First Language Acquisition

Clancy (1986) proposes that the ways in which Japanese male children are socialized to use masculine first person reference forms, such as ore and boku (both ‘I’) remain somewhat of a mystery. This is because, Clancy assumes, ‘primary linguistic input to both boys and girls comes from their mothers’ (1986: 514). In the present study, I examine data from the CHILDES database consisting of five corpora of child first language learners of Japanese interacting primarily with their mothers. In the analysis, I examine tokens of masculine first person reference first quantitatively and then qualitatively. In so doing, I will pursue the following questions: (1) Are there tokens of ore and boku in the data, and if so, who is producing them? and (2) What processes of language socialization are likely to follow? First, the quantitative analysis revealed that the reference forms in question were present in the data, and that, in the case of boku, Mother produced approximately three times more tokens than Child. In the case of ore, the distribution of tokens produced was roughly equal between Mother and Child. Next, the quantitative analysis showed that (1) boku, as phonological material, is made abundantly available to Child through its use by Mother in accomplishing second person reference, (2) first person referential use of boku is also modeled by Mother through, e.g., the animation of the voices of toys in play, and through quotative use of the voice of Child, (3) Child may be overtly and explicitly socialized to use boku (especially when a ‘gender inappropriate’ form, e.g. atashi ‘I’, is used), and (4) the use of ore may in part be socialized through Mother’s animation of characters during story-reading activities, and through her censure of the situationally inappropriate use of ore.

Traditional language acquisition research that employs offline tasks, such as act-out, pointing, sentence-picture matching, truth-value and grammaticality judgments, has established that children up to the age of 6 make mistakes in the comprehension of anaphoric expressions. With the adaptation of the Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm (VWP) for language acquisition, it has become possible to investigate the interpretation of anaphoric expressions in children in real time to gain a better understanding of the development of pronominal reference. This chapter provides an overview of the VWP studies of 3- to 9-year-old children’s comprehension of reflexives and personal pronouns in terms of various linguistic constraints and their interaction. There is a developmental trajectory of such constraints, with morphological (gender) and lexico-semantic (verb transitivity) constraints being acquired first, followed by syntactic constraints (Principles A and B of the Binding Theory). Discourse-level constraints, such as information structure and order-of-mention, develop last and often need to be present in combination for children to apply them online.

Ülevaade. Artikli eesmärk on anda ülevaade direktiividest eesti lapsele suunatud kõnes. Vaatluse all on kaks sama pere kooliealist last ja nende dialoogid mõlema vanemaga eraldi. Meetodina on kasutatud pikiuuringut (üht last on lindistatud regulaarselt vanuses 7-10 eluaastat, teist vanuses 10-14 eluaastat), mis hõlmab 16 tunni jagu audiomaterjali. Vanemate kõne direktiivsed lausungid on liigitatud otsesteks ja kaudseteks käskudeks, keeldudeks, kõneleja soovitud tegevuse väljendusteks, palveteks, soovideks, soovitusteks, ettepanekuteks, hoiatusteks ja kultuurinormi edastusteks. On võrreldud eri tüüpi direktiivide kasutamist ema ja isa kõnes ning vaadeldud direktiivide kasutamise dünaamikat laste kasvades ning suhtlusolukorriti. Selgub, et ehkki direktiivide hulk hoidjakeeles aja jooksul väheneb, kasutavad nii isa kui ema kõige sagedamini siiski otseseid käske.

El presente estudio de diseno metodologico ex post facto pretende comprobar y caracterizar los efectos de las Nuevas Tecnologias de la Informacion en la comprension lectora del espanol como lengua materna. Se trabajo con una muestra de seis grupos de 28 estudiantes cada uno, para un total de 165 estudiantes de primer ingreso de la Universidad del Norte en Barranquilla, Colombia, de la asignatura Competencias Comunicativas 1. La muestra fue separada en dos grupos: uno con alta implicacion de tecnologias de la informacion y comunicacion, grupo experimental, y otro con baja implicacion de tecnologia, el grupo control. A todos se les aplico la prueba PISA y una encuesta denominada Quick Course Diagnosis. Los resultados evidencian que no existen diferencias significativas entre ambos grupos en materia de comprension lectora o de satisfaccion manifestada por los estudiantes al final del curso.

