Information Structure in First Language Acquisition

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Höhle ◽  
Frauke Berger ◽  
Antje Sauermann
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
First Language ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Focus Particles ◽  
Comprehension Skills ◽  
Early Production ◽  
Linguistic Means

So far, research on the acquisition of information structure (IS) is still relatively sparse compared to other areas of first language acquisition research. A growing interest in this area has emerged with an increasing number of results indicating an asymmetry of an early production but late comprehension of linguistic means related to IS—which contrasts common findings in other areas of acquisition with comprehension skills typically being in advance to production skills and thus provides a challenge for theories of language acquisition. This chapter will give a review on recent findings on the acquisition of linguistic means to mark IS in first language acquisition focusing on studies looking at the production and comprehension of accentuation and word order. A further part will look at children’s production and comprehension of sentences with focus particles.

Subject realization in the syntactic development of a bilingual child

2000 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Juan-Garau ◽  
Carmen Pérez-Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
First Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Dependent Manner ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Syntactic Development

The present article reports on the findings of a case study of bilingual first language acquisition in Catalan and English. It first presents a general overview of a child's syntactic development from the age of 1;3 to 4;2 and then focuses on the question of subject realization in the two contrasting languages he is acquiring simultaneously. In this case, Catalan is a null subject language in opposition to the overt subject properties of English. Such data allow us to provide evidence on a key issue in bilingual acquisition research: the question of language separation in the early stages of acquisition. The data available suggest the absence of any major influence of one language on the other. In other words, our subject seems to be acquiring word order patterns which are different in the two adult systems in a language-dependent manner from the beginning of his production in both languages.

Approaches to first language acquisition

1992 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Döpke
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
First Language ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Dependent Clause

A bilingual child’s development of word order in German and English subordinate clauses was followed between three and five years of age, and a number of diversions from the development of word order in such clauses by monolingual children was noted. Of particular interest is the fact that incorrect dependent clause structures in German were more likely to be due to intra-language influences from German main clause structures than from English. The findings are discussed in the light UG claims made by Clahsen (1988) concerning the word order development in monolingual children.

scholarly journals Linguistic variation and micro-cues in first language acquisition

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
First Language ◽  
General Knowledge ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Language Data ◽  
Generative Approach ◽  
Learning Economy

Children are often exposed to considerable variation in the input. Nevertheless, there is very little overgeneralization in child language data and children are typically found to make errors of omission, not errors of commission, a fact which is often referred to as conservative learning. In this paper, these findings are accounted for by a model of micro-cues, a generative approach to language acquisition arguing that children are sensitive to fine syntactic distinctions from early on. The micro-cues are small pieces of abstract syntactic structure resulting from parsing the input. This means that UG provides children with principles, features, and the ability to parse, but not the micro-cues themselves, which are considered to be part of the knowledge of a specific language. The model also considers children’s errors to generally be due to economy and the language acquisition process to be development in small steps, from specific to more general knowledge. Keywords: Conservative learning; economy; English; grammar competition; Norwegian; (over- and under)generalization; parameter; rule “size”; word order

scholarly journals Constructivist Approaches to First Language Acquisition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Heike BEHRENS
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
First Language ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Theoretical Level ◽  
Lexical Categories ◽  
Form Function ◽  
Types Of Information ◽  
Constructivist Approaches ◽  
Morphological Patterns

Abstract Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which types of information leads to the induction of (lexical) categories, and to paradigm building. Regarding the acquisition of word order, it is shown how languages with fixed or variable word order profit from stable syntactic hyperschemas, but require a more detailed analyses of the form-function contingencies to identify the underlying, more specific semantic, syntactic and morphological patterns. At a theoretical level, it is shown how findings from acquisition and processing converge into new linguistic theories that aim to account for regular as well as irregular phenomena in language.

Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition

1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 151-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATASCHA MÜLLER
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
First Language ◽  
Quantitative Difference ◽  
Language Learner ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Grammatical Analysis ◽  
Bilingual Language Development

Much research on bilingual first language acquisition has stressed the role of the dominant or preferred language when the two languages have some influence on one another. The present paper tries to look at transfer or interference from the perspective of the input the child is exposed to. Transfer will be argued to occur in those domains of the grammar where the language learner is confronted with ambiguous input. The bilingual child may, as a relief strategy, use parts of the analysis of one language in order to cope with ambiguous properties of the other. Ambiguity of input is crucial and will be evaluated through a comparison with monolingual language acquisition: if monolingual children have problems with the language material in question, it may be suggested that the input contains evidence for more than only one grammatical analysis. A quantitative difference between monolingual and bilingual language acquisition will be interpreted as evidence in favor of cross-linguistic influence in bilingual language development. The paper reviews longitudinal studies on the acquisition of word order in German subordinate clauses.

Information Structure in Slavic

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Jasinskaja
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Focus Particles ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
Concise Overview ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Free Word ◽  
Linguistic Means ◽  
Focus Projection

This chapter presents a concise overview of the linguistic means that express categories of information structure (IS) in Slavic languages. Concentrating especially on (a) the realization of broad vs narrow focus (focus projection); and (b) the expression of given information, topic, and delimitation, the chapter covers intonation and ‘free’ word order—the two most widely discussed ways of IS encoding. It further presents less well studied IS-sensitive devices and phenomena in Slavic: clefts, predicate doubling, topic and focus particles, as well as the interaction of IS with the Slavic clitic systems, in particular, in the expression of positive and negative polarity (or verum) focus.

Infant-Directed Speech Effects in Adult Artificial Grammar Learning

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Sára Lukics ◽  
Ágnes Lukács
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Artificial Grammar ◽  
Combined Effect ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Relative Contribution ◽  
Grammar Learning ◽  
Learning Rates

First language acquisition is facilitated by several characteristics of infant-directed speech, but we know little about their relative contribution to learning different aspects of language. We investigated infant-directed speech effects on the acquisition of a linear artificial grammar in two experiments. We examined the effect of incremental presentation of strings (starting small) and prosody (comparing monotonous, arbitrary and phrase prosody). Presenting shorter strings before longer ones led to higher learning rates compared to random presentation. Prosody marking phrases had a similar effect, yet, prosody without marking syntactic units did not facilitate learning. These studies were the first to test the starting small effect with a linear artificial grammar, and also the first to investigate the combined effect of starting small and prosody. Our results suggest that starting small and prosody facilitate the extraction of regularities from artificial linguistic stimuli, indicating they may play an important role in natural language acquisition.

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