello, 2003) – that is, from immature levels of language comprehension and use to adultlike levels (and, it is important to note that adultlike levels are not always characterized in generativist terms). Most constructivists are also committed to studying the relations between language development and other simultaneously developing social and cognitive skills (Clark, 2003), whereas nativists tend to be interested in ‘pure’ linguistic ability uncontaminated by nonlinguistic influences. The main goal of nativists then is to verify a specific theory of linguistic competence that suggests that linguistic knowledge is innate and modular and to account for children's linguistic development in terms of UG, whereas the main goal for constructivists is to account for development (change) in the child's language system (beginning from perhaps no predetermined linguistic knowledge) and how it relates to other aspects of development. It is this fundamental difference in goals that makes one quite pessimistic that constructivist and nativist researchers in syntactic development can learn anything from one another; they are simply engaged in separate tasks.

L2 Grammar and L2 Processing in the Acquisition of Spanish Prepositional Relative Clauses

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
SILVIA PERPIÑÁN
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Time Data ◽  
Arabic Speakers ◽  
Grammaticality Judgment ◽  
The One

This paper investigates the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in L2 Spanish by English and Arabic speakers to understand the role of previous linguistic knowledge and Universal Grammar on the one hand, and the relationship between grammatical knowledge and its use in real-time, on the other. An oral production task and an on-line self-paced grammaticality judgment task were analyzed. Results indicated that the acquisition of oblique relative clauses is a problematic area for L2 learners. Divergent results compared to native speakers in production and grammatical intuitions were found; however, L2 reading time data showed the same real-time effects that native speakers had, suggesting that the problems with this construction are not necessarily linked to processing deficits. These results are interpreted as evidence for the ability to apply universal processing principles in a second language, and the relative independence of the processing domain and the production system.

Children's use of phonological information in ambiguity resolution: a view from Mandarin Chinese

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 687-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
PENG ZHOU ◽  
YI (ESTHER) SU ◽  
STEPHEN CRAIN ◽  
LIQUN GAO ◽  
LIKAN ZHAN
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Ambiguity Resolution ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Phonological Information ◽  
Language Research

ABSTRACTHow do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment 1 used eye-tracking to assess children's use of stress in resolving structural ambiguities. Experiment 2 took advantage of special properties of Mandarin to investigate whether children can use intonational cues to resolve ambiguities involving speech acts. The results of our experiments show that children's use of prosodic information in ambiguity resolution varies depending on the type of ambiguity involved. Children can use prosodic information more effectively to resolve speech act ambiguities than to resolve structural ambiguities. This finding suggests that the mapping between prosody and semantics/pragmatics in young children is better established than the mapping between prosody and syntax.

scholarly journals Papers on pragmasemantics

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 216
Author(s):  
Anton Benz ◽  
Reinhard Blutner
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Strategic Interaction ◽  
Mathematical Framework ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Bidirectional Optimality Theory ◽  
Game Theoretic Pragmatics

Optimality theory as used in linguistics (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004; Smolensky & Legendre, 2006) and cognitive psychology (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001) is a theoretical framework that aims to integrate constraint based knowledge representation systems, generative grammar, cognitive skills, and aspects of neural network processing. In the last years considerable progress was made to overcome the artificial separation between the disciplines of linguistic on the one hand which are mainly concerned with the description of natural language competences and the psychological disciplines on the other hand which are interested in real language performance. The semantics and pragmatics of natural language is a research topic that is asking for an integration of philosophical, linguistic, psycholinguistic aspects, including its neural underpinning. Especially recent work on experimental pragmatics (e.g. Noveck & Sperber, 2005; Garrett & Harnish, 2007) has shown that real progress in the area of pragmatics isn’t possible without using data from all available domains including data from language acquisition and actual language generation and comprehension performance. It is a conceivable research programme to use the optimality theoretic framework in order to realize the integration. Game theoretic pragmatics is a relatively young development in pragmatics. The idea to view communication as a strategic interaction between speaker and hearer is not new. It is already present in Grice' (1975) classical paper on conversational implicatures. What game theory offers is a mathematical framework in which strategic interaction can be precisely described. It is a leading paradigm in economics as witnessed by a series of Nobel prizes in the field. It is also of growing importance to other disciplines of the social sciences. In linguistics, its main applications have been so far pragmatics and theoretical typology. For pragmatics, game theory promises a firm foundation, and a rigor which hopefully will allow studying pragmatic phenomena with the same precision as that achieved in formal semantics. The development of game theoretic pragmatics is closely connected to the development of bidirectional optimality theory (Blutner, 2000). It can be easily seen that the game theoretic notion of a Nash equilibrium and the optimality theoretic notion of a strongly optimal form-meaning pair are closely related to each other. The main impulse that bidirectional optimality theory gave to research on game theoretic pragmatics stemmed from serious empirical problems that resulted from interpreting the principle of weak optimality as a synchronic interpretation principle. In this volume, we have collected papers that are concerned with several aspects of game and optimality theoretic approaches to pragmatics.  

