Bridging Interpersonal and Ecological Dynamics of Cognition through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism

Human cognition occurs within social contexts, and nowhere is this more evident than language behavior. Regularly using multiple languages is a globally ubiquitous, individual experience that is shaped by social environmental forces, ranging from interpersonal interactions to ambient language exposure. Here, we develop a Systems Framework of Bilingualism, where embedded layers of individual, interpersonal, and ecological sociolinguistic factors jointly predict people’s language behavior. Of note, we quantify interpersonal and ecological language dynamics through the novel applications of language-tagged social network analysis and geospatial demographic analysis among 106 English-French bilingual adults in Montréal, Canada. Consistent with a Systems view, we found that people’s individual language behavior, on a global level (i.e., overall language use), was jointly predicted by the language characteristics of their interpersonal social networks and the ambient linguistic patterns of their residential neighborhood environments, whereas more granular aspects of language behavior (i.e., word-level proficiency) was mainly driven by local, interpersonal social networks. Together, this work offers a novel theoretical framework, bolstered by innovative analytic techniques to quantify complex social information and empower more holistic assessments of multifaceted human behaviors and cognition, like language.

He kōpara e kō nei i te ata / Māori language socialisation and acquisition by two bilingual children: A case-study approach

<p>This thesis investigates natural Māori language socialisation and acquisition by two under-three-year-old children within bilingual settings in Aotearoa New Zealand, in which they were learning two languages simultaneously – te reo Māori (Māori language), the endangered indigenous heritage language, and English, a dominant world language. The thesis explores how Māori language socialisation occurred for the two children, and documents the emergence of Māori grammatical structures in their productive language. In this longitudinal, qualitative case-study, data were gathered by regularly video-recording the children while they interacted with their families. Analysis of input- and productive-language data revealed that whereas English was the principal ambient language for both children at home and in the community, the language used directly with Child 1 was predominantly Māori, and with Child 2 was predominantly English. Analysis confirmed that Child 1 chose Māori as a principal first productive language, while Child 2 chose English. Since the focus of the study was on te reo Māori, data gathered from Child 1 across 39 months were analysed from a language socialisation perspective. Wortham’s (2005) notion of “socialisation trajectory” was used to trace four “trajectories” as the child progressed towards cultural communicative practices such as the pūkana ‘wide eyes’ form of eye-talk, and towards kinship roles. She navigated, and sometimes diverged from, the expectations and guidance of her extended family (whānau), while accumulating participant roles and whānau values and responsibilities. Each trajectory was closely interwoven with the others, and also with the child’s language-acquisition trajectory, and thus contributed to her becoming an L1-Māori speaker. Linguistic analysis of the child’s “first words”, “first combinations” and “first sentences” revealed the emergence of Māori grammatical structures in her productive language, and led to a new “Phrasal acquisition of te reo Māori” hypothesis. The findings direct attention to the important contribution, not only of the language environment but also of a rich, many-faceted process of cultural socialisation, in enabling a child to become a proficient communicator within her whānau and an L1-speaker of te reo Māori. The findings therefore contribute to a deeper and broader understanding of natural socialisation and acquisition of te reo Māori, and also carry important implications for the revitalisation of this, and other, endangered languages of the world.</p>

He kōpara e kō nei i te ata / Māori language socialisation and acquisition by two bilingual children: A case-study approach

<p>This thesis investigates natural Māori language socialisation and acquisition by two under-three-year-old children within bilingual settings in Aotearoa New Zealand, in which they were learning two languages simultaneously – te reo Māori (Māori language), the endangered indigenous heritage language, and English, a dominant world language. The thesis explores how Māori language socialisation occurred for the two children, and documents the emergence of Māori grammatical structures in their productive language. In this longitudinal, qualitative case-study, data were gathered by regularly video-recording the children while they interacted with their families. Analysis of input- and productive-language data revealed that whereas English was the principal ambient language for both children at home and in the community, the language used directly with Child 1 was predominantly Māori, and with Child 2 was predominantly English. Analysis confirmed that Child 1 chose Māori as a principal first productive language, while Child 2 chose English. Since the focus of the study was on te reo Māori, data gathered from Child 1 across 39 months were analysed from a language socialisation perspective. Wortham’s (2005) notion of “socialisation trajectory” was used to trace four “trajectories” as the child progressed towards cultural communicative practices such as the pūkana ‘wide eyes’ form of eye-talk, and towards kinship roles. She navigated, and sometimes diverged from, the expectations and guidance of her extended family (whānau), while accumulating participant roles and whānau values and responsibilities. Each trajectory was closely interwoven with the others, and also with the child’s language-acquisition trajectory, and thus contributed to her becoming an L1-Māori speaker. Linguistic analysis of the child’s “first words”, “first combinations” and “first sentences” revealed the emergence of Māori grammatical structures in her productive language, and led to a new “Phrasal acquisition of te reo Māori” hypothesis. The findings direct attention to the important contribution, not only of the language environment but also of a rich, many-faceted process of cultural socialisation, in enabling a child to become a proficient communicator within her whānau and an L1-speaker of te reo Māori. The findings therefore contribute to a deeper and broader understanding of natural socialisation and acquisition of te reo Māori, and also carry important implications for the revitalisation of this, and other, endangered languages of the world.</p>

