When answer-phone makes a difference in children's acquisition of English compounds

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-691 ◽  
Author(s):  
VICTORIA A. MURPHY ◽  
ELENA NICOLADIS
Keyword(s):  
Truck Driver ◽  
British English ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
British Children

Over the course of acquiring deverbal compounds like truck driver, English-speaking children pass through a stage when they produce ungrammatical compounds like drive-truck. These errors have been attributed to canonical phrasal ordering (Clark, Hecht & Mulford, 1986). In this study, we compared British and Canadian children's compound production. Both dialects have the same phrasal ordering but some different lexical items (e.g. answer-phone exists only in British English). If influenced by these lexical differences, British children would produce more ungrammatical Verb–Object (VO) compounds in trying to produce the more complex deverbal (Object–Verb-er) than the Canadian children. 36 British children between the ages of 3;6 and 5;6 and 36 age-matched Canadian children were asked to produce novel compounds (like sun juggler). The British children produced more ungrammatical compounds and fewer grammatical compounds than the Canadian children. We argue that children's errors in deverbal compounds may be due in part to competing lexical structures.

scholarly journals The Use of American and British Lexis in Brunei English

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Mohamad Nur Raihan
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
School Students ◽  
British English ◽  
Recorded Data ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Power Point ◽  
Casual Speech ◽  
University Undergraduates ◽  
Age Range

In pronunciation, influenced by American English, a shift in Brunei English can be observed in the increasing use of [r] in tokens such as car and heard particularly among younger speakers whose pronunciation may be influenced by American English. In contrast, older speakers tend to omit the [r] sound in these tokens as their pronunciation may be more influenced by British English. However, it is unclear whether American English has influenced the vocabulary of Brunei English speakers as the education system in Brunei favours British English due to its historical ties with Britain. This paper analyses the use of American and British  lexical items between three age groups: 20 in-service teachers aged between 29 to 35 years old, 20 university undergraduates aged between 19 to 25 years old, and 20 secondary school students who are within the 11 to 15 age range. Each age group has 10 female and 10 male participants and they were asked to name seven objects shown to them on Power point slides. Their responses were recorded and compared between the age groups and between female and male data. The analysis is supplemented with recorded data from interviews with all 60 participants to determine instances of American and British lexical items in casual speech. It was found that there is a higher occurrence of American than British lexical items in all three groups and the interview data supports the findings in the main data. Thus, providing further evidence for the Americanisation of Brunei English and that Brunei English is undergoing change.

scholarly journals Compromiser - a notional paradigm

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. 157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carita Paradis
Keyword(s):  
Moderate Degree ◽  
Intensity Scale ◽  
British English ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Degree Modifiers ◽  
English I

On the basis of an investigation of the lexical forms quite, rather, fairly, and pretty in contemporary spoken British English, I postulate that these lexical items form a notional paradigm of compromiser within the category of degree modifiers. Compromisers are cognitive synonyms that occupy the middle of an abstract intensity scale, approximating a mean degree of another word, eg quite / rather / fairly / pretty dirty. They are all polysemous and poly-functional words, whose meanings are determined by a crucial semantic trait ‘to a moderate degree’ on the paradigmatic axis, and by a semantic-syntactic, selection-licensing mechanism on the syntagmatic axis.

Sentential negation in early child English

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROSALIND THORNTON ◽  
GRACIELA TESAN
Keyword(s):  
Negative Concord ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Sentential Negation ◽  
Longitudinal Pattern ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Negative Marker ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
Children First ◽  
Positive Input ◽  
Economical Parameter

Starting with the seminal work of Klima & Bellugi (1966) and Bellugi (1967), young English-speaking children have been observed to pass through a stage at which their negative utterances differ from those of adults. Children initially use not or no, whereas adults use negative auxiliary verbs (don't, can't, etc.). To explain the observed mismatches between child and adult language, the present study adopts Zeijlstra's (2004, 2007, 2008a, b) Negative Concord Parameter, which divides languages according to whether they interpret negation directly in the semantics with an adverb, or license it in the syntactic component, in which case the negative marker is a head and the language is a negative concord language. Our proposal is that children first hypothesize that negation is expressed with an adverb, in keeping with the more economical parameter value. Because English is exceptional in having both an adverb and a head form of negation, children must also add a negative head (i.e. n't) to their grammar. This takes considerable time as the positive input that triggers syntactic negation and negative concord is absent in the input for standard English, and children must find alternative evidence. The Negative Concord Parameter accounts for an intricate longitudinal pattern of development in child English, as non-adult structures are eliminated and a new range of structures are licensed by the grammar.