In order to become proficient language users, children must develop an array of abilities ranging from the understanding of non-literal language uses, the ability to produce referring expressions containing the adequate degree of information depending on their addressee's knowledge state, the use of adequate expressions depending on social relations with their addressee, to name but a few. Traditionally, in theoretical pragmatics, these competencies have been addressed in two different trends of studies. On the one hand, studies focusing on the appropriate use of language depending on social relations between speaker and hearer that investigate phenomena such as politeness. On the other hand, studies aiming at explaining how hearers enrich the linguisticallyencoded meaning of sentences to access the speaker's meaning that focus on phenomena such as reference resolution and implicatures.

Little is known about cross-linguistic differences in infants’ production and acquisition of voice quality parameters. In our study of Canadian English, Moroccan Arabic, and Chinese Bai infants, we found that for all infants, laryngeally constricted phonatory settings (harsh voice, creaky voice, whispery voice, and whisper) predominate in the first months of life and decline throughout the first year in favour of unconstricted settings (modal voice, breathy voice, and falsetto). To better understand the distribution of voice quality parameters in the infants’ utterances, we analyzed the phonatory settings employed in babbling. We found that the babbling of Arabic infants was more likely to feature laryngeal constriction than the babbling of English infants. Bai babbling showed the least stable incidence of laryngeal constriction, possibly reflecting the more complex use of this feature in the infants’ ambient language.

The aim of this study is to provide normative data regarding the acquisition of the phoneme /r/ in normally developing children. A total of 60 children between 3-5 years participated in this research from Gaziantep province, Turkey. 15 different words including the phoneme /r/ as word-initial, word-medial and word-final were selected. A picture-naming procedure was applied in order to elicit speech from children. Findings suggest that until the age of 4, children do not produce 50% of customary production level. However, it is found that 5-year old children also do not reach 75% of acquisition, which is inconsistent with the current findings from normative studies in Turkey.

Phon is a software that is part of the PhonBank project and it was developed to gather, code and search for speech data from language acquisition research, collected in spontaneous or experimental settings, from typical or atypical development.
In this paper we will present the software Phon and its advantages to the field of phonological acquisition research. In particular, we will mention data and results on the acquisition of phonology in European Portuguese, from both monolingual and bilingual environment. We will mention the results of the acquisition of segmental inventory, the acquisition of syllable structure and the acquisition of word stress in European Portuguese, obtained from Phon.

In his research on bilingualism, Weinreich noticed a process of “interference” between the two languages of the bilingual speaker, marked by deviation from the grammatical norms of either language. Lado referred to this process as a “transfer of forms, meanings and culture” from the native language of the speaker (L1) to his second or foreign language (L2). Corder and Sharwood Smith redefined the notion as a “cross linguistic influence” that included the third and fourth languages of the learner, while Odlin confirmed the notion of transfer with data from empirical evidence.

Research data shows that transfer occurs whenever two or more languages come into contact, and that these influences are effected in two directions: from the native language of the learner(L1) to the second language (L2) as substratum transfer, and from the second language (L2) to the native language (L1) as borrowing transfer. The influence of one language on the other could be positive, facilitating the learning of the lexicon and grammar, or negative, shown in lexical, pragmatic, discourse, or cultural departure from the target language norms. That digression phenomenon could create vagueness, lack of coherence and focus, and lack of relevance in the interlanguage of the learner of the second language. This paper discusses such issues of logicality, ambiguity and relevance in the written English of a native Romanian.

Interlanguage pragmatics concerns the inspection of interactions among people in society while they are aware of the effects that interaction imposes on them regarding culture, social values and individuals' peculiar interpretations. Of high value in social interaction, politeness is an essential constituent of interlanguage pragmatics. If considered as a skill required to cope with social environmental demands, Emotional Intelligence (EI) may play a part in modifying the interlanguage pragmatics and hence individuals' politeness in response to social interaction. This study investigates how emotional intelligence of L1-Persian EFL learners relates to politeness strategies utilized in requests. To this end, 150 male and female undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students majored in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) were randomly selected. Instruments of the study included Emotional Intelligence Appraisal Test, Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Task (MDCT), and a politeness questionnaire based on Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness. The results of correlational and regression analyses indicated that EI cannot predict politeness , whereas educational level and pragmatic competence can predict the EFL learners' politeness appreciated in requests in different scenarios. Of interest, the higher the level of education, the more pragmatic ability and politeness thereof.

