Morphological cues to verb meaning: verb inflections and the initial mapping of verb meanings

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Behrend ◽  
L. Lynn Harris ◽  
Kelly B. Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Verb Learning ◽  
The Past ◽  
Within Subjects ◽  
Morphological Cues ◽  
Verb Meaning ◽  
Verb Inflections

ABSTRACTThe present studies investigated children's use of verb inflections to guide their initial mapping of verb meanings. Given that children initially apply the progressive-inginflection to verbs denoting actions and the past-edinflection to verbs denoting results of events, two studies were conducted to investigate whether children use these inflections during mapping of novel verb meanings. In both studies, subjects were taught novel verbs and were asked to extend those verbs to events in which the action or result differed from events used to teach the verbs. It was predicted that subjects would be less likely to extend verbs inflected with-ingto events with new actions and would be less likely to extend verbs inflected with-edto events with new results. Eighteeen three- and five-year-olds and 24 adults participated in Experiment 1 in a between-subjects design that produced weak effects for the youngest subjects tested. Experiment 2 tested 16 three-year-olds and 19 five-year-olds in a within-subjects design and produced the predicted effect for three-year-olds, but not for five-year-olds. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for early verb learning and regarding the use of the bootstrapping construct in language acquisition research.

Women in the history of linguistics

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Wendy Ayres-Bennett ◽  
Helena Sanson
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Central Section ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Of Women

This Introduction outlines the need for a ‘true history’ (Lerner 1976) of the role of women in the history of linguistics, which considers them on their own terms, and challenges categories and concepts devised for traditional male-dominated accounts. We start by considering what research has already been conducted in the field, before exploring some of the reasons for the relative dearth of studies. We outline some of the challenges and opportunities encountered by women who wished to study the nature of language and languages in the past. The geographical and chronological scope of this volume is then discussed. In a central section we examine some of the major recurring themes in the volume. These include attitudes towards women’s language, both positive and negative; women and language acquisition and teaching; and women as creators of new languages and scripts. We further explore women as authors, dedicatees, or intended readers of metalinguistic texts, as interpreters and translators, and as contributors to the linguistic documentation and maintenance. We consider how women supported male relatives and colleagues in their endeavours, sometimes in invisible ways, before reviewing the early stages of their entry into institutionalized contexts. The chapter concludes with a brief section on future directions for research.

Buzzsaws and blueprints: what children need (or don't need) to learn language

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 715-726 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK A. SABBAGH ◽  
SUSAN A. GELMAN
Keyword(s):  
General Relativity ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Cognitive Scientist ◽  
Great Discovery

Review essay on: B. MACWHINNEY (ed.), The emergence of language. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999.An old joke that has been circulating for the past decade or so goes as follows: a biologist, a physicist, and a cognitive scientist were sitting around discussing the great achievements of their fields. The biologist waxed eloquent about the insights of Darwin's theory of evolution; the physicist expounded on the implications of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Then the cognitive scientist spoke up: ‘Our great discovery is the thermos. You put a cold drink in, the drink stays cold. You fill it with hot soup, the soup stays hot. This is amazing, for how does the thermos know?’Obviously, this cognitive scientist has asked the wrong question about how the thermos maintains temperatures. In The emergence of language (henceforth, EL), an edited collection of chapters authored by an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, linguists, and cognitive and developmental psychologists, it is suggested that perhaps language acquisition researchers have been making the same mistake as the errant cognitive scientist. To be sure, language is an extremely complex phenomenon, yet it is also elegant. Recognition of these characteristics in all aspects of language (thanks in large part to Chomskyan approaches to linguistics) highlights a well-known apparent paradox: language is hopelessly complex but children acquire it with ease. Solutions to this paradox have typically inspired researchers to posit rules or other kinds of blueprints – knowledge (innate or acquired) that children have to guide their language acquisition. But are these rules truly necessary? Perhaps children do not KNOW how to acquire language any more than a thermos knows how to maintain temperature.

An Empirical Study on Interlanguage of Computer Science and Engineering Major Students in English Writing

2011 ◽  
Vol 71-78 ◽  
pp. 4337-4340
Author(s):  
Jing Li
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
English Teachers ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
English Teaching ◽  
English Writing ◽  
The Past

Interlanguage is an important issue in the field of second language acquisition for the past forty years. This study classifies the errors into three levels-lexicon, syntax and discourse, and then analyses the error examples to reflect the cause of interlanguage. The result may make some suggestions to the English teachers in English teaching.

