scholarly journals COVID-19 first lockdown as a unique window into language acquisition: What you do (with your child) matters.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Kartushina ◽  
Nivedita Mani ◽  
ASLI AKTAN-ERCIYES ◽  
Khadeejah Alaslani ◽  
Naomi Aldrich ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Normative Data ◽  
Vocabulary Development ◽  
Limited Access ◽  
Daycare Centers ◽  
Child Interaction ◽  
External Sources ◽  
At Home

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries (from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown.

Family and language development during COVID-19: The case of Turkey

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junko Kanero ◽  
ASLI AKTAN-ERCIYES
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Mothers And Fathers ◽  
Descriptive Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Unique Context ◽  
At Home

With the suspension of daycares and kindergartens, COVID-19 caused temporary yet significant changes in young children’s learning environments around the world. In some countries such as Turkey, however, most young children had been taken care of at home even before the pandemic. Thus, Turkey provides a unique context in which one of the most notable pandemic-related changes for many was the increased presence of the father at home. The study uses language development as an example to (1) provide descriptive information about how COVID-19 affected the learning environment of young children in Turkey, and (2) understand the contributions of mothers and fathers in language learning. We administered a two-part online survey to 133 families with a child at ages 8-36 months. The survey asked the details of the child’s vocabulary level at two times, time spent with the child, and activities they were engaged in. As a proxy of the parental language input, we also asked the parents to write a story about a picture as if they are telling a bedtime story to their child. Our data suggest that the number of words used in the mother’s story, but not the father's story, predicted the vocabulary level of children.

scholarly journals How arbitrary is language?

2014 ◽  
Vol 369 (1651) ◽  
pp. 20130299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic Monaghan ◽  
Richard C. Shillcock ◽  
Morten H. Christiansen ◽  
Simon Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Vocabulary Development ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Early Language Development ◽  
The Relationship

It is a long established convention that the relationship between sounds and meanings of words is essentially arbitrary—typically the sound of a word gives no hint of its meaning. However, there are numerous reported instances of systematic sound–meaning mappings in language, and this systematicity has been claimed to be important for early language development. In a large-scale corpus analysis of English, we show that sound–meaning mappings are more systematic than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, this systematicity is more pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and reduces in later vocabulary development. We propose that the vocabulary is structured to enable systematicity in early language learning to promote language acquisition, while also incorporating arbitrariness for later language in order to facilitate communicative expressivity and efficiency.

Individual differences in early vocabulary development: redefining the referential-expressive distinction

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena V. M. Lieven ◽  
Julian M. Pine ◽  
Helen Dresner Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Relative Proportion ◽  
Vocabulary Development ◽  
Alternative Route ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Simple Scheme ◽  
Stylistic Variation ◽  
Early Language Development

ABSTRACTThe existence of stylistic variation between children in the early stages of language acquisition has been most frequently studied using Nelson's 0973) referential—expressive distinction. While the use of this distinction has generated a great deal of interesting research, there are a number of major problems associated with it. The present study presents a simple scheme, based on formal categories, for coding stylistic variation in the early lexicon. When applied to the first 50 and 100 words of 12 children collected between 0; 11 and 2; 3, the major dimensions of difference are found to be the relative proportion of common nouns and the relative proportion of frozen phrases. Moreover, the proportion of frozen phrases is also found to be significantly positively related to children's early productivity, suggesting that, rather than being a ‘deadend’ in early language development, the acquisition of frozen phrases may provide an alternative route into multiword speech.

Acquisition Planning and Language Acquisition by Indonesian Four-year Old Children

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 152
Author(s):  
Imam Surbakti ◽  
Khairani Hayat Situmorang
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Analysis Technique ◽  
Acquisition Planning ◽  
Better Than ◽  
At Home

This study aims at describing of acquisition planning and language acquisition by four-year old children. The objectives of this study were to find out the characteristics of Indonesian language acquisition of four-year old children who study at kindergarten and who do not ones and acquisition planning in the kindergarten. To achieve the objectives, this study was conducted by applying qualitative research. It is a kind of multi-case study. The subjects of this study were the children who study in the kindergarten and who do not ones. And the objects of this research were the utterances which contained characteristics of language acquisition uttered by the children and the implementation of acquisition planning in a kindergarten. The data were collected by using content analysis technique. The data were analyzed based on the theory of characteristics of language acquisition and the interview was conducted to get the answer of how the kindergarten school implements the acquisition planning. Based on the results of this study, the children’s utterances that study in kindergarten is better than children who don’t study, in their language development and have more vocabulary and can use them more appropriately compared to the chidren who only stayed at home as the effect of the acquisition planning applied in the kindergarten.

Parental contributions to language development during the COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junko Kanero ◽  
ASLI AKTAN-ERCIYES
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Mothers And Fathers ◽  
The World ◽  
Unusual Situation ◽  
As If ◽  
At Home

The COVID-19 pandemic caused temporary yet significant changes in young children’s learning environments around the world. In Turkey and many other countries where young children are commonly taken care of at home, a notable pandemic-related change was the increased presence of the father at home. This study utilized this unusual situation to examine the contributions of mothers and fathers in language learning. A two-part online survey was administered to the parents of an 8- to 36- month-old, and we analyzed data from 128 families at Time 1 (Mage = 21.91) and 52 families at Time 2 (Mage = 25.09). As a proxy of the parental language input, we asked the parents to write a story about a picture as if they were telling a bedtime story to their child. The number of words used in the mother’s story, but not the father’s story, predicted the vocabulary level of children.

Lexical segmentation and vocabulary growth in early language acquisition

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Plunkett
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Speech Signal ◽  
Vocabulary Development ◽  
Language Learner ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Vocabulary Growth ◽  
Lexical Segmentation ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance ◽  
Segmentation Problem

ABSTRACTThe identification of appropriate lexical segmentations of the speech signal constitutes a problem for the language learner and the child language researcher alike. Articulatory precision and fluency criteria for identifying formulaic expressions, sub-lexical forms and target lexemes in linguistic productions are defined and applied to the analysis of two Danish children's language development between the ages of 1;0 and 2;0. The results of this analysis are compared to the results of applying standard distributional and frequency criteria in the tabulation of mean length of utterance and vocabulary profiles for both standard and nonstandard lexical segmentations. It is argued that although the two methods yield converging profiles of development during the latter part of the period studied, articulatory precision and fluency criteria offer a more powerful tool for identifying alternative segmentation strategies in early language acquisition. Profiles of vocabulary development for these two children suggest that the solution to the segmentation problem may be an important trigger for their vocabulary spurts.

Code-switching in parents’ everyday speech to bilingual infants

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena V. Kremin ◽  
Julia Alves ◽  
Adriel John Orena ◽  
Linda Polka ◽  
Krista Byers-Heinlein
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Common Phenomenon ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
Bilingual Communities ◽  
Apparent Reasons ◽  
At Home

Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents’ code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French–English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings when their infant was 10 and 18 months old. Overall, rates of infant-directed code-switching were low, averaging 7 times per hour (6 times per 1,000 words) at 10 months and increasing to 28 times per hour (18 times per 1,000 words) at 18 months. Parents code-switched more between sentences than within a sentence; this pattern was even more pronounced when infants were 18 months than when they were 10 months. The most common apparent reasons for code-switching were to bolster their infant’s understanding and to teach vocabulary words. Combined, these results suggest that bilingual parents code-switch in ways that support successful bilingual language acquisition.

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