Patterns of Adaptation in Child-Directed and Child Speech in the Emergence of Hebrew Verbs

Children approach verb learning in ways that are specific to their native language, given the differential typological organization of verb morphology and lexical semantics. Parent-child interaction is the arena where children's socio-cognitive abilities enable them to track predictive relationships between tokens and extract linguistic generalizations from patterns and regularities in the ambient language. The current study examines how the system of Hebrew verbs develops as a network over time in early childhood, and the dynamic role of input-output adaptation in the network's increasing complexity. Focus is on the morphological components of Hebrew verbs in a dense corpus of two parent-child dyads in natural interaction between the ages 1;8-2;2. The 91-hour corpus contained 371,547 word tokens, 62,824 verb tokens, and 1,410 verb types (lemmas) in CDS and CS together. Network analysis was employed to explore the changing distributions and emergent systematicity of the relations between verb roots and verb patterns. Taking the Semitic root and pattern morphological constructs to represent linked nodes in a network, findings show that children's networks change with age in terms of node degree and node centrality, representing linkage level and construct importance respectively; and in terms of network density, as representing network growth potential. We put forward three main hypotheses followed by findings concerning (i) changes in verb usage through development, (ii) CS adaptation, and (iii) CDS adaptation: First, we show that children go through punctuated development, expressed by their using individual constructs for short periods of time, whereas parents' patterns of usage are more coherent. Second, regarding CS adaptation within a dynamic network system relative to time and CDS, we conclude that children are attuned to their immediate experience consisting of current CDS usage as well as previous usage in the immediate past. Finally, we show that parents (unintentionally) adapt to their children's language knowledge in three ways: First, by relating to their children's current usage. Second, by expanding on previous experience, building upon the usage their children have already been exposed to. And third, we show that when parents experience a limited network in the speech of their children, they provide them with more opportunities to expand their system in future interactions.

CV co-occurrence and articulatory control in three Brazilian children from 0:06 to 1:07

Many studies in language acquisition have addressed consonant/vowel co-occurrence, henceforth CV. Traditional views focus on the upper vocal tract, while a recent one stresses the importance of its lower end. None has nevertheless attempted to understand how these two tracts interact and cooperate in early vocalization. The role of the ambient language in this interaction is also understudied. The aim of this paper is to integrate such apparently contradictory views by observing activity in the entire vocal tract during the emergence of CV combinations in three Brazilian children interacting with their parents between the ages of 0:06 and 1:07. We have used a mixed longitudinal and cross-sectional method, whereby one child was followed longitudinally while the other two were observed at later, complementary stages. Data were collected using a digital recorder, transcribed with the aid of acoustic analysis, and later processed with a syllable counter. Our results uncovered the following trends: biomechanical constraints interact with ambient language inluences; control over articulations is diferent for vowels and consonants; infants tend to have a favorite babbling vowel; the lower vocal tract remains active past 12 months; and not all children acquire articulatory control in the same way. Overall, they do not support any speciic view, but, rather, call for the integration of several separate strands in the literature.

Trochaic bias overrides stress typicality in English lexical development

This paper investigates whether typical stress patterns in English nouns and verbs are available as a prosodic cue for categorisation and accelerated word learning during first language acquisition. The stress typicality hypothesis states that left-stressed nouns and right-stressed verbs should be acquired earlier than the reverse configurations if stress effectively signals lexical class membership. In this view, class-typical stress patterns are expected to facilitate learning of novel items. A series of generalized additive models (GAMs) based on a comprehensive set of lexical data (CELEX) as well as a large set of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and concreteness ratings reveals that stress typicality plays a minor role in early acquisition, as it is generally superseded by a preference for left-hand (or ‘trochaic’) patterns in both nouns and verbs. This may be explained by general cognitive constraints (perceptual salience and recency) or exposure to the dominant pattern in the ambient language.