The field of language acquisition has long suffered from a lack of serious, real dialogue between competing approaches. It is to be welcomed, then, that researchers of Ambridge and Lieven's caliber are spearheading a movement toward more collaboration in understanding the complexities, advantages, and disadvantages of different viewpoints. Child language acquisition (CLA) is a monumental effort to kickstart more unbiased, comprehensive comparisons between competing generativist and constructivist theories of language development. The book's intended audience is researchers and instructors for undergraduate/graduate courses, although as we see below, some caveats apply.

La adquisición y el aprendizaje de lenguas constituyen dos procesos cognitivos diferentes en los que influyen distintos factores, entre otros, el contexto, el input, la motivación, la edad, etc. Precisamente el factor etario parece tener influencia decisiva en llegar al nivel de dominio de una LE/L2. Este trabajo constituye un intento de aproximación experimental para demostrar que la adquisición y el aprendizaje no producen los mismos resultados. Para ello, a partir de la presentación de los diferentes valores y contextos de uso del artículo en español y mediante las entrevistas realizadas con polacos que viven en España, se presenta el análisis de errores de las producciones de los niños que adquirieron la lengua inconscientemente (adquisición) y de los adultos que recibieron una enseñanza explícita (aprendizaje) de ELE.

We further develop the self-centered model of mental representations for language with the focus on the mechanisms underlying syntactic calculus and the construction of larger meaningful constructs out of the basic syntactic units. We consider the inborn multimodal perception and  the self-concept as an actor in an environment as the basis for concept formation and syntactic construction. Based on relevant findings in language acquisition, we investigate the perceptual, semantic, and syntactic aspects of mental apparatus. We see this apparatus as an overall system that can handle the task of conceptualization and the task of syntactic construction using the same mechanisms. Based on the argument-centered model of mental representations which involves such processing homogeneity, we show the gradual development of the complexity of syntactic formants during language acquisition.

Keywords: language acquisition, syntax complexity, mental operations
ACM classification keywords: I.2.0: Artificial Intelligence, I.2.7: Natural Language Processing

The aim of teaching "religion and culture" is to develop a competence in dealing with religious issues and traditions. The teaching follows the concept of teaching about religion, which means that students should learn about religions that are present in our society.

This study presents the findings of cross-sectional psycholinguistic research investigating the first-language acquisition of Turkish among heritage speakers in Germany. Studies in heritage language acquisition in the last decades have provided increasing evidence that heritage speakers do not always converge on the grammars of native speakers, which is predominantly explained in relation to estimates of reduced input and output conditions. Nonetheless, Montrul (2010) underlines the fact that estimates cannot be used as

When children enter public kindergartens in the current atmosphere of high-stakes testing, they often encounter an emphasis on correctness that casts doubt on the integrity of their personally invented messages, prompting them to ask not “What did I write?” but “Is this right?” This ethnographic case study examines early writing by 23 kindergarten children within the context of their free-writing time and their teacher's plan to restore intention to compensate for a mandated curriculum that overemphasized convention.

The challenges for young children learning to write are many, as they try to respond to their teachers' expectations, 'school language' and the complex, abstract notion of writing. Scaffolding the learning of young children is challenging for teachers, as they attempt to respond to the diverse needs of students, curriculum requirements and the expectations of employers and the community. Through conversation teachers and students work at understanding the expectations and needs of the other. The research study discussed in this article examined teacher/student conversations that focused on writing in three Australian Kindergarten classrooms in 2007. In some of the conversations analysed, the teachers and children appear to 'connect' and the children move forward with their learning as a result. This was not, however, always the case. The language of school literacy appears to be a particular barrier for some students. The author identifies the need for a 'shared language' if teachers' efforts to scaffold children's early attempts at writing are to be fruitful. Teachers must also know their children well.

This study argues that the pattern and timing of ordinal acquisition differs substantially from that of cardinals and is influenced by different languagespecific factors, such as (ir)regular ordinal morphology, superlative morphology, and the singular-plural distinction. We discuss data from a Give X task (Wynn 1992) administered to 77 Dutch monolinguals (2;11-6;04) that support a so-called knower-level acquisition pattern (e.g., Le Corre & Carey 2007) for Dutch cardinals but show a more complex picture for ordinals, which are acquired around the time a child masters the necessary counting principles and becomes a CP (cardinal principle) knower. Not only is the tiered pattern absent in regular low ordinals, we also see that it takes time for children to link drie 'three' to irregular derde 'third.' We take this as evidence that ordinals are acquired via rules, rather than being stored lexically one by one.