AHISTORICITY REVISITED

1998 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Gass ◽  
Catherine Fleck ◽  
Nevin Leder ◽  
Ildiko Svetics
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Pertinent Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Logical Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Language Acquisition Theory

In our reply to Margaret Thomas's article “Programmatic ahistoricity in second language acquisition theory,” we first review pertinent literature, concluding that historical awareness is evident in SLA, though it is not as far-reaching as Thomas would like it to be. We then argue that the attitude of most scholars in SLA toward the past is reasonable given that no significant work in SLA from antiquity has been discovered—by Thomas or anyone else—and that if such work exists Thomas has the burden to bring it to light before declaring the field guilty of ahistoricity. We consider various ways to define the field of SLA, arguing that it should be defined theoretically first, and historically second. We claim that the point at which SLA separated itself from language teaching is a logical point from which to date the beginnings of SLA as a true discipline. We consider and reject Thomas's comparison of SLA and its history to various other scientific disciplines and their histories, arguing that these disciplines have true milestones to point to in the distant past, whereas SLA does not. Although we agree with Thomas that a general awareness of the history of philosophy and science is beneficial for scholars in all fields, we make a sharp division between that history and the history of SLA proper. We conclude by arguing that respect for the field of SLA can come only through sound scientific progress, not by appeals to history.

Looking Back at Oneself in Time: Another Approach to the Actor-Observer Phenomenon

1976 ◽  
Vol 43 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1283-1287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lenauer ◽  
Lillian Sameth ◽  
Phillip Shaver
Keyword(s):  
Locus Of Control ◽  
Observer Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Trait Attribution ◽  
The Future ◽  
Within Subjects ◽  
Looking Back

Two studies were reported in which a mean trait attribution pattern parallel to the Jones-Nisbett actor-observer effect was obtained within subjects when people were asked to describe what they were like in the past, are like now, and will be like in the future. This argues in favor of the perspective or salience explanation of the actor-observer phenomenon. Both temporal and role defined actor-observer differences, while statistically significant, were due to a minority of subjects. This minority did not differ from the majority on measures of locus of control and self-consciousness. Problems and implications were discussed briefly.

scholarly journals Foreword

1989 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. vii-xi
Author(s):  
Robert B. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Language Planning ◽  
Language Testing ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Education Planning ◽  
The Past

This tenth volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL) concerns itself with a survey of applied linguistics broadly, as this series did in volume I and volume V. The changes which have occurred in the field generally over the past decade are impressive; indeed, a volume such as this one would have been quite impossible ten years ago. Some of the topics covered in this volume are ones to which this series has repeatedly returned—e.g., language planning, language-in-education planning, bilingualism; others are unique to this volume—e.g., language and aging, and still others represent sub-fields which have been treated previously but which have expanded significantly in the years since volume I was published—e.g., second-language acquisition, language testing.

scholarly journals The Role of Universal Grammar in Second Language Acquisition from the Perspective of Chinese Acquiring English Reflexives

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. p284
Author(s):  
Jing Song
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Second Language Learning ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chinese Learners ◽  
Chinese And English

In China, the second language learning has always played an important role in primary and higher education. The issue of how children acquire the second language has experienced a boom in China over the past decade as the proficiency of a person’s English level mainly depends on its acquisition in primary stage. The main focus of this paper is to examine the role of UG in the second language acquisition and to what extent it plays in the process. To illustrate this, the four access hypotheses were given firstly. In addition, the role of UG from the aspect of Chinese learners’ acquiring the English reflexives was discussed. In this section, the importance of analyzing the reflexives and the different features of them in Chinese and English were exhibited.

Discovering traces of the past: Studies of bilingualism among school pupils in Finland and in Sweden. Olli Kuure. Oulu: Oulu University Press, 1997. Pp. 182.

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-597
Author(s):  
Jakob Cromdal
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Sociocultural Theory ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Text Linguistics ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Empirical Ground ◽  
Bilingual Development

This is a courageous book. Published as the author's doctoral thesis, this work strives retrospectively to “determine the significance of age in the acquisition of a second language” (p. 26). It has explicit interdisciplinary ambitions to integrate concepts and practices from various disciplines in which bilingual development is studied: notably, sociocultural theory, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, text linguistics, and pragmatics. These multifaceted theoretical aims are anchored in an equally broad empirical ground, drawing on various types of data. Not surprisingly, the result is a theoretically intriguing, yet methodologically puzzling, approach to the study of bilingualism and second language acquisition.

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