Cross-linguistic variation in word-initial cluster production in adult and child language: evidence from English and Norwegian

Young children simplify word initial consonant clusters by omitting or substituting one (or both) of the elements. Vocalic insertion, coalescence and metathesis are said to be used more seldom (McLeod, van Doorn & Reed, 2001). Data from Norwegian children, however, have shown vocalic insertion to be more frequently used (Simonsen, 1990; Simonsen, Garmann & Kristoffersen, 2019). To investigate the extent to which children use this strategy to differing degrees depending on the ambient language, we analysed word initial cluster production acoustically in nine Norwegian and nine English speaking children aged 2;6–6 years, and eight adults, four from each language. The results showed that Norwegian-speaking children produce significantly more instances of vocalic insertions than English-speaking children do. The same pattern is found in Norwegian- versus English-speaking adults. We argue that this cross-linguistic difference is an example of the influence of prosodic-phonetic biases in language-specific developmental paths in the acquisition of speech.

Early Child Phonology

Child phonology is a relatively young discipline. Although diary studies provided data and analyses from the early 20th century, it was only in the 1970s that technological advances made it possible to record infants on audio and video, providing better documented accounts, and to investigate infant speech perception experimentally. The titles included here focus mainly on the first two years of life, the period of the most dramatic change. Two theoretical positions have long dominated production studies, reflecting divisions within linguistics more generally. The formalist generative model conceptualizes child phonology as an account of the stage-like development of constraint-based child output forms guided by universal principles. In contrast, functionalist or usage-based positions emphasize the sensorimotor origins of speech, self-organization, and individual variability. Longitudinal studies have revealed the kind of regression first reported for morphological development: Early accurate forms are followed by more systematic but less accurate ones, suggesting representational reorganization. As linguistic theories have evolved over the past half-century, so have approaches to child phonology. The proposal that speech is retained in the form of exemplars, for example, is currently reflected in both formalist and usage-based production models. Research on infant perception and processing of speech has largely followed a separate trajectory. After twenty years of investigation into infant discrimination of speech-sound contrasts in the first months of life researchers turned their attention to advances in segmentation, or word recognition within the speech stream; in the past twenty years that research has been extended to languages other than English. Another highly productive line of research is statistical or distributional learning, which provides implicit knowledge of ambient language patterns. This conceptualization, with experimental support, has helped to account for perceptual narrowing, or the loss of “universal” discrimination after about six months, and also for ambient language effects on babbling and first words. More recently, experimental studies have begun to address the relationship between production and perception, providing evidence of the effect of a child’s individual vocal patterns on the processing of input speech. Bilingual acquisition and the development of prosody in general and tones in particular have also received more serious attention in the past twenty years, again with parallel lines of research addressing perception and production.

First-Language Acquisition of Morphology

First-language acquisition of morphology refers to the process whereby native speakers gain full and automatic command of the inflectional and derivational machinery of their mother tongue. Despite language diversity, evidence shows that morphological acquisition follows a shared path in development in evolving from semantically and structurally simplex and non-productive to more complex and productive. The emergence and consolidation of the central morphological systems in a language typically take place between the ages of two and six years, while mature command of all systems and subsystems can take up to 10 more years, and is mediated by the consolidation of literacy skills. Morphological learning in both inflection and derivation is always interwoven with lexical growth, and derivational acquisition is highly dependent on the development of a large and coherent lexicon. Three critical factors platform the acquisition of morphology. One factor is the input patterns in the ambient language, including various types of frequency. Input provides the context for children to pay attention to morphological markers as meaningful cues to caregivers’ intentions in interactive sociopragmatic settings of joint attention. A second factor is language typology, given that languages differ in the amount of word-internal information they package in words. The “typological impact” in morphology directs children to the ways pertinent conceptual and structural information is encoded in morphological structures. It is thus responsible for great differences among languages in the timing and pace of learning morphological categories such as passive verbs. Finally, development itself is a central mechanism that drives morphological acquisition from emergence to productivity in three senses: as the filtering device that enables the break into the morphological system, in providing the span of time necessary for the consolidation of morphological systems in children, and in hosting the cognitive changes that usher in mature morphological systems in both speech and writing in adolescents and adults.