Multilingual learners and foreign language acquisition: Insights into the effects of prior linguistic knowledge

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anahí Alba de la Fuente ◽  
Hugues Lacroix
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Foreign Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Classrooms ◽  
Foreign Language Classrooms

AbstractIn foreign language classrooms we often find that, in addition to their mother tongue (L1), learners already speak – or are learning – at least one other language. As a result, they already have an array of linguistic and cognitive skills that may prove very useful if they are adequately exploited during the language learning process. However, in contrast with the growing interest displayed by researchers in the processes involved in the acquisition of a third or subsequent language (e.g.

Generative coda

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-430
Author(s):  
ELLY VAN GELDEREN
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Innate Knowledge

Generative grammar has its beginnings in the late 1950s with the work of Noam Chomsky and emphasizes innate linguistic knowledge, or Universal Grammar. Children use their innate knowledge and, on the basis of the language they hear spoken, also known as the E(xternalized)-Language, come up with a grammar, also known as the I(nternalized)-Language (see Chomsky 1986: 19–24). Generative grammar focuses on the ability of native speakers to speak and understand grammatical sentences.

Sources of variation at the onset of bilingualism: The differential effect of input factors, AOA, and cognitive skills on HL Arabic and L2 English syntax

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Adriana SOTO-COROMINAS ◽  
Evangelia DASKALAKI ◽  
Johanne PARADIS ◽  
Magdalena WINTERS-DIFANI ◽  
Redab AL JANAIDEH
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Migrant Children ◽  
Refugee Children ◽  
Structure Factors ◽  
Syntactic Development ◽  
Sources Of Variation ◽  
Input Variables ◽  
English Syntax

Abstract Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee children (N = 119) recently arrived in Canada using a sentence repetition task. Regression analyses showed that a partially overlapping set of child-level (input and cognitive skills) and language-level (syntactic structure) factors accounted for performance in each language. HL performance was particularly sensitive to language, cognitive, and input variables indexing cumulative HL exposure. L2 performance, however, was sensitive to cognitive and environmental variables indexing current and cumulative L2 use. Finally, despite stronger performance in Arabic than in English, results revealed interdependence between the two languages, indicating that participants with stronger syntactic abilities in their HL tended to have stronger syntactic abilities in their emerging L2.

scholarly journals Superficial intersubjectivity in ELF university dormitory interactions

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 377-402
Author(s):  
Aki Siegel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Academic Press ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Ability ◽  
International University ◽  
The One ◽  
Newcastle Upon Tyne

AbstractThe current study investigates the phenomena of “superficial intersubjectivity” occurring in English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions at an international university dormitory in Japan. “Intersubjectivity” (Rommetveit, Ragnar. 1976. On the architecture of intersubjectivity. In Ragnar Rommetveit & Rolv Mikkel Blakar [eds.],Studies of language, thought, and verbal communication, 93–107. New York: Academic Press) refers to the shared perspective of the social world by the interlocutors. In ELF interactions where shared perspectives cannot be presumed, efforts to achieve intersubjectivity are critical. ELF research has explicated speakers’ efforts and cooperativeness to achieve intersubjectivity or avoid misunderstandings during interactions (Kaur, Jagdish. 2011a. “Doing being a language expert”: The case of the ELF speaker. In Alasdair Archibald, Alessia Cogo & Jennifer Jenkins [eds.],Latest Trends in ELF Research, 53–75. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2001. Closing a conceptual gap: The case for a description of English as a lingua franca.International Journal of Applied Linguistics11[2]. 133–158). However, few studies have investigated cases where speakers display mutual understanding during a repair sequence even when the understanding is not accurate.Approximately 37 hours of naturally occurring ELF interactions were collected and analyzed using a standard conversation analysis followed by a post-analytic researcher observation. Detailed analyses of repair sequences regarding a word suggest that in non-institutional ELF interactions the accuracy of intersubjectivity is not always prioritized. Rather, statements made by the speaker positioned as the one with relatively stronger linguistic ability seem to hold influence over the repair sequence, which prompts the interlocutor with relatively weaker ability to agree with inaccurate candidate understandings. The study suggests a connection between the positioning of speakers regarding linguistic knowledge and the construction of intersubjectivity in ELF interactions.

Tweede-Taalverwerving en Universele Grammatica

1988 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 31-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Jordens
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Adult Learners ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Logical Problem ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Rule System ◽  
Learning Principles

Among researchers in SLA there is currently a debate on wheter or not L2 learners may have access to Universal Grammar. Clahsen & Muysken (1986), for example, claim that this should not be the case. This is because the interlanguage system of L2 learners should contain rules which do not belong to "a possible rule system". Felix (1987), Flynn (1984, 1985) and White (1987), however, claim that the interlanguage system of L2 learners consists of "instantiations of possible rules". Furthermore, L2 learners should possess linguistic knowledge that cannot be related to general learning principles, nor to linguistic knowledge of L1. In the present article evidence from a study by White (1987) with respect to the so-called "logical problem of language acquisition" and from studies by Flynn (1984, 1985) regarding the so-called "logical problem of language development" is examined critically. With regard to the acquisition of the thai-trace effect in L2 English by native speakers of Dutch it can be shown that it is not necessary to assume that L2 learners should have access to Universal Grammar. Similarly, it can be shown that evidence that is interpreted in favour of the resetting of the head-parameters in the L2 English of native speakers of Japanese and Chinese can also be explained alternatively. Methodologically it appears to be problematical to find empirical evidence for the use of Universal Grammar by adult learners of a second language.

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