What do doctors advise patients in jokes and why?

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-497
Author(s):  
Władysław Chłopicki
Keyword(s):  
Power Distance ◽  
State Of Health ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
Broad Category ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Linguistic Categories

Abstract Doctor jokes are one of the most popular kind of jokes because they deal with the very sensitive subject of human state of health which draws upon the very basic life-death dichotomy, listed by Raskin in his influential study (Raskin, Victor. 1985. Semantic mechanisms of humor. Dordrecht: Reidel.) among the dichotomies most common in jokes. At the same time, doctor jokes are culture-specific as they reflect the relations between doctors and patients which are typical of a culture in terms of its power distance relations, especially in institutional encounters. Such differences are emphasized by the linguistic categories, such as official and familiar forms of address or culture-specific lexical items. But the reason certain jokes do not “travel” across language boundary is often not only the language itself, but also the cultural assumptions and relations – this concerns, for instance, the references to drinking or doctors’ ineffectiveness/incompetence in Polish jokes. This study focuses on doctor jokes as a category of jokes popular both in Poland and English-speaking countries, but the broad category of doctor jokes is here restricted to those which express the doctor’s advice: this aims at specifying and comparing the jocular advice scripts, central to the doctor-patient relation in both cultures, setting them against the serious advice script.

Phonological development: a normative study of British English‐speaking children

2003 ◽  
Vol 17 (8) ◽  
pp. 617-643 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARBARA DODD ◽  
ALISON HOLM ◽  
ZHU HUA ◽  
SHARON CROSBIE
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Development ◽  
Normative Study ◽  
British English ◽  
English Speaking

scholarly journals Social acquisition context matters: Increased neural responses for native but not nonnative taboo words

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Sendek ◽  
Grit Herzmann ◽  
Valeria Pfeifer ◽  
Vicky Tzuyin Lai
Keyword(s):  
Visual Recognition ◽  
American English ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
British English ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Late Positive Complex ◽  
Taboo Words ◽  
Native Dialect

AbstractThis study examined whether the context of acquisition of a word influences its visual recognition and subsequent processing. We utilized taboo words, whose meanings are typically acquired socially, to ensure that differences in processing were based on learned social taboo, rather than proficiency. American English-speaking participants made word/non-word decisions on American taboo (native dialect), British taboo (non-native dialect), positive, neutral, and pseudo- words while EEG was recorded. Taboo words were verified as taboo by both American and British English speakers in an independent norming survey. American taboo words showed a more positive amplitude of the Late Positive Complex (LPC), a neural correlate of emotionality and social processing, compared with British taboo words and all other word categories. Moreover, in an item-wise analysis, LPC amplitudes of American taboo words were positively correlated with their taboo ratings. British taboo words did not show this effect. This indicates that American participants, who had very limited social contact with British English, did not have the same perception of social threat from British taboo words as they had from American taboo words. These results point to the importance of social context of acquisition in establishing social-affective meaning in language.

Uprooted Speakers’ Grassroots English: Metalinguistic Perspectives of Asylum Seekers in Germany

2021 ◽  
pp. 233-254
Author(s):  
Axel Bohmann
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
British English ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Differential Evaluation ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Group Functions ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Dancehall Culture

This chapter discusses metalinguistic discourse produced by asylum seekers from English-speaking West Africa in Germany, with a focus on the role of English in participants’ communicative environment and the values and affordances ascribed to different varieties of English. The chapter argues that, in this specific context, a) English loses much of its communicative range but retains important identity-related functions, and b) the values associated with different varieties of English reflect global relationships in the World system of Englishes. African varieties are linked to in-group functions and receive differential evaluation, with Nigerian English being constructed as more standard-distant than Ghanaian English, whereas the English of German interlocutors is associated with the prestige varieties American and British English. Particularly surprising is the frequent equation of Gambian English with Jamaican ways of speech, a pattern accounted for not in terms of linguistic similarity but of the global circulation of reggae and dancehall culture. The chapter thus contributes to the sociolinguistics of globalization and the study of language, mobility, and migration.

