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Constructivist Approaches to First Language Acquisition
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Behrens, Heike – Journal of Child Language, 2021
Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which…
Descriptors: Constructivism (Learning), Native Language, Language Acquisition, Morphology (Languages)
Effects of Parental Input Quality in Child Heritage Language Acquisition
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Daskalaki, Evangelia; Blom, Elma; Chondrogianni, Vasiliki; Paradis, Johanne – Journal of Child Language, 2020
This study investigates the role of parental input quality on the acquisition of Greek as a heritage language in Western Canada. Focusing on subject use, we tested four groups of Greek speakers: monolingual children, heritage children, and the parents of each one of those groups. Participants completed an elicited production task designed to…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Parent Participation, Child Language, Native Language
Acquiring a Frst Language in Adolescence: The Case of Basic Word Order in American Sign Language
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Cheng, Qi; Mayberry, Rachel I. – Journal of Child Language, 2019
Previous studies suggest that age of acquisition affects the outcomes of learning, especially at the morphosyntactic level. Unknown is how syntactic development is affected by increased cognitive maturity and delayed language onset. The current paper studied the early syntactic development of adolescent first language learners by examining word…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Native Language, American Sign Language, Adolescents
Interpreting Silent Gesture: Cognitive Biases and Rational Inference in Emerging Language Systems
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Schouwstra, Marieke; Swart, Henriëtte; Thompson, Bill – Cognitive Science, 2019
Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent-ordering patterns to indicate "who did what to whom," yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language…
Descriptors: Nonverbal Communication, Language Acquisition, Bayesian Statistics, Preferences
The Effects of Language Input on Word Order in German as a Heritage and Majority Language
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Sopata, Aldona; Dlugosz, Kamil – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input--including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input--affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, German, Word Order, Bilingualism
Word Order Preferences of Tagalog-Speaking Adults and Children
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Garcia, Rowena; Dery, Jeruen E.; Roeser, Jens; Höhle, Barbara – First Language, 2018
This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the…
Descriptors: Preferences, Word Order, Phrase Structure, Tagalog
Non-Standard Italian Dialect Heritage Speakers' Acquisition of Clitic Placement in Standard Italian
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Chan, Lionel – ProQuest LLC, 2014
This dissertation examines the acquisition of object clitic placement in Standard Italian by heritage speakers (HSs) of non-standard Italian dialects. It compares two different groups of Standard Italian learners--Northern Italian dialect HSs and Southern Italian dialect HSs--whose heritage dialects contrast with each other in clitic word order.…
Descriptors: Italian, Nonstandard Dialects, Native Language, Standard Spoken Usage
A Large-Scale Cross-Linguistic Investigation of the Acquisition of Passive
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Armon-Lotem, Sharon; Haman, Ewa; de López, Kristine Jensen; Smoczynska, Magdalena; Yatsushiro, Kazuko; Szczerbinski, Marcin; van Hout, Angeliek; Dabašinskiene, Ineta; Gavarró, Anna; Hobbs, Erin; Kamandulyte-Merfeldiene, Laura; Katsos, Napoleon; Kunnari, Sari; Nitsiou, Chrisa; Olsen, Lone Sundahl; Parramon, Xavier; Sauerland, Uli; Torn-Leesik, Reeli; van der Lely, Heather – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2016
This cross-linguistic study evaluates children's understanding of passives in 11 typologically different languages: Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish. The study intends to determine whether the reported gaps between the comprehension of active and passive and between short and…
Descriptors: Language Research, Form Classes (Languages), Language Processing, Language Acquisition