Language learnability and the forms of recursion

2005 ◽  
pp. 155-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Roeper ◽  
William Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Language Learnability

Uninterpretable features: psychology and plasticity in second language learnability

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Birdsong
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Signal Detection ◽  
Signal Detection Theory ◽  
First Language ◽  
Detection Theory ◽  
Language Learnability

This commentary addresses the relevance of detectability to a theory of learning uninterpretable features in the second language (L2). Detectability of features is illustrated in an application of Signal Detection Theory. By analogy with development of phonemic categories in the first language (L1), the notion of paring down the repertoire of uninterpretable features is considered.

Language Learnability and Language Development

Language ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 903
Author(s):  
Clifton Pye ◽  
Steven Pinker
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Language Learnability

The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Newborn Child ◽  
Linguistic Input ◽  
Linguistic Analyses ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
Age Range ◽  
Language Learnability

This handbook provides a thorough and systematic investigation of the question of how we come to know a language. Researchers from all over the world explore the leading research questions within developmental linguistics, which include: What does the newborn child bring to the task of language acquisition? What information must the child extract from her linguistic input? And how does biological maturation interact with the child’s developing linguistic abilities? In the main body of the handbook, each chapter addresses a single area of grammatical knowledge, such as syllable structure, negation, or binding theory, and begins with an overview of the fundamental generalizations that guide current linguistic analyses and the features of grammatical representation that these generalizations entail. This is followed by a consideration of language learnability; a review of the relevant acquisition literature organized according to target language, age range of the child, and research methodology; and, finally, a discussion of a series of broader questions, such as: Do the experimental findings that were reviewed in the chapter favour a particular approach to the logical problem of language learnability? In what ways, if any, does the child’s knowledge surpass the information directly available from the input? In what ways can innate structure make the input more informative? Likewise, are there ways in which the child’s knowledge seems more limited than expected, given the richness of the available input?

Corpus data

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 119-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalila Ayoun
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Explanatory Account ◽  
Quantitative Analyses ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Magazine Articles ◽  
Language Learnability

The present corpus study analyzes 5,016 contextualized DPs drawn from 34 current newspaper and magazine articles to test the so-far unsubstantiated claim that the input provides abundant and clear evidence of the grammatical gender of French nouns. Findings show that 49.76% of noun tokens are not gender-marked; 9.01% of nouns lack a gender-marked determiner, but are modified by a gender-marked adjective; while 41.22% of nouns have a gender-marked determiner. Detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses provide a descriptive and explanatory account of gender-marked contexts and second language learnability implications are discussed. The lack of readily available word-external clues explains why the acquisition of French grammatical gender is notoriously difficult (e.g., Ayoun 2007).

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