THE ACQUISITION OF PASSIVES IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE

ANTÓNIA PIMENTEL ESTRELA

ABSTRACT
The aim of this study is to describe the acquisition of passives in European Portuguese, specifically regarding its comprehension. Many studies reveal that this construction is acquired late in different languages, both when production and comprehension are considered.
The apparent cross linguistic delay suggests children’s knowledge is somehow restricted, leading some authors to claim that the difficulties are due to syntactic maturation (Borer & Wexler 1987; Hirsch & Wexler 2007) or to the development of thematic role assignment (Fox & Grodzinsky 1998). Other studies value the importance of the input (Gordon & Chafetz 1990; Demuth et al. 2010), while others emphasize the pragmatic and discursive features assigned to the passive (Tomasello 2000; Marchman et al. 1991). Recently, some important studies point out that the acquisition of the passive construction is not delayed, arguing that if the felicity conditions are met, children will not have problems interpreting this structure, although other factors may be involved (O’Brien et al. 2006; Thatcher et al. 2008).
This study aims at addressing the lack of systematic data on the acquisition of passives in European Portuguese. In order to accomplish that, it presents the results of four pilot studies on the comprehension of the structure under analysis. The first study is designed to test comprehension of long and short passive with actional verbs; the second and third analyze the comprehension of passives with actional and non-actional verbs; and the fourth assesses whether children distinguish three types of passive and their different properties (eventive, resultative and stative passives).
First, the results show that four-year- old children can understand passives with actional verbs, revealing no difference between short and long passives. Secondly, passives with non-actional verbs are problematic for children of different age groups and even active sentences with non-actional verbs are difficult. Thirdly, the analysis of the results of the fourth experimental study reveals that, at five, children do not show significant differences in the judgments of grammaticality assigned to various types of passive, with a performance at the chance level, contrarily to the performance of six-year-old children. Grammaticality contrasts are not completely understood by children, but we can already notice a statistically significant development in the recognition of the contrast between eventive and stative passives; and resultative and stative passives.
The analysis of an acquisition corpus complete these results, showing that even before the age of two children produce stative passives, and before they are three years old they produce eventive and resultative passives.
The study conducted allows us to evaluate the different proposals in the literature, covering various aspects relevant to the acquisition of passive structure, a structure in which different factors are involved, justifying that the processing of various types of the passive construction occurs gradually.

KEYWORDS: Language acquisition, passive structure,  eventive, resultative and stative passives

The investigation is an attempt to contribute further to our understanding of First Language Acquisition processes. The aims of the study, briefly stated, are to determine that:

        1) The development towards the target is a creative system of increasing  complexity
        2) The linguistic behaviours of the acquirers are systematic and rule-governed.
        3) The developmental sequences can be identified for each of the syntactic areas studied.

APA Citation: İnci Kavak, V.(2019). The acquisition and use of negation in the early child language. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 15(2), 587-604. Abstract This paper investigates how negation develops in the speech of a Turkish-speaking child in the very early stages of language acquisition. The study features the video recordings of a child between the ages of 19 and 22 months and the analyses of negative forms in the recorded data. The development of negation in parent-child interactions is discussed with demonstrative examples between the boy and his parents. The data was recorded by the mother in a regular fashion, particularly at play and lunch times. For the detailed data analysis, the recordings have been divided into three sets according to the age of the child as 1;8, 1;9 and 1;10. The initial step is to identify and explain how negation is formed in Turkish, which is followed by the data analysis in order to track the development of negation in the child's speech. The ways in which his formation of negation improves have been given special attention and interpreted as the child's linguistic knowledge expands. The data evidences that the child not only starts to use most forms of negation as early as the age of 1;10, but also does this strategically by performing them for a successful communication in a clear developmental sequence. Some of his strategies traced in the data are using variety sets, complementing one negative form with the other to emphasize his point and providing reasons and results for his statements. The findings confirm that the child acquires the forms in an order from more independent to the dependent as well as in a sequence from the easy to the linguistically and cognitively more challenging.

