ST PETERSBURG CONFERENCE 2006: CHILDREN ACQUIRING LANGUAGE (original) (raw)

Vygotsky-Luria-Leontiev’s School of Psycholinguistics: the Mechanisms of Language Production

L.S. Vygotsky's and A.R. Luria's works devoted to the psychology of speech, development of the regulatory function of speech in children, and aphasiology are well known both in Russia and abroad, as well as the theory of activity proposed by A.N. Leontiev. However, foreign researchers are not so well informed about the development of their ideas in the studies of speech by next generations of Russian scientists. In this paper, I'd like to describe (synoptically, to suit the requirements) the theory of speech activity developed by the "Moscow school of psycholinguistics" headed by Alexey A. Leontiev, who was acknowledged as the school leader . Although labeled as "Moscow", the school joined researchers in accordance with their theoretical approach (inspired by L.S. Vygotsky, A.R. Luria and A.N. Leontiev) rather then with their place of residence. It welcomed scientists from St. Petersburg, Perm, Minsk, Tver and other Russian cities.

Early Grammatical Development in Several Languages, with Special Attention to Soviet Research

1968

i R gratefully acknowledged. AN .401 587 d P. is frightvJLi:zi, to think Wil..L. on enOrrriMis number or grarnmati(al forms are poured over the poor head of the young ehil.d. And he, aii it it were nothipg at all, adjtists to ail this chaos, constantly sorting Out tru,0 rlit.rivu the disorf,1erly 01.-,mentt4 of the words br. ilearp, without notwim 3 s he does this, his gigantic effc,r L. If an adult had to mas1cr so many grammatical rules within ;;:o short a time. his head wf.u: surely bui st-a moss of rules ma8.. sA so lightly and so freely by the two-yearold "linguist". The labor he thus performs at this age is astonishing enough but even more amazing and unparalleled is the ease with which he does it. L) truth, the young child is the hardest nmntal toiler on our planet. Fortunately. he does not even suspect this. .....Korney Chukovskiy (1963:10i Psychologists, linguists, awl philosophers have recently come to devote serious attention to the American child's mastery of English grammar. The preceding papers in this section reflect the .growing strength of theoretical and empirical interest in ihid area, and poi. to implications for language acquisition in gci;-al, regardless of the specific native language being acquired. Developmental psycholinguistics is also extremely active in the Soviet Union, providing important data on the acquisition of Russian as a native language (Slobin, 1966a, b, c). Both American and Soviet investigations have their roots in over a century of European and American diary studies, going back at least to Darwin's observations of his son's development, and covering more than a dozen languages. Parental diaries of child language development are flawed by methodological shortocming and paucity of data, and have therefore been largely ignored in current American developmental psycholinguistics. With the exception of recent careful Soviet research, however, they provide the only body of % I To appear in The structure andisy_c);_LA_.ogy of language, edited by W. Weksel and T. G. Bever York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, in preparation). NoteFull references are given in the bibliography ,,, 'lb di****, Volk ubethal ("The wolf (mascu1e] ran away"), Lisa ubezhala ("the fox [feminine] ran away"), and so on.

HOW CHILDREN ACQUIRE LANGUAGE: THE MOTOR THEORY ACCOUNT

in her Nature review article 37, surveys the research carried out over many years into all aspects of the acquisition of language by children. She recognizes that 'the mystery' is not yet solved; although substantive progress has been made on some aspects of infants' speech development, notably of the phonology of the parent language. How far in fact has the extensive research program into child language taken us and how plausible and helpful so far are theories of child language acquisition? Over the last few decades research into child language acquisition has been revolutionized by the use of ingenious new techniques which allow one to investigate what in fact infants (that is children not yet able to speak) can perceive when exposed to a stream of speech sound, the discriminations they can make between different speech sounds, different speech sound sequences and different words. Infants' perception of speech develops a good way ahead of their capacity to produce speech sounds, no doubt a reflection of the longer time it takes for the motor capacity for speech to mature. . However on the central features of the mystery, the extraordinarily rapid acquisition of lexicon and complex syntactic structures, little solid progress has been made.

