Language Acquisition Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The central thesis of this paper is that a cognitively and academically beneficial form of bilingualism can be achieved only on the basis of adequately developed first language (L1) skills. Two hypotheses are formulated and combined to... more

The central thesis of this paper is that a cognitively and academically beneficial form of bilingualism can be achieved only on the basis of adequately developed first language (L1) skills. Two hypotheses are formulated and combined to arrive at this position. The “developmental interdependence” hypothesis proposes that the development of competence in a second language (L2) is partially a function of the type of competence already developed in L1 at the time when intensive exposure to L2 begins. The “threshold” hypothesis proposes that there may be threshold levels of linguistic competence which a bilingual child must attain both in order to avoid cognitive disadvantages and allow the potentially beneficial aspects of bilingualism to influence his cognitive and academic functioning. These hypotheses are integrated into a model of bilingual education in which educational outcomes are explained as a function of the interaction between background, child input and educational treatment...

... of the fidelity with which parents conducted the inter-vention is in the lower frequency of straightreading and yes ... The chance that random differences between the two groups were ... The ap-pliedsignificance is substantial and... more

... of the fidelity with which parents conducted the inter-vention is in the lower frequency of straightreading and yes ... The chance that random differences between the two groups were ... The ap-pliedsignificance is substantial and derives from the magnitude of the obtained effects. ...

Abstract The authors describe an evolving theoretical framework that has been called one of the best kept secrets of academia: cultural-historical activity theory, the result of proposals Lev Vygotsky first articulated but that his... more

Abstract The authors describe an evolving theoretical framework that has been called one of the best kept secrets of academia: cultural-historical activity theory, the result of proposals Lev Vygotsky first articulated but that his students and followers substantially developed to constitute much expanded forms in its second and third generations. Besides showing that activity theory transforms how research should proceed regarding language, language learning, and literacy in particular, the authors demonstrate how it is a theory for praxis, ...

MOTHERS' SPEECH TO CHILDREN LEARNING LANGUAGE CATHERINE E. SNOW McGill University SNOW, CATHERINE E. Mothers' Speech to Children Learning Language. ... 550 Page 3. CATHERINE E. SNOW they were characterized by a complete... more

MOTHERS' SPEECH TO CHILDREN LEARNING LANGUAGE CATHERINE E. SNOW McGill University SNOW, CATHERINE E. Mothers' Speech to Children Learning Language. ... 550 Page 3. CATHERINE E. SNOW they were characterized by a complete intonation pattern. ...

The Principle of Contrast: A Constraint on Language Acquisition Eve V. Clark Stanford University Different words mean different things. That is, wherever there is a difference in form in a language, there is a difference in meaning. This... more

The Principle of Contrast: A Constraint on Language Acquisition Eve V. Clark Stanford University Different words mean different things. That is, wherever there is a difference in form in a language, there is a difference in meaning. This is what, in 1980, I called the Principle of ...

Infant vocal babbling has been assumed to be a speech-based phenomenon that reflects the maturation of the articulator-y apparatus responsible for spoken language produc- tion. Manual babbling has now been reported to occur in deaf... more

Infant vocal babbling has been assumed to be a speech-based phenomenon that reflects the maturation of the articulator-y apparatus responsible for spoken language produc-
tion. Manual babbling has now been reported to occur in deaf children exposed to signed languages from birth. The similarities between manual and vocal babbling suggest that babbling is a product of an amodal, brain-based language capacity under maturational control, in which phonetic and syllabic units are produced by the infant as a first step toward building a mature linguistic system. Contrary to prevailing accounts of the neurological basis of babbling in language ontogeny, the speech modality is not critical in babbling. Rather, babbling is tied to the abstract linguistic structure of language and to an expressive capacity capable of processing different types of signals (signed or spoken).

A three-layer back-propagation network is used to implement a pattern association task in which four types of mapping are learned. These mappings, which are considered analogous to those which characterize the relationship between the... more

A three-layer back-propagation network is used to implement a pattern association task in which four types of mapping are learned. These mappings, which are considered analogous to those which characterize the relationship between the stem and past tense forms of English verbs, include arbitrary mappings, identity mappings, vowel changes, and additions of a suffix. The degree of correspondence between parallel distributed processing (PDP) models which learn mappings of this sort (e.g., Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986, 1987) and children's acquisition of inflectional morphology has recently been at issue in discussions of the applicability of PDP models to the study of human cognition and language (Pinker & Mehler, 1989; Bever, in press). In this paper, we explore the capacity of a network to learn these types of mappings, focusing on three major issues. First, we compare the performance of a single-layered perceptron similar to the one used by Rumelhart and McClelland with a multi-layered perceptron. The results suggest that it is unlikely that a single-layered perceptron is capable of finding an adequate solution to the problem of mapping stems and past tense forms in input configurations that are sufficiently analogous to English. Second, we explore the input conditions which determine learning in these networks. Several factors that characterize linguistic input are investigated: (a) the nature of the mapping performed by the network (arbitrary, suffixation, identity, and vowel change); (b) the competition effects that arise when the task demands simultaneous learning of distinct mapping types; (c) the role of the type and token frequency of verb stems; and (d) the influence of phonological subregularities in the irregular verbs. Each of these factors is shown to have selective consequences on both successful and erroneous performance in the network. Third, we outline several types of systems which could result in U-shaped acquisition, and discuss the ways in which learning in multi-layered networks can be seen to capture several characteristics of U-shaped learning in children. In general, these models provide information about the role of input in determining the kinds of errors that a network will produce, including the conditions under which rule-like behavior and U-shaped learning will and will not emerge. The results from all simulations are discussed in light of behavioral data on children's acquisition of the past tense and the validity of drawing conclusions about the acquisition of language from models of this sort.