Most young children love to draw and they all need to learn to write. However, despite the research over the past 30 years which identifies a strong relationship between emergent writing and drawing, in some classrooms young children are being obliged to see drawing and writing separately rather than as a unified system of meaning making. In this article I highlight one outcome of the fourth phase of an ongoing research project which focuses on writing in the first year of formal schooling. In 2009 I challenged 10 teachers working with children in the first year of school to make drawing central to their writing program, particularly during the first half of the year. I wanted to examine the relationship between children's drawing and learning to write in the first six months of formal schooling in an era where visual literacy and linguistic literacy combine. This required a shift in teachers' priorities. The result of the research is unambiguous: if teachers encourage emergent writers to see drawing and writing as a unified system for making meaning children create texts which are more complex than those they can create with words alone. The findings, if not new, are significant for two reasons. Firstly, in an era where visual literacy is central to new literacies it does not make sense to ignore the research which identifies the important relationship between drawing and emergent writing. Secondly, the findings remind us of the power of building on from the known to the new; meaning making through talking and drawing are the known, and writing as script is the new. The approach discussed also leads children to develop a positive attitude towards themselves as writers.

Historically, comics have been viewed as a "debased or simplified word-based literacy," explains Dale Jacobs, who considers comics to be complex, multimodal texts. Examining Ted Naifeh's Polly and the Pirates, Jacobs shows how comics can engage students in multiple literacies, furthering meaning-making practices in the classroom and beyond. We are better able to "hear" the narrator's voice because we can see what words are emphasized by the bold lettering, and we associate particular kinds of voices with the narrative voice of a pirate's tale, especially emphasized here by the shape of the text boxes.

TEACHING PRODUCTIVITY AND ITS ENEMIES is a distribution of my original doctoral dissertation "Language Tangle : Predicting and Facilitating Outcomes in Language Education" ( http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804346 )  with a new title better reflecting its actual theme, barriers to teaching productivity.

Although the keys to teaching success are elusive, some of the destructive forces at work against success have enough constancy to be worth the trouble of a well-developed defence system. I will collectively describe forces acting against teaching success as “the enemies of language teaching productivity”.  A productive teacher is one who adds to the learning productivity of students. A productive student is one who  acquires and retains what needs to be learned (a skill, a body of knowledge or a method of thinking) with the most efficient use of his or her mental resources, time and money...

As a working teacher, I am concerned with managing the psychology of my students as well as my own. The “enemies” in this ghostly arena of the human mind are well known to any experienced teacher. However, the bulk of this book is concerned with other distractors – enemies without. Typically they take the form of individuals and groups within institutions who have agendas which clash with what the teachers and students are trying to achieve. Productivity for these other players has an altogether different meaning from the learner’s pursuit of knowledge...

"Recently, educators have begun to consider what is required in literacy curricula and best teaching practices given the demands placed on the educator sector and on literacy in general.

Multiliteracies and Technology Enhanced Education: Social Practice and the Global Classroom features theoretical reflections and approaches on the use of multiliteracies and technologies in the improvement of education and social practices. Assisting educators at different teaching levels and fostering professional development and progress in this growing field, this innovative publication supports practitioners concerned with teaching at both a local and global level."

Synsemia means the deliberate and conscious disposition of elements of writing in the space in order to communicate in a reasonably unambiguous way and in a regular manner, through the space articulation. These regularities can be valid only for a specific text (but coherent, rigorous and interpreted without the aid of the author), or defined by specific patterns and consolidated habits of use.

هذا بحث في اللسانيات التطبيقية؛ إذ يقصد إلى بيان وجوه استثمار مجلات الأطفال في ترقية كفايات الأطفال  اللغوية وتنميتها، وذلك باتخاذ مجلة وسام الأردنية نموذجًا للتطبيق.
وقد استقام بناء البحث في مبحثين رئيسيين وخاتمة وتوصيات:
المبحث الأول: اعتنى ببيان منزلة مجلات الأطفال في بناء لغة الطفل من حيث هي مصدر لغوي معرفي يمثل مجتمعًا لغويًا للعربية. وأضاء البحثُ جوانب من أهمية التخطيط اللغوي في إنتاج مجلات أطفال وفق خطة علمية مرسومة تراعي أعراف الـتأليف اللساني الحديث.
المبحث الثاني: وهو المبحث التطبيقي؛ وفيه تعريف بمجلة وسام، وكيفية استثمار المجلات في  اكتساب اللغة الأم وتعليمها. وتركز الجانب التطبيقي في مسارين؛ أولهما تمثل في انتخاب مواد منشورة في مجلة وسام  وبيان كيفية توجيهها توجيهًا وظيفيًا تعليميًا للأطفال القرَّاء.  وتمثَّل المسار الثاني في تجارب عملية (دراسة حالة) في توظيف مجلات الأطفال في تنمية المهارات اللغوية والتواصلية  .
وقد ذُيِّل البحث بخاتمة ونتائج وأهم التوصيات.

