Bilingual First Language Acquisition: French and German Grammatical Development. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, Vol. 7)

1997 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 565
Author(s):  
William D. Keel ◽  
Jurgen M. Meisel
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 319-340
Author(s):  
Evan Kidd ◽  
Seamus Donnelly

Humans vary in almost every dimension imaginable, and language is no exception. In this article, we review the past research that has focused on individual differences (IDs) in first language acquisition. We first consider how different theoretical traditions in language acquisition treat IDs, and we argue that a focus on IDs is important given its potential to reveal the developmental dynamics and architectural constraints of the linguistic system. We then review IDs research that has examined variation in children's linguistic input, early speech perception, and vocabulary and grammatical development. In each case, we observe systematic and meaningful variation, such that variation in one domain (e.g., early auditory and speech processing) has meaningful developmental consequences for development in higher-order domains (e.g., vocabulary). The research suggests a high degree of integration across the linguistic system, in which development across multiple linguistic domains is tightly coupled.


2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
MARTINE SEKALI

How do French children acquire the grammatical system of their native language so easily? Many hypotheses have been put forward and experimentally tested to solve this mystery. Generative theories argue that grammar is a universal and innate ability ready to be instantiated after birth. Within this framework, grammatical development is seen as a process whereby universal grammar gradually settles into the language-specific structures of the linguistic input that children receive in the first years of life. In the last decades however, many researchers of child language development have suggested other explanations. Current functional-cognitive research (cf. Langacker, 1988, 2000; Bybee, 1995, 2002; Elman et al., 1996; Tomasello, 2003; Diessel, 2004), proposes a usage-based approach to first language acquisition, where grammar is shaped by usage, and linguistic constructions are taken from parental input and gradually generalised by the child. Usage-based theories thus consider grammatical development as a dynamic process which emerges and evolves, in parallel with cognitive and psychological development, through the use of symbolic patterns which consolidate into grammatical constructions.


Language ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 645
Author(s):  
Bernhard Rohrbacher ◽  
Jürgen M. Meisel ◽  
Jurgen M. Meisel

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-61
Author(s):  
Rabiah Tul Adawiyah Mohamed Salleh ◽  
Bruno Di Biase ◽  
Satomi Kawaguchi

Abstract Many first language acquisition (FLA) studies have found a strong correlation between lexical and grammatical development in early language acquisition. For bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA), the development of grammar is also found to be correlated with the size of the lexicon in each language. This case study investigates how a Malay-English bilingual child developed the lexicon and grammar in each of her languages and considers possible evidence of interaction between the languages during acquisition. The study also aims to show that the predominant linguistic environment to which the child was alternatively exposed might have played an important role in her lexical and grammatical development. Thus, the study presents two sets of data: (a) a 12-month longitudinal investigation when the child was 2;10 up till 3;10 in Australia and (b) a one-off elicitation session at age 4;8 when the family was in Malaysia. The findings show that not only the emergence of grammar is linked to the lexical size of the developing languages, but that other variables, mainly the linguistic environment and the bilingual language mode, also influenced the child’s language productions.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Sára Lukics ◽  
Ágnes Lukács

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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document