Grammatical competence is not a psychologically valid construct

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 467-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICIA J. BROOKS
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Linguistic Performance ◽  
Grammatical Competence ◽  
Adult Performance ◽  
Linguistic Demand ◽  
Linguistic Behaviour

It is not unusual for developmental psychologists to become frustrated with the theory of universal grammar (UG), whose proponents have tended to dismiss most research on children's language production and comprehension as irrelevant to explaining how human languages are acquired. This is because children's actual linguistic behaviour is presumed to reflect factors besides their grammatical competence, rendering most methods of sampling linguistic behaviour unsuitable for evaluating UG theory. This means, in practice, that UG proponents do not view performance errors as evidence against their hypothesis that grammatical knowledge is largely innate. When children perform at ceiling on a given task, this is usually taken as proof of their adultlike grammatical competence, while poor performance is dismissed as due to research design flaws or limitations in information processing capacities (e.g. working memory). Crain & Thornton (1998) attempt to eliminate what they consider to be post hoc processing accounts of children's linguistic behaviour by arguing, counter to Chomsky (1965) and many others, that children and adults share identical language processing mechanisms, and that linguistic performance directly reflects grammatical competence. Therefore, if UG principles are available from an early age, child and adult performance should be the same when tasks are properly constructed to avoid extra-linguistic demand characteristics (excepting adult–child differences predicted by parameter-setting or maturational models). It should not be surprising then that some psycholinguists, such as Drozd (target article), would find C&T to be misguided with respect to these issues, because children's linguistic behaviour surely differs from adults' in seemingly unpredictable ways.

Grammatical Competence within L2 Communication: Language Production, Monitor Hypothesis, and Focus on Forms Instruction

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moh. Rofid Fikroni
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Focus On Form ◽  
Grammatical Competence ◽  
Foreign Language Learners ◽  
Speaking Skill ◽  
Focus On Forms ◽  
Learning Language

Bearing in mind that the learners’ speaking skill had become the main goal in learning language, grammatical competence is believed to have a big role within foreign language learners’ language production, especially in spoken form. Moreover, the learners’ grammatical competence is also closely related to the Monitor Hypothesis proposed by Krashen (1982) in which it says that the acquired system will function as monitor or editor to the language production. The students’ monitor performance will vary based on how they make use of their acquired system. They may use it optimally (monitor optimal user), overly (monitor over-user), or they may not use it at all (monitor under-user). Therefore, learners’ grammatical competence has its own role, which is very crucial, within learners’ language production, which is not only to produce the language, but also to monitor the language production itself. Because of this reason, focus on form instruction will give a great impact for students’ grammatical competence within their communicative competence. This paper aims to present ideas about the how crucial the role grammatical competence within learners’ L2 communication.

scholarly journals What Are Predictors for Persistence in Childhood Stuttering?

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (04) ◽  
pp. 299-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Usler ◽  
Anna Bostian ◽  
Ranjini Mohan ◽  
Katelyn Gerwin ◽  
Barbara Brown ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
Dynamic Interactions ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Sensorimotor Processes ◽  
Speech Motor

AbstractOver the past 10 years, we (the Purdue Stuttering Project) have implemented longitudinal studies to examine factors related to persistence and recovery in early childhood stuttering. Stuttering develops essentially as an impairment in speech sensorimotor processes that is strongly influenced by dynamic interactions among motor, language, and emotional domains. Our work has assessed physiological, behavioral, and clinical features of stuttering within the motor, linguistic, and emotional domains. We describe the results of studies in which measures collected when the child was 4 to 5 years old are related to eventual stuttering status. We provide supplemental evidence of the role of known predictive factors (e.g., sex and family history of persistent stuttering). In addition, we present new evidence that early delays in basic speech motor processes (especially in boys), poor performance on a nonword repetition test, stuttering severity at the age of 4 to 5 years, and delayed or atypical functioning in central nervous system language processing networks are predictive of persistent stuttering.

Spoken language comprehension: insights from eye movements

2007 ◽  
pp. 308-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Tanenhaus
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Language Production ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Response Measure ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension

Recently, eye movements have become a widely used response measure for studying spoken language processing in both adults and children, in situations where participants comprehend and generate utterances about a circumscribed “Visual World” while fixation is monitored, typically using a free-view eye-tracker. Psycholinguists now use the Visual World eye-movement method to study both language production and language comprehension, in studies that run the gamut of current topics in language processing. Eye movements are a response measure of choice for addressing many classic questions about spoken language processing in psycholinguistics. This article reviews the burgeoning Visual World literature on language comprehension, highlighting some of the seminal studies and examining how the Visual World approach has contributed new insights to our understanding of spoken word recognition, parsing, reference resolution, and interactive conversation. It considers some of the methodological issues that come to the fore when psycholinguists use eye movements to examine spoken language comprehension.