scholarly journals VIETNAMESE LEARNERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS AMERICAN AND BRITISH ACCENTS

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Huong Le Thu Phan
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Online Questionnaire ◽  
British English ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Inner Circle ◽  
Efl Classrooms ◽  
Received Pronunciation

English possesses different varieties due to its worldwide usage which challenges the tendency of favorite accents among EFL classrooms in non-English speaking countries. However, learners show more positive familiarity and preference for General American English (GA) and British English, Received Pronunciation (RP) which are grouped as the inner-circle of English. This study investigated 53 students in a university in southern part of Vietnam. They were asked to complete an online questionnaire which examined their evaluations of two accents on different traits of status and solidarity, their preference and familiarity. A verbal guise technique is employed with two female native speakers. The data was analyzed by SPSS with different T-tests and ANOVA. The study revealed that the respondents showed greater recognition and evaluations for GA which associated with prestige, familiarity and social attractiveness. Nearly two-thirds of participants revealed a preference to the American speaker although more than half of them did not recognize where she was from.

scholarly journals Segmentation of root and pattern morphology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Finley ◽  
Elissa Newport
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Information ◽  
Artificial Grammar ◽  
Form Complex ◽  
Grammar Learning ◽  
Semantic Associations ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Morphology Learning ◽  
Types Of Information ◽  
Complex Words

Morphology is the study of how form and meaning are combined to form complex words. While previous studies of morphology learning rely on semantic associations of continuous affixes (e.g., prefixes and suffixes), the present study focuses on the learnability of non-continuous (non-concatenative) forms, without the use of semantic information. We performed three artificial grammar learning experiments testing the types of information that adult, English speaking learners can extract from hearing words made up of CCC ‘roots’. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to 24 CVCVC words made up of 12 CCC roots and four VV residues, repeated 15 times. In Experiments 2 and 3 the number of CCC items was increased to 72 (repeated five times), but with four additional templates (e.g., CVCCV in addition to CVCVC) in Experiment 2, and the addition of a prefix in Experiment 3. The results were parallel across all three experiments: participants could readily identify familiar items compared to both ungrammatical and novel grammatical items, and could correctly identify novel words compared to ungrammatical items, but only when the ungrammatical item was sufficiently different from the items heard in training. These results suggest that while learners can extract discontinuous information from lexical items, learners rely heavily on their memory for these lexical items, suggesting a possible bias against learning non-concatenative morphology.

scholarly journals Acquisition of English Argument Patterns By Russian EFL Students

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (SPE3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Mikhailovich Amatov ◽  
Arkadiy Petrovich Sedykh ◽  
Tatyana Alexandrovna Sidorova ◽  
Elena Evgenjevna Kotsova ◽  
Elvira Nikolajevna Akimova ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
English Language ◽  
Institutional Discourse ◽  
Current Period ◽  
Grammatical Accuracy ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Grammatical Structures

Foreign (especially English) language learning has witnessed growing popularity in Russia over the last decades due to the enormous change in economic, political, legal, and cultural domains in the current period. The increasing need for good English speaking and writing skills put forward a demand for the accurate use of lexical items and grammatical structures by those who study English as a foreign language (EFL). Lexical and grammatical accuracy acquires a crucial importance in reasoning and argumentation. A slapdash word or syntactic construction in the argument structure may submit the listener to a conclusion, which is completely different from what the speaker implied. Such issues may be particularly frustrating in academic, legal, business, medical, and other types of institutional discourse. The rules of Aristotelian logic, underlying the good majority of reasoning structures, are generic. Therefore, it is a certain difference between the two languages, native (Russian) and foreign (English), that makes Russian students of English misinterprete logical chains and use irrelevant lexical items and grammatical constructions.

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