Form and function in very early word learning

Learning a new word is, in part, acquiring an association between the word and the object or event to which it refers, but mature word learners have honed their expectations how words are related to objects. Specifically, they understand that words are symbols that are used by speakers to communicate about referents. A critical task in development, then, is learning about this relation between a word and its referent. A second critical task is determining which kinds of behaviors and signals serve this function. Although, in principle, the forms of words are arbitrary, within a language, there is a strong regularity in the form of words. As examples, in spoken languages words are units of speech, and in sign languages, they are manual patterns. The link between form and function here -e.g., between spoken words and naming-is so obvious to adults that it is easy to assume that infants begin the language learning game with this correspondence in mind. However, consider that the infant must abstract this regularity in the context of learning many things from and about the behavior of other people, many of them with reference to objects (the sounds they make, their typical uses, etc.). It may take infants some time to sort out the forms and functions of names for things.

ESSAYS ON THE EVOLUTIONARY-SYNTHETIC THEORY OF LANGUAGE_Selected chapters

Academic Studies Press, Brighton, USA; LRC Publishing House, Moscow, Russia, 2019

The monograph implements a multidisciplinary approach in describing language (a) in its ontogenetic development, and (b) in its close interrelationship with other human subsystems: thought, memory, activity, etc. The focus is on the semantic component of the evolutionary-synthetic theory. The major results of the monograph are as follows: - the mechanisms for grammatical polysemy are analysed; - the structural unity of artefact and natural concepts (such as CHAIR, ROAD, LAKE, RIVER, TREE) are brought to light; - object and motor concepts are defined in terms of the language of thought, and their representation in neurobiological memory codes is discussed; - the hierarchic structure of basic meanings of concrete nouns is shown to arise as a result of their step-by-step development in ontogeny. Reviews “The book reads with great interest sustained by both the core ideas of the Evolutionary-Synthetic Theory of Language (ESToL) itself―which may be assessed differently by different readers―and the detailed analysis of numerous examples that illustrate the propositions advanced by the author. The main merit of the book is that the author, while declaring a deep crisis in contemporary theoretical linguistics, at the same time suggests a way out of this crisis with the course outlined in the ESToL.” Alexander Kravchenko, English Philology, Irkutsk State University (Russia) “Alexey Koshelev takes the next crucial step, toward a synthesis of cognitive and linguistic abilities in their interrelated development, toward a systematic unity of universal and specific, abstract and concrete in language. He begins with patterns in the cognition of objects, from the most basic and holistic representations of an object to the delineation of its distinct features and, further, to the synthesis of the accumulated knowledge of the various facets of an object into a cohesive system for its representation.” Liudmila Zubkova, People’s Friendship University of Russia [translation J. Smith] “Alexey Koshelev presents an integral conception of language as a sum total of lexicon and grammar, developed from the perspective of child cognitive development and language acquisition. The unquestionable merit of such a conception is the uniform and consistent approach to analysis and description of a range of linguistic phenomena; this approach is characterized by the deliberate use of a well-grounded methodology and an original set of concepts.” Tat’iana Screbtsova, Saint Petersburg State University (Russia)

Grammatical Development in Russian-Speaking Children

A contribution to the debate on innate factors in children's language acquisition is rendered by cross-linguistic comparisons of children's languages. Russian, for example, is sufficiently different from English to serve as a useful contrast. Early syntactic development is very much the same in both languages. A small class of "pivot words" and a larger open class of words are used first. Word order is quite inflexible at each of the early stages of syntactic development. Two-word sentences appear at about 1:8 (1 year, 8 months); three- or four-word sentences appear at about 1:10. Morphological markers enter with the three- and four-word sentences. The learning of morphology goes on longer than the learning of syntactic patterns. A major Russian work on language development contends that the Russian child does not master his morphology until several years beyond the age at which the American child completes his primary grammatical learning. This factor suggests tha...