Creation of annotated country-level dialectal Arabic resources: An unsupervised approach

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Maha J. Althobaiti
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Country Level ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Agreement Score ◽  
Arabic Dialects ◽  
Dialectal Arabic

Abstract The wide usage of multiple spoken Arabic dialects on social networking sites stimulates increasing interest in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for dialectal Arabic (DA). Arabic dialects represent true linguistic diversity and differ from modern standard Arabic (MSA). In fact, the complexity and variety of these dialects make it insufficient to build one NLP system that is suitable for all of them. In comparison with MSA, the available datasets for various dialects are generally limited in terms of size, genre and scope. In this article, we present a novel approach that automatically develops an annotated country-level dialectal Arabic corpus and builds lists of words that encompass 15 Arabic dialects. The algorithm uses an iterative procedure consisting of two main components: automatic creation of lists for dialectal words and automatic creation of annotated Arabic dialect identification corpus. To our knowledge, our study is the first of its kind to examine and analyse the poor performance of the MSA part-of-speech tagger on dialectal Arabic contents and to exploit that in order to extract the dialectal words. The pointwise mutual information association measure and the geographical frequency of word occurrence online are used to classify dialectal words. The annotated dialectal Arabic corpus (Twt15DA), built using our algorithm, is collected from Twitter and consists of 311,785 tweets containing 3,858,459 words in total. We randomly selected a sample of 75 tweets per country, 1125 tweets in total, and conducted a manual dialect identification task by native speakers. The results show an average inter-annotator agreement score equal to 64%, which reflects satisfactory agreement considering the overlapping features of the 15 Arabic dialects.

Language processing and language acquisition through the lens of Relational Morphology

2019 ◽  
pp. 201-232
Author(s):  
Ray Jackendoff ◽  
Jenny Audring
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Spreading Activation ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Memory Network ◽  
Complex Words

This chapter asks what is happening to linguistic representations during language use, and how representations are formed in the course of language acquisition. It is shown how Relational Morphology’s theory of representations can be directly embedded into models of processing and acquisition. Central is that the lexicon, complete with schemas and relational links, constitutes the long-term memory network that supports language production and comprehension. The chapter first discusses processing: the nature of working memory; promiscuous (opportunistic) processing; spreading activation; priming; probabilistic parsing; the balance between storage and computation in recognizing morphologically complex words; and the role of relational links and schemas in word retrieval. It then turns to acquisition, which is to be thought of as adding nodes and relational links to the lexical network. The general approach is based on the Propose but Verify procedure of Trueswell et al. (2013), plus conservative generalization, as in usage-based approaches.

FUNDAMENTAL AND GRADIENT DIFFERENCES IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Herschensohn
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
First Language ◽  
Cognitive Strategies ◽  
Foreign Language Learning ◽  
Language Faculty ◽  
Generative Theory ◽  
The Difference

This article reexamines Bley-Vroman’s original (1990) and evolved (this issue) fundamental difference hypothesis that argues that differences in path and endstate of first language acquisition and adult foreign language learning result from differences in the acquisition procedure (i.e., language faculty and cognitive strategies, respectively). The evolved assessment of the theoretical and empirical developments of the past 20 years is taken into account with respect to Universal Grammar and parameters in generative theory and with respect to cognition and acquisition in data processing. This article supports the spirit of Bley-Vroman’s proposals in light of the discussion of three topics: pathway of acquisition, endstate age of acquisition effects, and language processing by monolinguals and bilinguals. I argue that the difference between child and adult language acquisition is, above all, quantitative not qualitative, a gradient continuum rather than a precipitous break.

Speech and Language Production at Age 2

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 879-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren K. Nelson ◽  
Harold R. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Complexity Analysis ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Limited Capacity ◽  
Speech And Language ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Propositional Complexity ◽  
The Relationship

The purpose of this study was to explore how 2-year-old children manage the relationship between phonetic production and production of word combinations in their spontaneous speech. The subjects were 5 normally developing 2-year-olds who were participants in an ongoing longitudinal study of speech and language acquisition. Three measures were used to estimate phonetic production skills in the children’s spontaneous speech samples. These included a measure of the accuracy of consonant production (Percentage of Consonants Correct), and two estimators of phonetic complexity (phonetic products for utterance and word length units). Regression analyses were used to determine the relationship between complexity of word combinations, as measured by length of utterance in morphemes and a propositional complexity analysis, and utilization of phonetic production skills. The results revealed modest tradeoffs between complexity of word combinations and accuracy of consonant production for 2 of the 5 children. The results also showed tradeoffs between complexity of word combinations and phonetic complexity of individual lexical items (phonetic product for words) for 4 of the 5 children. As the complexity of these 4 children’s multiword combinations increased, the phonetic complexity of individual lexical items decreased. These results are consistent with synergistic theories of language acquisition and language processing that emphasize dynamic tradeoffs in interactions among language processing levels in a limited capacity production system.

