On EST Sentence Translation Based on English and Chinese Structures: Natural Linear Expansion vs. Reversed Linear Expansion

With the development of science，new subjects with a new technical vocabulary spurt from technology and science, and it makes translation in EST more difficult. It turns out that similarities between English and Chinese can be handled easily in translation, while differences between the two make translation in EST a hard task. The intention of this study is to analyze the formulas of the patterns between English and Chinese in thinking and explore possible advantages in translation practice.

First Word Learning

Learning words means gaining the ability not only to understand, but also to produce identifiable word forms and use them to make reference. Focusing on the first two years of life, this chapter considers the role of isolated words as well as segmentation in word-form learning, and also the role of vocal practice for production. It reviews alternative perspectives on the origins of concepts or categories of meaning and weighs the evidence for a “vocabulary spurt” or “nominal insight.” Self-action is found to be a powerful tool for perceptual processing of word forms, understanding referential intention, and retaining episodic memories. Changes related to the maturation of brain structures documented for declarative memory in other domains provide suggestive parallels to the processes of decontextualization of word meaning and reference, while word learning itself is seen to lead to a qualitative change in the learning process.

A Cypriot Greek Adaptation of the CDI: Early Production of Translation Equivalents in a Bi-(dia)lectal Context

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) has been widely used to study children’s word production in both monolingual and bilingual contexts, in typical and atypical populations, and for the study of different aspects of language development, such as the use of mutual exclusivity. In this study, an adaptation of the CDI in Cypriot Greek is used to collect production data for post-vocabulary spurt children growing up in a bilectal community, where two different varieties of a language are used. Parents report that their children use translation equivalents for a single concept, and these increase as their total word production increases. Also girls seem to produce more translation equivalents than boys overall. This suggests that lexical development in bilectal communities might be more similar to bilingual rather than monolingual development, and that mutual exclusivity does not constrain word usage in such populations even during early word production.

Productive Vocabulary Size Predicts Event-related Potential Correlates of Fast Mapping in 20-Month-Olds

Although it is well documented that children undergo a productive vocabulary spurt late in the second year, it is unclear whether this development is accompanied by equally significant advances in receptive word processing. In the present study, we tested an electrophysiological procedure for assessing receptive word learning in young children, and the impact of productive vocabulary size for performance in this task. We found that 20-month-olds with high productive vocabularies displayed an N400 incongruity effect to violations of trained associations between novel words and pictures, whereas 20-month-olds with low productive vocabularies did not. However, both high and low producers showed an N400 effect for common real words paired with an incongruous object. These findings indicate that there may be substantial differences in receptive fast mapping efficiency between typically developing children who have reached a productive vocabulary spurt and typically developing children who have not yet reached this productive spurt.