Experience, Variation and Generalization
Learning a first language
Published on 20. July 2011
Book
Hardback
300 pages
978-90-272-3477-3 (ISBN)
Description
Are all children exposed to the same linguistic input, and do they follow the same route in acquisition? The answer is no: The language that children hear differs even within a social class or cultural setting, as do the paths individual children take. The linguistic signal itself is also variable, both within and across speakers - the same sound is different across words; the same speech act can be realized with different constructions. The challenge here is to explain, given their diversity of experience, how children arrive at similar generalizations about their first language. This volume brings together studies of phonology, morphology, and syntax in development, to present a new perspective on how experience and variation shape children's linguistic generalizations. The papers deal with variation in forms, learning processes, and speaker features, and assess the impact of variation on the mechanisms and outcomes of language learning.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Illustrations
+ index
Dimensions
Height: 245 mm
Width: 164 mm
Weight
725 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-272-3477-3 (9789027234773)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2011
1st Edition
John Benjamins Publishing Company
€112.99
Available for download
Persons
Content
1. Acknowledgements; 2. List of contributors; 3. Introduction (by Arnon, Inbal); 4. Part I. Extracting regularities; 5. Toward a theory of gradual morphosyntactic learning (by Rispoli, Matthew); 6. Cues to form and function in the acquisition of German number and case inflection (by Behrens, Heike); 7. Developing first contrasts in Spanish verb inflection: Usage and interaction (by Rojas Nieto, Cecilia); 8. Part II. Multiple cues in learning to communicate; 9. A new look at redundancy in children's gesture and word combinations (by Kelly, Barbara F.); 10. Learning the meaning of "um": Toddlers' developing use of speech disfluencies as cues to speakers' referential intentions (by Kidd, Celeste); 11. Part III. Discovering units; 12. From first words to segments: A case study in phonological development (by Vihman, Marilyn); 13. Analysis and generalization across verbs and constructions: The development of transitives and complement-clause constructions in German (by Brandt, Silke); 14. Two- and three-year-olds' linguistic generalizations are prudent adaptations to the language they hear (by Bannard, Colin); 15. Units of learning in language acquisition (by Arnon, Inbal); 16. Part IV. Individual differences; 17. Causes and consequences of variability in early language learning (by Fernald, Anne E.); 18. Individual differences in measures of linguistic experience account for variability in the sentence processing skill of five-year-olds (by Anderson, Sarah E.); 19. Genetic variation and individual differences in language (by Misyak, Jennifer B.); 20. Part V. Mechanisms for learning; 21. Language as a process (by Croft, William A.); 22. Memory, sleep and generalization in language acquisition (by Gomez, Rebecca L.); 23. Bayesian modeling of sources of constraint in language acquisition (by Perfors, Amy); 24. Index