Michael Garman

Language acquisition : studies in first language development

Preface Part I. Contexts and Determinants: 1. Psychosocial aspects of language acquisition Maya Hickmann 2. Language acquisition and cognition Robin N. Campbell 3. Language acquisition and linguistic theory Helen Goodluck 4. Conversations with children Catherine E. Snow 5. Learnability Martin Atkinson 6. Variation in child language Gordon Wells Part II. The Development of Linguistic Systems: Phonology: 7. Prespeech segmental feature development Rachel E. Stark 8. Prosodic development David Crystal 9. Early strategies for the perception and production of words and sounds Paula Menyuk, Lise Menn and Ronnie Silber 10. Phonological development: production David Ingram 11. Speech perception and the emergent lexicon: an ethological approach John L. Locke 12. Phonological development: a crosslinguistic perspective Marlys A. Macken Part III. The Development of Linguistic Systems: Grammar: 13. Early vocabulary Patrick Griffiths 14. Early syntax Ann M. Peters 15. Assessing morphological development Bruce L. Derwing and William J. Baker 16. Personal pronouns Shulamuth Chiat 17. Tense and aspect Richard M. Weist 18. Modality Ursula Stephany 19. Deixis Roger Wales 20. A crosslinguistic perspective: morphology and syntax Ruth A. Berman Part IV. Later Language Development: 21. Some fundamental aspects of language development after age 5 Annette Karmiloff-Smith 22. The development of reading: the acquisition of a cognitive skill Philip T. Smith 23. Language acquisition and writing Katherine Perera Notes to chapters Bibliography and citation index General index.

Normal language development and language impairment: Syntax and beyond

The characterization of the linguistic behaviour of a particular group of severely language-impaired school-aged children is addressed here, in terms both of categories derived from normal development, and of features identified as typical of the language-impaired data.The normal data base consists of child-adult conversations involving British children at three, five and seven years of age. The language-impaired corpus is composed of similar conversations (organized according to the same protocols as those with normals) with seven- to nine-year-old children with specific language disorders, attending residential schools or language units.In the absence of structural categories which distinguish the linguistic behaviour of the language-impaired children, the analysis focuses on a functional category, specifically adverbials, and on certain types of non-occurrence of grammatical elements, specifically clause subject, verb phrase auxiliary and noun phrase determiner. The functional analysis finds both quant...

Assessing the comprehension and production of language in young children: an account of the Reynell Developmental Language Scales III

The Reynell Developmental Language Scales III have been designed to test the language abilities of children from 18 months to 7 years. They have been standardized on a large, representative sample of children in the United Kingdom and thereby provide a robust measure of language achievement. These Scales provide clinicians with the means of comparing the performance of children who have been referred for therapy, or who are in therapy, with the performance of a large group of normally developing children. The Scales reflect the developmental progression of normal child language in the early years, focusing on key features of child language acquisition at different stages as well as on features which are known to distinguish language impaired-children from language-normal children. While not claiming that the tests are fully comprehensive, the authors maintain that they afford the clinician with a means of looking at components of language while also gaining some insights into the childs ability to integrate vocabulary and grammar. It is recognized that no test can fully assess every aspect of language; essentially a test must be practical in terms of design and, for screening purposes, sufficiently comprehensive to be used with a large section of children referred. In addition to fulfilling these criteria, the Scales have been designed to provide some diagnostic indicators of areas of difficulty. The aims of the original Scales were to provide a measure of verbal ability that could be compared with mental age, and to provide separate scores for production and comprehension. These aims have also been realized in the new version. Additionally a test has been provided that is consonant with information gained from the intensive research in the field of child language that has taken place since the original Scales were devised. The Scales can reveal information about a childs language abilities not readily available from observation and serve a useful function in both identifying disorder and evaluating therapy. Clinicians are increasingly being asked to demonstrate effectiveness of therapy but are hampered by inappropriate outcome measures (Law 1997). It is hoped that the RDLS III provides a test that is valid and reliable and one that can contribute to both the characterization of speech and language disorders and the measurement of treatment efficacy.

LARSPing by numbers

The setting up of reference profiles of childrens grammatical development, for clinical use, requires explicit attention to a number of factors which may affect reliability. This paper identifies and discusses three of these: segmentation, scoring and sampling. In addition the issue of the supplementation of LARSP by lexical information is addressed, with exemplification.

Project report: The linguistic characterization of aphasic speech

Project report: The linguistic characterization of aphasic speech Susan Edwards, Michael Garman & Raymond Knott To cite this article: Susan Edwards, Michael Garman & Raymond Knott (1992) Project report: The linguistic characterization of aphasic speech, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 6:1-2, 161-164, DOI: 10.3109/02699209208985526 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/02699209208985526

Aphasia and communicative speech therapy: The potential of grammatical analyses

Abstract My first comment relates mainly to the introduction of the leading article, and concerns the use of the term ‘linguistic’. The following contexts are representative.

On the acquisition of two complex syntactic constructions in Tamil

A test was designed to throw light on how three- to five-year-old Tamil children comprehend two complex sentence types, one of them ambiguous for adult speakers and involving alternating Ns and Vs in surface form (NVNV), the other unambiguous and with clustering Ns and Vs (NNVV). The results indicate that neither of the age groups tested showed adult comprehension of either construction, but apparently relied on certain strategies of perception which are sensitive to features of surface syntactic form rather than to assumed real-world probabilities. The NVNV type yielded the largest proportion of ‘correct’ responses (in terms of the adult model), and also of favoured responses (in terms of syntactic strategies that may be postulated to account for the data); but another relevant variable turned out to be the order in which the constituent structures were probed; probing the internal predicate first enhanced the probability of favoured responses, for both the constructions tested.

Three Hypotheses on Early Grammatical Development

Bilingual children provide an opportunity to investigate the role of innate vs. environmental factors in the process of language acquisition. In this paper we examine how far the conversational speech data from two bilingual children shed light on the stage of early grammatical development. We focus on functional categories (FCs, Abney, 1987), because these are subject to striking developmental and cross-linguistic variation: in terms of the principles and parameters model of Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1986; Hyams, 1986; Freidin, 1992; Meisel, 1995), they are highly parameterised. Within this framework, the main developmental issue has been stated as between the continuity and maturation hypotheses. By the continuity view (Pinker, 1984), all UG principles are available from the outset and minimal exposure to the primary linguistic data is required for parameters to be set. By contrast the maturational view (Borer & Wexler, 1987; Radford, 1995) allows for certain linguistic principles to form over time, with the implication that exposure to primary linguistic data is effective only once a maturational threshold has been reached.

A Structural Analysis of the Language of School‐age Children

Westminster College is currently undertaking a research project into the language development of children of school age in conjunction with the Department of Linguistic Science, University of Reading. The collaboration represents an attempt to apply Linguistic Science to the work of classroom teachers within the mother‐tongue. The following papers indicate the nature of the project and its possible uses to the teaching profession and students of language acquisition.