Çà ëèíãâèñòèêàòà íà êðàÿ íà XX âåê îïðåäåëåíî ìîaeå äà ñå êàaeå, ÷å òîâà å ëèíãâèñòèêà íà âñå ïî-êàòåãîðè÷íî óòâúðaeäàâàùèÿ ñå ìàêðîëèíãâèñòè÷åí ïîäõîä êúì åçèêà. Çà ðàçëèêà îò ïî-òåñíèÿ, ìèêðîëèíãâèñòè÷íèÿ ïîäõîä, êîéòî êîíöåíòðèðà âíèìàíèåòî ñè âúðõó åçèêà è åäèíñòâåíî âúðõó íåãî â äóõà íà èçêàçâàíåòî íà Ñîñþð, ÷å ëèíãâèñòèêàòà èìà çà åäèíñòâåí è èñòèíñêè îáåêò åçèêà, ðàçãëåaeäàí â ñåáå ñè çà ñåáå ñè [Ñîñþð, 1992: 263], ìàêðîëèíãâèñòè÷íèÿò ïîäõîä âçåìà ïîä âíèìàíèå è ôàêòîðèòå, îò êîèòî çàâèñè íåãîâîòî ôóíêöèîíèðàíå è ðàçâèòèå. À òå ñà îò ïñèõè÷åñêî, êîãíèòèâíî, ñîöèàëíî, êóëòóðíî åñòåñòâî. Òàêà â ðóñëîòî íà ðîäåíèòå îò òîçè ïîäõîä ìëàäè íàóêè: ñîöèîëèíãâèñòèêàòà, åòíîëèíãâèñòèêàòà, ïñèõîëèíãâèñòèêàòà, íåâðîëèíãâèñòèêàòà, êîãíèòèâíàòà ëèíãâèñòèêà, ìåaeäó êîèòî ïî ïðèíöèï å òðóäíî äà áúäå ïðîêàðàíà ðÿçêà ãðàíèöà, áÿõà íàïðàâåíè âàaeíè ñòúïêè â ïîñîêà êúì ðàçêðèâàíå íà ñúùíîñòòà íà ñàìèòå åçèêîâè ÿâëåíèÿ, íà òåõíèòå ïðè÷èíè è ìåõàíèçìè, à òîâà îçíà÷àâà è íà îáóñëàâÿùèòå ãè ìèñëîâíè ïðîöåñè. Íàéãîëÿìîòî ïðåäèìñòâî íà èçâîäèòå íà òåçè íàóêè å òÿõíàòà îáÿñíÿâàùà ñèëà.

Mes mots résonnent dans ma tête et vibrent comme une corde
à l’intérieur d’un piano pour former la mélodie de ma pensée.
D’où me viennent-ils ? De quoi sont-ils l’écho ? Sont-ils bien à moi
ou suis-je livré à eux ? M’appartiennent-ils ou me possèdent-ils
comme une voix qui ne serait pas la mienne ? Pour comprendre
d’où vient la musique, j’aimerais simplement soulever le couvercle
et voir la mécanique à l’oeuvre : faculté d’abstraction, modèle
de catégorisation, représentation mentale, fonction symbolique.
Je me penche sur la question, mais l’origine de ma parole reste
obscure. Je n’arrive pas à comprendre comment j’ai appris à
jouer de mes mots.
Le mystère s’éclaircit quand on filme comment le langage passe
d’une génération à l’autre dans l’intimité de nos vies. C’est en
effet des adultes que les enfants apprennent le sens de leurs mots.
Suivre l’enchaînement des jeux de langage par lesquels notre
langue maternelle devient un air connu procure une compréhension
de nos mots en donnant à voir les connexions de nos expressions
dans leur usage de tous les jours.
Tout bien réfléchi, le livre que vous avez entre les mains s’avère
n’être qu’un film. Le point de vue grammatical qu’il adopte n’a
pas d’autre ambition que de faire voir l’évidence que nous avons
toujours eue sous les yeux.

