Discrimination of Mandarin disyllabic tone contrasts by American English‐speaking adults and children.

2009 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 2761-2761
Author(s):  
Shari Berkowitz
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
English Speaking

The acquisition of word connotations: asking ‘What happened?’

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERTA CORRIGAN
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Relative Frequency ◽  
American English ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Negative Connotation

Although words have both denotative and connotative meanings, there has been little research on the child's acquisition of connotations. In large segments of written texts, connotations can be studied by examining word co-occurrences (collocations). Using this technique, corpus linguists have found, for example, that ‘happen’ has a negative connotation; it most often collocates with negative words (e.g. ‘accidents’, ‘something dreadful’). The current research is a case study of the use of the lemma ‘happen’. Adult production of ‘happen/happens/happening/happened’ was examined in 151 American English-speaking, adult–child dyads from the CHILDES database. Within these dyads, 35 children used ‘happen’ and its variants. Both adults and children were increasingly likely to use ‘happen’ to describe negative contexts as children's language progressed from MLUs around 1·00 to MLUs greater than 4·00. Results are consistent with usage-based theories of language that claim that the relative frequency of information in the input is critical to language learning.

Snapshots of tellings in interactions between adults and children aged two, three and three and a half in an Australian context

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 119-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Filipi
Keyword(s):  
Social Activity ◽  
Second Child ◽  
Object A ◽  
Birthday Party ◽  
Final Sample ◽  
The Social ◽  
Two Samples ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Australian English

This paper examines how and by whom tellings with two young children are triggered at ages 23, 36 and 42 months. The data for the investigation is derived from a larger Australian English corpus of over 50 hours of interactions in the home, although one of the children is a bilingual Italian/ English-speaking child. The data is derived from two parent/child dyads, and in the case of the child aged 42 months, a triadic interaction between a mother, her own child and a second child. Using the micro-analytic methods of conversation analysis, the study analyses five samples of tellings. The first two describe how a child, Cassandra, aged 23 months, is invited to recount events of her day by her parents. The trigger for these tellings is the social activity of sharing everyday routine events. The next two samples focus on Rosie at 36 months who is also invited to share a telling by her parent about a birthday party celebration and one about a neighbourhood cat, Claude. The first telling is triggered by an object, a balloon from a birthday party from the day before, while the second is triggered by play involving the character of a cat, initially derived from a favourite story, Hairy Maclary. In the final sample, Cassandra, aged 42 months, initiates a telling about an experience at her grandmother’s which is trigged by a picture in a book. The analyses in each case reveal the interactional issues that arise in the action of telling and how these are dealt with by all participants. By focusing on the three ages, key features in the children’s participation in storytelling are uncovered.

scholarly journals Corpus-based analysis of the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged

2017 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Liana Markelova
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
American English ◽  
Public Attitude ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Web Based ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Semantic Prosody

The present study aims to trace the evolution of public attitude towards the mentally challenged by means of the corpus-based analysis. The raw data comes from the two of the BYU corpora: Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). The former is comprised of 1.8 million web pages from 20 English-speaking countries (Davies/Fuchs 2015: 1) and provides an opportunity to research at a cross-cultural level, whereas the latter, containing 400 million words from more than 100,000 texts ranging from the 1810s to the 2000s (Davies 2012: 121), allows to carry on a diachronic research on the issue. To identify the difference in attitudes the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged were created. Having analysed them in terms of their semantic prosody one might conclude that there are certain semantic shifts that occurred due to the modern usage preferences and gradual change in public perception of everything strange, unusual and unique.

scholarly journals Acoustic characteristics of American English /ɹ/ and /l/ produced by Japanese adults and children

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katsura Aoyama ◽  
James E. Flege ◽  
Reiko Akahane-Yamada ◽  
Tsuneo Yamada
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Acoustic Characteristics ◽  
Japanese Adults ◽  
Adults And Children

Nonstandardized Englishes in Mainstream Literacy Practice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patriann Smith
Keyword(s):  
Literacy Instruction ◽  
English Language ◽  
American English ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Literacy Practice ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
Mainstream Classrooms ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Many

The term Englishes refers to the many different varieties of the English, and represents both standardized and nonstandardized forms. Nonstandardized Englishes is used to refer to Englishes that do not adhere to what has been determined to be Standard English within a given context, such that they are referred to as dialects, Creoles, or New Englishes (e.g., African American English). Standardized Englishes is used to refer to the counterparts of the nonstandardized Englishes that have been typically adopted for use in literacy classrooms (e.g., Standard American English). The field of literacy has addressed nonstandardized Englishes by either focusing on the nonstandardized varieties in isolation from standardized Englishes or by advancing literacy instruction in mainstream classrooms that emphasizes dialect-English speakers’ mastery of standardized Englishes. This approach reflects standard monolingual English ideology and traditional notions of the English language. Operating based on standard monolingual English perspectives implicitly reinforces the view that standardized Englishes and their users are privileged and that speakers of nonstandardized Englishes and their users are inferior. In addition, adhering to traditional notions of English based on their geographical and nation-based use, as opposed to their function based on school, offline, or online contexts regardless of geography, reinforces the concept of the English language as a system and fails to emphasize its communicative and contextual purposes as demanded by our postmodern era of globalization, transnationalism, and internationalization. A translingual approach to Englishes can serve as an alternative to current ways of thinking about literacy instruction because it addresses the needs of both standardized and nonstandardized English-speaking populations. Literacy instruction reframed based on this approach is critical for students’ successful interaction across linguistic and cultural boundaries in the context of the 21st century.

Prosodic differences between declaratives and interrogatives in infant-directed speech

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 968-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN GEFFEN ◽  
TOBEN H. MINTZ
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
American English ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
Prosodic Cues ◽  
Syntax Acquisition ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Maternal Speech

AbstractIn many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful basis for this type of discrimination, although no systematic studies of the prosodic cues available to infants have been reported. Analysis of maternal speech in three Standard American English-speaking mother–infant dyads found that polar interrogatives differed from declaratives on the patterning of pitch and duration on the final two syllables, butwh-questions did not. Thus, while prosody is unlikely to aid discrimination of declaratives fromwh-questions, infant-directed speech provides prosodic information that infants could use to distinguish declaratives and polar interrogatives. We discuss how learners could leverage this information to identify all question forms, in the context of syntax acquisition.

BE, DO, and Modal Auxiliaries of 3-Year-Old African American English Speakers

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 1383-1393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandi L. Newkirk-Turner ◽  
Janna B. Oetting ◽  
Ida J. Stockman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Surface Form ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries ◽  
Different Types ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
American English Speakers

PurposeThis study examined African American English–speaking children's use of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries.MethodThe data were based on language samples obtained from 48 three-year-olds. Analyses examined rates of marking by auxiliary type, auxiliary surface form, succeeding element, and syntactic construction and by a number of child variables.ResultsThe children produced 3 different types of marking (mainstream overt, nonmainstream overt, zero) for auxiliaries, and the distribution of these markings varied by auxiliary type. The children's nonmainstream dialect densities were related to their marking of BE and DO but not modals. Marking of BE was influenced by its surface form and the succeeding verbal element, and marking of BE and DO was influenced by syntactic construction.ConclusionsResults extend previous studies by showing dialect-specific effects for children's use of auxiliaries and by showing these effects to vary by auxiliary type and children's nonmainstream dialect densities. Some aspects of the children's auxiliary systems (i.e., pattern of marking across auxiliaries and effects of syntactic construction) were also consistent with what has been documented for children who speak other dialects of English. These findings show dialect-specific and dialect-universal aspects of African American English to be present early in children's acquisition of auxiliaries.

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