Ann M. Peters

LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES: DOES THE WHOLE EQUAL THE SUM OF THE PARTS?

Two fundamentally different strategies may be employed by very young children learning their first language. The basic assumptions underlying the study of childrens language development, however, have provided means for dealing with only one of these strategies: that which proceeds from the parts to the whole (Analytic). This paper reports on a child who evidently proceeded from the whole to the parts (Gestalt) in producing much of his early language. Since further evidence for a Gestalt strategy exists in the literature, albeit implicitly, such a strategy is probably quite widespread, and any theory of language or language acquisition needs to be able to account for it. It is also speculated that there may be neurological bases for the different language learning strategies.*

Phonological encoding and ideographic reading by the disconnected right hemisphere: Two case studies ☆

Abstract The mute disconnected right hemispheres (RHs) of two commissurotomy patients are able to understand spoken words and read printed words by matching them with pictures of the objects named. In this paper we report the results of five experiments. The RH of one patient could “evoke the sound image” of a word to the extent of matching two pictures with homonymous names (experiment 1) or with rhyming names (experiment 2) without being able to name either one. This transformation of picture to covert sound does not depend on orthographic similarity of word ends as a clue to homonymy or rhyme, nor does it improve with short-term learning. Yet neither RH can translate print into sound by matching a spelled word with a picture that has a rhyming name (experiment 3) or by matching two orthographically dissimilar rhymes, be they meaningful (experiment 4) or nonsense words (experiment 5). We suggest that these RHs read “ideographically,” recognizing words directly as visual gestalts without intermediate phonetic recoding or grapheme-to-phoneme translation.

The acquisition of homonymy

Abstract The growth in childrens ability to perform the task of separating the sounds of words from their meanings was investigated by asking children between 3;3 and 6;3 to select homonyms from pictures. The results show a growth in ability with age, with a jump at 4;4. An investigation of the developmental changes in the strategies employed shows that the task is cognitively complex. Performance in the younger children is more hampered by a resource-limited inability to cope with many cognitive factors all at once than by lack of ability to do the linguistic aspects of the task. These cognitive factors include access to vocabulary, rehearsal of intermediate results, and implementation of a search strategy.

The transition from optional to required subjects.

We propose (contra Hyams, 1986) that the optional subject phenomenon in early child language arises because children have not yet acquired the morphological elements (primarily modals and tense) necessary to distinguish Subject-Taking (ST) verbs (e.g. finite verbs) from their non-Subject-Taking (NST) counterparts (e.g. infinitives). Unaware of this distinction, children are able only to observe that verbs sometimes occur with subjects and sometimes without. We show that our proposal makes a number of developmental predictions which we then test with the help of longitudinal data from three children. We conclude that: (1) There is no systematic morphological distinction between ST and NST verbs during the optional subject stage (OSS). (2) The emergence of the distinction between ST and NST verbs is gradual rather than sudden. (3) There is variation from child to child in terms of which morphologically-defined subclass of verbs is first recognized as subject-taking. (4) There is no link between the emergence of modals or contracted copulas and the end of the OSS.

What Are You Cookin' on a Hot?: Movement Constraints in the Speech of A Three-Year-Old Blind Child

We consider an anomalous but internally consistent set of wH-questions produced by a 3k-year-old child. They are of theoretical interest because they appear to violate constraints against the movement of constituents out of noun phrases, thus raising questions about the conditions of applicability of such constraints. After giving an account of the probable sources of these questions in several kinds of verbal interactions between the child and his father, we propose that discourse patterns may affect the acquisition of sentence grammar in unexpected ways, and may even allow the language learner to temporarily modify the domain of applicability of universal constraints.*

The role of prosody in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: evidence from two Chinese languages

This paper examines two issues concerning the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: (1) How is the acquisition of grammatical morphemes influenced by prosodic and phonological characteristics of the language being learned? and (2) What sorts of prosodic and phonological properties do grammatical morphemes have that might aid children in applying particular segmentation strategies? To address these issues, we compared the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in a pair of morphosyntactically similar but prosodically different languages, namely Taiwan Mandarin Chinese (TMC) and Taiwanese (TW). We analyse the patterns of realization and omission of a highly frequent subset of grammatical morphemes in six childrens speech, recorded between the ages 1:6 and 2:3. The results from the between-language comparisons suggest that rhythmic characteristics of languages can affect segmentation by providing different kinds of prosodic handles for children to grasp at.

Phonological Changes during the Transition from One-Word to Productive Word Combination.

We investigated developmental changes during the transition from one-word to two-word production, focusing on strategies to lengthen utterances phonologically and to control utterances suprasegmentally. We hypothesized that there is a period of reorganization at the onset of word combinations indicated by decreases in both filler syllables (Fillers) and final syllable lengthening (FSL). The data are from a visually impaired child (Seth) between 1; 6.21 and 1; 10.26. Seth produced many Fillers until 1; 9 when their number decreased for about two weeks after which they changed in nature. FSL was observed until 1; 8, but diminished at 1; 9. These two regressions coincide with the onset of word combination.