Experience, Variation and Generalization
Learning a first language
1st Edition
Published on 20. July 2011
X, 300 pages
978-90-272-8504-1 (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.
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Content
- Experience, Variation and Generalization
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Table of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- References
- PART I. Extracting regularities
- Toward a theory of gradual morphosyntactic learning
- 1. Introduction
- 2. A brief history of research on tense and agreement
- 3. Gradual morphosyntactic learning: The framework
- 4. Evidence for gradual morphosyntactic learning
- 5. Conclusion and future directions
- References
- Cues to form and function in the acquisition of german number and case inflection
- 1. Introduction
- 2. German noun inflection
- 3. Research questions and method
- 3.1 The acquisition and overgeneralization of the -n plural
- 4. The acquisition of -n as dative plural marker
- 5. Conclusions
- References
- Developing first contrasts in Spanish verb inflection: Usage and Interaction
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Method
- 2.1 Focus and scope
- 2.2 The data
- 2.3 Inflectional forms in Spanish
- 3. Analysis
- 3.1 Inflectional inventory
- 3.2 Developing a verb paradigm
- 3.3 Ways to develop a paradigm: First inflectional contrasts
- 3.4 Emergent verb classes
- 3.5 Verb inflection models in maternal usage
- 4. Final considerations
- Abbreviations
- References
- PART II. Multiple cues in learning to communicate
- A new look at redundancy in children's gesture and word combinations
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Some background
- 2.1 Early gesture communications
- 2.2 Redundancy in gesture and word combinations
- 3. The data
- 4. Findings
- 4.1 Caregiver responses to children's early gestures
- 4.2 Frequency of caregiver response to communications
- 4.3 Caregiver responses to child communications
- 5. Concluding remarks
- References
- Learning the Meaning of "Um"
- 1. Introduction: Learning and cue use
- 2. Disfluencies as a cue to speaker intention
- 3. How fluent is speech to young children?
- 3.1 Evidence from CHILDES of disfluencies in child-directed speech
- 3.2 General knowledge of speaker difficulty from lexically specific examples in the input
- 4. Experimental evidence of young children's use of disfluencies in comprehension
- 5. Discussion
- 5.1 An alternative possibility: Learning by doing?
- 5.2 The nature of the knowledge
- Acknowledgments
- References
- PART III. Discovering units
- From first words to segments
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Methods
- 3. Results
- 3.1 The palatal template
- 3.2 Consonant harmony
- 3.3 The move to segmental representation
- 4. Discussion and conclusion
- References
- Analysis and Generalization Across Verbs and Constructions
- 1. Introduction
- 1.1 Generalization across verbs
- 1.2 Generalization across constructions
- 1.3 Form and function of complement-clause and transitive constructions
- 1.4 Analyzability of complement-clause and transitive constructions
- 2. Input analysis
- 2.1 Predictions
- 3. Elicitation
- 4. Results
- 4.1 Error analysis
- 5. Discussion
- 5.1 Generalization across verbs
- 5.2 Frequency of co-occurrence, chunking, and analyzability
- 5.3 Generalization across constructions
- References
- Two- and three-year-olds' linguistic generalizations are prudent adaptations to the language they hear
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Method
- 3. Results
- 4. Discussion
- References
- Units of Learning in Language Acquisition
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Gestalt processes in learning
- 3. The current findings
- 4. Implications
- 5. Conclusion
- References
- PART IV. Individual differences
- Causes and consequences of variability in early language learning
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Research on variability in children's verbal abilities: An historical perspective
- 3. Using real-time measures to assess the development of fluency in understanding
- 4. Using real-time processing measures to study individual differences in fluency of understanding by infants and young children
- 5. Early language experience influences processing efficiency as well as vocabulary learning
- References
- Individual differences in measures of linguistic experience account for variability in the sentence processing skill of five-year-olds
- 1. Introduction
- 2. A new methodology for use with children
- 3. The current experiment
- 4. Method
- 5. Results
- 6. Discussion
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Genetic variation and individual differences in language
- 1. Introduction
- 1.1 Behavioral genetics and aspects of language development
- 1.2 The Nature of Nature': Emergentism
- 2. Genes and behavior
- 3. Molecular genetic studies in language and cognition
- 4. Towards an endophenotype approach
- 4.1 Concept
- 4.2 Merits
- 5. Possible language endophenotypes
- 5.1 Neuroimaging techniques
- 5.2 Process measures and learning-based tasks
- 5.3 Incorporating developmental change and other challenges
- 6. Conclusion
- Acknowledgments
- References
- PART V. Mechanisms for learning
- Language as a process
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Language as joint action: Pragmatic and semantic foundations
- 3. Language as replication: Stability, variation and change in language use
- 4. Language as verbalization: Semantic and grammatical structure
- 5. Conclusion: The process of language and the process of language acquisition
- References
- Memory, sleep and generalization in language acquisition
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Prior learning
- 3. How pressures from the input can alter learning over developmental time
- 4. Sleep and memory consolidation
- 5. Summary
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Bayesian modeling of sources of constraint in language acquisition
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Basics of Bayesian modeling
- 3. Constraints caused by mutual learning
- 4. Constraints due to different assumptions about how data is sampled
- 5. Constraints imposed by learning abstract knowledge
- 6. Constraints imposed by imperfect approximations to the ideal
- 7. Limitations of Bayesian models
- 8. Summary
- References
- Index