This thesis examines the acquisition of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language of northern Australia, based on semi-naturalistic data from 5 children (1;9-6;1) over a two-year period. It represents the first detailed acquisition study of an Australian non-Pama Nyungan language and thus contributes to a growing crosslinguistic and typological understanding of the process of language acquisition. In particular it focuses on the acquisition of Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verbs and the acquisition of complex inflectional verbal paradigms. These structures pose a number of challenges to the language learner, which raise questions for current theories of morphological acquisition.


The structure of this thesis is built around three major research questions. The first aims to describe the characteristics of early verb use in Murrinhpatha both with regard to their structure and their semantics and pragmatics. I describe the development of verb structures in Murrinhpatha finding that these are sensitive to phonological/prosodic factors and not truncated according to morphosyntactic factors. The semantics and pragmatics of early verbs show similarities to English-acquiring children despite the great typological differences of these languages. Secondly I examine the acquisition of the complex inflectional paradigms of Murrinhpatha classifier stems. This system appears to be too complex to allow for abstract rule-based morphological acquisition but also too large to rely on rote learning of individual inflected forms. I find that children begin by using a small core of rote learned inflected forms and gradually expand verb paradigms along predictable pathways relying on low level analogy and semi-regular patterns of inflection. Finally I consider the acquisition of Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verb morphology. These verbs are constructed of two stem elements, a classifier stem and a lexical stem, which co-vary to encode verbal semantics and argument structure. Such a system has not previously been explored from an acquisition perspective, and thus I investigate how children acquire the underlying compositional principles of the system. While children do use bipartite stem morphology contrastively, they are found not to acquire the compositional principles underlying the system in the age range considered. This suggests that the Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verb system is not regular or transparent enough to allow for the acquisition of the principles of compositionality during the earlier stages of development.

This study is an endeavor to find how English native and nonnative EFL/ESL (English as foreign language/English as second language) writers use adversative conjunctions to connect ideas together so that texts have both coherence and cohesion. Regarding the problems nonnative writers of EFL face when composing a piece of writing, we attempted a qualitative study through compiling a stack of 200 articles written by the two groups. The research design concerned the content analysis of research articles and descriptive statistics showing the frequency of occurrences of modals in the data. The findings indicated
that the number of proper and correction adversatives exceeded those of contrastive and dismissal; the statistically significant difference between two groups lay in the use of proper and correction adversative conjunction, whereas the two groups showed little or no difference in the usage of contrastive or dismissal adversatives. These findings can help material writers, EFL/ESL teachers, and learners to appreciate the significant roles adversative conjunctions play in writing.

Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, wie Unterrichtsgespräche in der Schule genutzt werden können, um bildungssprachliche Fähigkeiten von Schülerinnen und Schülern zu fördern. Er fokussiert am Beispiel des Erklärens und Argumentierens die Ebene globaler diskursiver Praktiken. Anhand authentischer Unterrichtsdaten zeigt er auf, mit welchen interaktiven Verfahren Lehrkräfte Gelegenheiten für schülerseitige Diskursbeiträge schaffen und in partizipations-und diskurserwerbsförderlicher Weise nutzen können. Empirische Befunde aus der Unterrichts-und Erwerbsforschung werden zu einem Konzept unterrichtsintegrierter Diskursförderung zusammengeführt.

The new millennium began with a strong hope for success through collaboration in globalization. People were told
that globalization would bring a significant boost in transportation, communication, and information, which would
contribute to the foundation of the “global village”. Many predictions came true. One new trend was evident to
support all the new innovations—most leaders wanted to integrate English in their own educational system. Around
the world, schools promoted English in order to meet the competitive market that globalization had created. In fact,
some linguists predicted that English was going to take over other languages, and that it could actually take some
indigenous languages to their eternal rest. Today, there is a new trend that shows more and more countries
promoting mother tongue-based education (MTBE). Due to the fact that this is a fairly new paradigm shift, it is
catching a lot of government and educational leaders off-guard. Based on careful survey of a number of countries
promoting mother tongue education and recent research studies on MTBE, this presentation synthesizes common
factors that either promote or hinder MTBE. It concludes with recommendations of what must be in place for
success to happen when switching to MTBE, especially in the Asian context.