Language in the infant’s mind

1994 ◽  
Vol 346 (1315) ◽  
pp. 13-20 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Early Stages

We review recent work that shows that, during the early stages of language acquisition, molar properties such as prosody are important to the infant. We argue that the specification of these structures allows the infant to learn the language processing routines that adults employ.

Homelessness or Symbolic Castration? Subjectivity, Language Acquisition, and Sociality in Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Schmitz ◽  
Julia Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Forms Of Violence

How much violence can a society expect its members to accept? A comparison between the language theories of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan is the starting point for answering this question. A look at the early stages of language acquisition exposes the sacrificial logic of patriarchal society. Are those forces that restrict the individual to be conceived in a martial imagery of castration or is it possible that an existing society critically questions those points of socialization that leave their members in a state of homelessness? The following considerations should help to distinguish between unavoidable and avoidable forms of violence.

Stepping backwards in development: integrating developmental speech perception with lexical and phonological development – a commentary on Stoel-Gammon's ‘Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children’*

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
TANIA S. ZAMUNER
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Phonological Development ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Traditional Approaches

Within the subfields of linguistics, traditional approaches tend to examine different phenomena in isolation. As Stoel-Gammon (this issue) correctly states, there is little interaction between the subfields. However, for a more comprehensive understanding of language acquisition in general and, more specifically, lexical and phonological development, we must consider relations between multiple subfields. That is, by examining the interactions between these subfields, a greater understanding of lexical and phonological development can emerge. For instance, the interaction between phonology, syntax and semantics is demonstrated in recent work looking at how phonological patterns can provide a basis for inferring a word's lexical category (such as nouns and verbs) (Christiansen, Onnis & Hockema, 2009; Lany & Saffran, 2010).

scholarly journals Language Usage and Second Language Morphosyntax: Effects of Availability, Reliability, and Formulaicity

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rundi Guo ◽  
Nick C. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Fixed Effects ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Short Delay ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Generalized Linear Mixed Effects

A large body of psycholinguistic research demonstrates that both language processing and language acquisition are sensitive to the distributions of linguistic constructions in usage. Here we investigate how statistical distributions at different linguistic levels – morphological and lexical (Experiments 1 and 2), and phrasal (Experiment 2) – contribute to the ease with which morphosyntax is processed and produced by second language learners. We analyze Chinese ESL learners’ knowledge of four English inflectional morphemes: -ed, -ing, and third-person -s on verbs, and plural -s on nouns. In Elicited Imitation Tasks, participants listened to length- and difficulty-matched sentences each containing one target morpheme and typed the whole sentence as accurately as they could after a short delay. Experiment 1 investigated lexical and morphemic levels, testing the hypotheses that a morpheme is expected to be more easily processed when it is (1) highly available (i.e., occurring in frequent word-forms), and (2) highly reliable (i.e., occurring in lemma words that are consistently conjugated in the form containing this morpheme). Thirty sentences were made for each morpheme, divided into three Availability-Reliability Distribution (ARD) groups on the basis of corpus analysis in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies, 2008-): 10 target words high in availability, 10 high in reliability, and 10 low in both reliability and availability. Responses were scored on whether the target morpheme was accurately reproduced given the provision of the correct lemma. A generalized linear mixed-effects logit model (GLMM) revealed fixed effects of morpheme type, availability, and reliability on the accuracy of morpheme provision. There were no effects of lemma frequency. Experiment 2 successfully replicated these results and extended the investigation to explore phrasal formulaicity by manipulating the frequency of the four-word strings in which the morpheme was embedded. GLMMs replicated the effects of word-form availability and reliability and additionally revealed independent phrase-superiority effects where morphemes were better reproduced in contexts of higher string-frequency. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that morpheme acquisition reflects the distributional properties of learners’ experience and the mappings therein between lexis, morphology, phraseology, and semantics. These conclusions support an emergentist view of the statistical symbolic learning of morphology where language acquisition involves the satisfaction of competing constraints across multiple grain-sizes of units.

scholarly journals ANALISIS GANGGUAN BERBAHASA PADA ANAK DI KECAMATAN PAHAE JULU

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Sales Sitompul
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Language Disorders ◽  
Descriptive Research ◽  
Acquisition Device ◽  
The Brain

This study originated from cases of language disorders that occur in society in Pahae Julu district. Language is a need to interact, and humans have been blessed with Language Acquisition Device (LAD) or any language by god. However, if when speaking of someone impaired both LAD and language processing part of the brain, then the communication will not be smooth. The language disorders can happen to anyone. The purpose of this study is to reveal some kinds of language disorders, cases of language disorders and to find out the causes of language disorders experienced by the community in Pahae Julu. The method used in this research is descriptive research method type of case studies.

Phonotactics and Syllable Structure in Infant Speech Perception

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania S. Zamuner ◽  
Viktor Kharlamov
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Structure Form ◽  
Modeling Studies ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Infant Speech Perception ◽  
Sound Patterns ◽  
Linguistic Structures

Phonotactics and syllable structure form an integral part of phonological competence and may be used to discover other aspects of language. Given the importance of such knowledge to the process of language acquisition, numerous studies have investigated the development of phonotactic and syllabic knowledge in order to determine when infants become sensitive to these sound patterns and how they may use this knowledge in language processing. Considering that infants’ first exposure to linguistic structures comes from speech perception, we provide an overview of the perception-related issues that have been investigated experimentally and point out issues that have not yet been addressed in the literature. We begin with phonotactic development, examining a wide range of sound patterns, followed by a discussion of the acquisition of syllable structure and a brief summary of various outstanding issues that may be of interest to the reader, including production-related investigations and phonological modeling studies.

Women in the history of linguistics

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Wendy Ayres-Bennett ◽  
Helena Sanson
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Central Section ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Of Women

This Introduction outlines the need for a ‘true history’ (Lerner 1976) of the role of women in the history of linguistics, which considers them on their own terms, and challenges categories and concepts devised for traditional male-dominated accounts. We start by considering what research has already been conducted in the field, before exploring some of the reasons for the relative dearth of studies. We outline some of the challenges and opportunities encountered by women who wished to study the nature of language and languages in the past. The geographical and chronological scope of this volume is then discussed. In a central section we examine some of the major recurring themes in the volume. These include attitudes towards women’s language, both positive and negative; women and language acquisition and teaching; and women as creators of new languages and scripts. We further explore women as authors, dedicatees, or intended readers of metalinguistic texts, as interpreters and translators, and as contributors to the linguistic documentation and maintenance. We consider how women supported male relatives and colleagues in their endeavours, sometimes in invisible ways, before reviewing the early stages of their entry into institutionalized contexts. The chapter concludes with a brief section on future directions for research.

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.

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