scholarly journals Bilingual beginnings to learning words

2009 ◽  
Vol 364 (1536) ◽  
pp. 3649-3663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet F. Werker ◽  
Krista Byers-Heinlein ◽  
Christopher T. Fennell
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Speech Perception ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Language Discrimination ◽  
Infancy And Early Childhood

At the macrostructure level of language milestones, language acquisition follows a nearly identical course whether children grow up with one or with two languages. However, at the microstructure level, experimental research is revealing that the same proclivities and learning mechanisms that support language acquisition unfold somewhat differently in bilingual versus monolingual environments. This paper synthesizes recent findings in the area of early bilingualism by focusing on the question of how bilingual infants come to apply their phonetic sensitivities to word learning, as they must to learn minimal pair words (e.g. ‘cat’ and ‘mat’). To this end, the paper reviews antecedent achievements by bilinguals throughout infancy and early childhood in the following areas: language discrimination and separation, speech perception, phonetic and phonotactic development, word recognition, word learning and aspects of conceptual development that underlie word learning. Special consideration is given to the role of language dominance, and to the unique challenges to language acquisition posed by a bilingual environment.

scholarly journals The Role of Reward in Word Learning and Its Implications for Language Acquisition

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (21) ◽  
pp. 2606-2611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Ripollés ◽  
Josep Marco-Pallarés ◽  
Ulrike Hielscher ◽  
Anna Mestres-Missé ◽  
Claus Tempelmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Learning

Role of Embodied Movement in Assessing Creative Behavior in Early Childhood: A Focused Review

2019 ◽  
Vol 126 (6) ◽  
pp. 1058-1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Frith ◽  
Paul D. Loprinzi ◽  
Stephanie E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Creative Thinking ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Creative Behavior ◽  
Physical Interactions ◽  
One Year ◽  
Interactive Play

The controlled measurement of creative potential in early childhood is imperative for researchers seeking to fully understand the initial emergence and development of creativity. Evidence for original ideation has been demonstrated in infants as young as one year old, through their performance of movement-based, interactive creativity tasks. In this focused review of developmental research, we suggest that embodied movements and interactive play may uniquely facilitate creative thinking in early childhood (i.e., from birth to age six). From this review, we propose that embodied movement reinforces physical interactions that influence cognitions underlying creative behavior. Embodied creativity may supplement traditional creativity measures, as young children may be more inclined to represent their inner thoughts and experiences through movement rather than through language alone. Thus, we explored the importance of embodied creativity as a means of informing current researchers about the development of creativity, and we suggest future experimental research in this area.

scholarly journals Predicting the birth of a spoken word

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (41) ◽  
pp. 12663-12668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Roy ◽  
Michael C. Frank ◽  
Philip DeCamp ◽  
Matthew Miller ◽  
Deb Roy
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Learning Environment ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Multimodal Data ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Frequency Of Use

Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and video recordings of a single child’s life that allows us to measure the child’s experience of each word in his vocabulary. This corpus provides the first direct comparison, to our knowledge, between different predictors of the child’s production of individual words. We develop a series of new measures of the distinctiveness of the spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts in which a word appears, and show that these measures are stronger predictors of learning than frequency of use and that, unlike frequency, they play a consistent role across different syntactic categories. Our findings provide a concrete instantiation of classic ideas about the role of coherent activities in word learning and demonstrate the value of multimodal data in understanding children’s language acquisition.

Instructional Strategies and SLA in Early French Immersion

1993 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Harley
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Instructional Strategies ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
French Immersion ◽  
School Based ◽  
Immersion Programs ◽  
Clear Conception

Examining the role of instruction in second language acquisition (SLA) entails not only a specification of what aspects of SLA stand to be affected but also a clear conception of what is meant by instruction. In this paper the potential of various instructional strategies for promoting SLA among child second language (L2) learners is considered in relation to empirical findings in early French immersion programs. Several principles are proposed concerning the what, when, and how of code-focused L2 instruction in a communicatively oriented school-based acquisition context. These proposals need to be put to the test in further experimental research.

Melissa Bowerman & Stephen Levinson (eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. ix, 602. Hb. $100.00, pb. $35.00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-109
Author(s):  
Edith L. Bavin
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
Form Function ◽  
Relational Concepts ◽  
Theoretical Issues

This volume, dedicated to Martin Braine, is the outcome of a conference held at the Max Plank Institute in Nijmegen in 1995. The first of four parts covers general theoretical issues; part 2 focuses specifically on word learning, particularly nouns; in part 3, entities, individuation and quantification are examined; and in part 4, relational concepts in form-function mapping, with a focus on the influence of language-specific properties. Two main issues link the nineteen chapters: whether concepts are language-independent or constructed through language, and the role of experience in conceptual development. As emphasized by the editors in the introduction, past attempts to relate cognitive and linguistic development have not been too successful, possibly because of the focus on language structure within theoretical linguistics. Recent research on the domain-specific cognitive abilities of infants and on semantic and cross-linguistic aspects of language acquisition have provided new insights, and thus it is timely to reexamine the links.

What absolute beginners learn from input

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-136
Author(s):  
Susanne E. Carroll ◽  
Angela George
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Learning Problems ◽  
Laboratory Research ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Laboratory Findings ◽  
Foundational Research

Absolute beginners rapidly solve several word learning problems after minimal exposure to second language speech. In this article, we report on laboratory research that supports this claim. Explaining second language acquisition is a goal of foundational research. While our findings are consistent with the generativist enterprise, generativists have been content to describe what learners have acquired while avoiding discussion of the ‘how’. We describe a specific generativist approach (the Autonomous Induction Theory) that directly addresses the role of specific learning mechanisms proposed by cognitive psychology. In contrast to alternative non-generative approaches, the Autonomous Induction Theory offers a constrained theory of language acquisition. Both the data from laboratory settings and the theoretical explanations of how adult learners learn have potential implications for language teaching. One should not, however, make teaching recommendations directly from laboratory results. Rather, the findings should be reinterpreted as a research agenda for the classroom, one that recognises its complexities. In this paper, we make several proposals as to how to get from laboratory findings to a classroom-based research agenda.

scholarly journals Concepts as explanatory theories: Evidence from word learning and the development of lexical flexibility

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahesh Srinivasan
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
New Words ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Insight Into

By some theories, children are guided by explanatory frameworks, which motivate them to understand why objects have the properties they do. In this chapter, I describe how language development can inform such theories, by reviewing previous work on how children extend new words, and more recent work on how children learn to use words flexibly, with multiple, related meanings (e.g., shattered/drinking glass; thirsty/tasty chicken). Interestingly, some scholars have proposed that the different meanings of flexible words reflect different modes of explanation, raising the possibility that children’s understanding of flexible words will lend insight into the role of explanatory structures in conceptual development. To this end, this chapter presents a background on lexical flexibility, and brings together recent evidence on how it is acquired, represented, and instantiated across languages. Together, these recent developments provide new support for the idea that explanatory frameworks shape how children conceptualize the world.

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