Acquisition of cumulative conditioning effects on words: Spanish-speaking children’s [subject pronoun + verb] usage

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular discourse context that conditions usage accumulates in memory over time and shapes the lexical representation of that form. This study contributes to the body of research on frequency effects in child language acquisition by testing whether such cumulative conditioning effects are also found among children, and, if so, at what age such effects appear. Specifically, the study investigates the influence of a distributional frequency measure (each verb form’s likelihood of use in a switch vs same-reference discourse context) on variable subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression ( N = 2227) in Spanish (e.g. yo voy ~ voy, both meaning ‘I go’) in the speech of 65 monolingual children in two age cohorts. Results reveal sensitivity to the contextual conditioning of discourse continuity (switch reference) among both the younger (6- and 7-year-olds) and older (8- and 9-year-olds) children in support of previous research. In addition, each verb’s likelihood of use in a switch-reference context significantly predicted the SPP use among the older children, but not the younger ones, suggesting that the cumulative effect of a probabilistic pattern takes time to emerge during childhood. The lexically specific accumulation in memory of contextual conditioning effects supports exemplar models of child language acquisition: each instance of use in discourse contributes to the lexical representation of that form and, over time, plays a role in the creation of morphosyntactic patterns during language development.

The Evidential Value and Pitfalls of Extant Language Development Research Methods

Several research methods have been developed with an aim to uncover the underlying cognitive andneural mechanisms behind child language acquisition. While these methods continue to generatepromising empirical evidence, language researchers need to carefully examine the evidential valueand limitations of findings that were derived from these methods before building on them. Similarly,language practitioners (e.g., speech-language pathologists/therapists, teachers) need to be aware thatwhile these methods may form or resemble the foundations of language assessment and interventionpractices (Seiger-Gardner & Almodovar, 2017; Deevy, 2017), no single paradigm cancomprehensively account for the multifaceted nature of “typical” and “atypical” languagedevelopment that we see in real-world settings, especially in multilingual contexts. If such is the case,how can we utilise the evidence that these methods generate in practical and clinical settings? Toanswer this question, this paper reviews and evaluates select language acquisition research methodsbased on the following criteria: (1) ecological validity of stimuli, (2) sensitivity of cognitive-linguisticmeasure, (3) suitability of comparison groups, (4) procedural suitability, (5) precision of responseclassification, (6) communicative sense (Ambridge & Rowland, 2013), and (7) practical implications(e.g., evidential value for bi/multilingual populations and in practitioner settings).

How diverse is child language acquisition?

A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7,000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in approximately half of them. In the current paper we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition, and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for the following variables: (i) language(s), (ii) topic(s), and (iii) country of author affiliation, from each journal’s inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing only around 1.5% of the world’s languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority published on non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. There was a more even distribution of topics across language categories, but a vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to a truly representative account of child language acquisition.

Pengaruh Video Lagu Anak – Anak Terhadap Pemerolehan Bahasa Anak Usia Dini (Kajian Psikolinguistik) Early Child Language Acquisition and The Impact of Children’s Songs Video (Psycolinguistics Studies)

Pemerolehan Bahasa pada anak – anak tidak akan berlangsung dengan baik apabila tidak disertai dengan stimulus dari lingkungan sekitarnya. Penelitian ini dilakukan untuk mendeskripsikan pengaruh video lagu anak – anak sebagai salah satu stimulus terhadap pemerolehan Bahasa anak usia dini. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini ialah kualitatif deskriptif, dengan pemaparan situasi yang disajikan dalam bentuk uraian naratif. Subjek penelitian adalah anak usia dini yang sedang berada dalam fase sintaksis. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian, dapat disimpulkan bahwa video lagu anak – anak memiliki pengaruh yang signifikan pada pemerolehan Bahasa anak. Banyaknya perbendaharaan kata dalam video menjadi stimulus yang tepat bagi anak usia dini untuk mengembangkan proses pemerolehan Bahasa.

Acquisition, Loss and Innovation in Chuquisaca Quechua—What Happened to Evidential Marking?

Variation among closely related languages may reveal the inner workings of language acquisition, loss and innovation. This study of the existing literature and of selected interviews from recent narrative corpora compares the marking of evidentiality and epistemic modality in Chuquisaca, Bolivian Quechua with its closely related variety in Cuzco, Peru and investigates three hypotheses: that morpho-syntactic attrition proceeds in reverse order of child language acquisition, that convergence characterizes the emergence of grammatical forms different from L1 and L2 in contact situations, and that the Quechua languages are undergoing typological shift toward more isolating morphology. It appears that reportive -sis disappeared first in Bolivia, with eyewitness/validator -min retaining only the validator function. This finding seems to concord with reverse acquisition since it has previously been claimed that epistemic marking is acquired earlier than evidential marking in Cuzco. Meanwhile, Spanish and Quechua in nearby Cochabamba are claimed to mark reportive evidentiality via freestanding verbs of saying. I explore the reportive use of ñiy ‘to say’ in Chuquisaca as compared to Cochabamba and Cuzco and suggest the need for comparative statistical studies of evidential and epistemic marking in Southern Quechua.

The traceback method in child language acquisition research: identifying patterns in early speech

abstract This paper discusses the traceback method, which has been the basis of some influential papers on first language acquisition. The method sets out to demonstrate that many or even all utterances in a test corpus (usually the last two sessions of recording) can be accounted for with the help of recurrent fixed strings (like What’s that?) or frame-and-slot patterns (like [What’s X?]) that can also be identified in the remaining dataset (i.e., the previous sessions of recording). This is taken as evidence that language learning is much more item-based than previously assumed. In the present paper we sketch the development of the method over the last two decades, and discuss its relation to usage-based theory, as well as the cognitive plausibility of its components, and we highlight both its potential and its limitations.