scholarly journals A unified neurocomputational bilateral model of spoken language production in healthy participants and recovery in poststroke aphasia

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (51) ◽  
pp. 32779-32790
Author(s):  
Ya-Ning Chang ◽  
Matthew A. Lambon Ralph
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Partial Recovery ◽  
Language Performance ◽  
Unified Framework ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Formal Basis ◽  
Healthy Participants

Understanding the processes underlying normal, impaired, and recovered language performance has been a long-standing goal for cognitive and clinical neuroscience. Many verbally described hypotheses about language lateralization and recovery have been generated. However, they have not been considered within a single, unified, and implemented computational framework, and the literatures on healthy participants and patients are largely separated. These investigations also span different types of data, including behavioral results and functional MRI brain activations, which augment the challenge for any unified theory. Consequently, many key issues, apparent contradictions, and puzzles remain to be solved. We developed a neurocomputational, bilateral pathway model of spoken language production, designed to provide a unified framework to simulate different types of data from healthy participants and aphasic patients. The model encapsulates key computational principles (differential computational capacity, emergent division of labor across pathways, experience-dependent plasticity-related recovery) and provides an explanation for the bilateral yet asymmetric lateralization of language in healthy participants, chronic aphasia after left rather than right hemisphere lesions, and the basis of partial recovery in patients. The model provides a formal basis for understanding the relationship between behavioral performance and brain activation. The unified model is consistent with the degeneracy and variable neurodisplacement theories of language recovery, and adds computational insights to these hypotheses regarding the neural machinery underlying language processing and plasticity-related recovery following damage.

Continuity and development in the acquisition of inversion in yes/no questions: dissociating movement and inflection

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 813-842 ◽  
Author(s):  
LYNN SANTELMANN ◽  
STEPHANIE BERK ◽  
JENNIFER AUSTIN ◽  
SHAMITHA SOMASHEKAR ◽  
BARBARA LUST
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Specific Knowledge ◽  
Grammatical Competence ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Valid Test ◽  
Question Formation

This paper examines two- to five-year-old children's knowledge of inversion in English yes/no questions through a new experimental study. It challenges the view that the syntax for inversion develops slowly in child English and tests the hypothesis that grammatical competence for inversion is present from the earliest testable ages of the child's sentence production. The experimental design is based on the premise that a valid test of this hypothesis must dissociate from inversion various language-specific aspects of English grammar, including its inflectional system. An elicited imitation method was used to test parallel, lexically-matched declarative and question structures across several different verb types in a design which dissociated subject-auxiliary inversion from the English-specific realization of the inflectional/auxiliary system. Using this design, the results showed no significant difference in amount or type of children's errors between declarative (non-inverted) and question (inverted) sentences with modals or auxiliary be, but a significant difference for sentences with main verbs (requiring reconstruction of inflection through do-support) and copula be. The results from sentences with auxiliary be and those with modals indicate that knowledge of inversion is present throughout our very young sample and does not develop during this time. We argue that these results indicate that the grammar of inversion is present from the youngest ages tested. Our results also provide evidence of development relevant to the English-specific inflectional system. We conclude with a new developmental hypothesis: development in question formation occurs in integrating language-specific knowledge related to inflection with the principles of Universal Grammar which allow grammatical inversion.

The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Text Comprehension ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
First Language ◽  
Grammatical Encoding ◽  
Current State

This handbook reviews the current state of the art in the field of psycholinguistics. Part I deals with language comprehension at the sublexical, lexical, and sentence and discourse levels. It explores concepts of speech representation and the search for universal speech segmentation mechanisms against a background of linguistic diversity and compares first language with second language segmentation. It also discusses visual word recognition, lexico-semantics, the different forms of lexical ambiguity, sentence comprehension, text comprehension, and language in deaf populations. Part II focuses on language production, with chapters covering topics such as word production and related processes based on evidence from aphasia, the major debates surrounding grammatical encoding. Part III considers various aspects of interaction and communication, including the role of gesture in language processing, approaches to the study of perspective-taking, and the interrelationships between language comprehension, emotion, and sociality. Part IV is concerned with language development and evolution, focusing on topics ranging from the development of prosodic phonology, the neurobiology of artificial grammar learning, and developmental dyslexia. The book concludes with Part V, which looks at methodological advances in psycholinguistic research, such as the use of intracranial electrophysiology in the area of language processing.

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