Hearing versus Listening: Attention to Speech and Its Role in Language Acquisition in Deaf Infants with Cochlear Implants

The advent of cochlear implantation has provided thousands of deaf infants and children access to speech and the opportunity to learn spoken language. Whether or not deaf infants successfully learn spoken language after implantation may depend in part on the extent to which they listen to speech rather than just hear it. We explore this question by examining the role that attention to speech plays in early language development according to a prominent model of infant speech perception – Jusczyk’s WRAPSA model – and by reviewing the kinds of speech input that maintains normal-hearing infants’ attention. We then review recent findings suggesting that cochlear-implanted infants’ attention to speech is reduced compared to normal-hearing infants and that speech input to these infants differs from input to infants with normal hearing. Finally, we discuss possible roles attention to speech may play on deaf children’s language acquisition after cochlear implantation in light of these findings and predictions from Jusczyk’s WRAPSA model

Aphasia in a linguistically diverse population: resources for turn construction and interactional adaptations of Malaysian adults

The central aim of this thesis is to explore resources for turn construction and interactional adaptations in the conversation of adults with aphasia (a language difficulty acquired most commonly after stroke) in the linguistically diverse Malaysian population. Malaysia has a long history of societal multilingualism, necessitating individual bi/multilingualism; the thesis investigates for the first time the impact of aphasia on conversational interactions in this population. As a result, the thesis applies Conversation Analysis (CA), with an emphasis on localised investigation of participants’ turns within particular sequences. The data are from two sources: video recorded natural conversations in the homes of three participants with aphasia and their regular conversation partners, and conversations outside the home with a friend, where languages other than the home language were reportedly used. The data driven procedures of CA reveal turn construction resources of topic-comment structure, co-construction and repetition are deployed by PWAs in conversation with regular and less familiar conversation partners and these resources cross the linguistic boundaries of the languages in their repertoire. These resources also occur in the non-aphasic conversation partners’ turns and exhibit similarities to those documented in studies of the conversations of monolingual English speakers with aphasia. Given that two or more sets of linguistic resources are available for each partnership, code-switching is found to be a compensatory resource for dealing with word finding difficulties as well as a resource for claiming or ascribing identity. A comparison of conversations with a friend indicates that a partnership’s familiarity influences interactional outcomes. However, the relationship between familiarity and interactional success is a complex one which appears to vary for each partnership. The findings of this thesis have theoretical and clinical implications for planning support services for aphasia in societies where bi/multilingualism is the norm. The significance of this contribution becomes evident when global trends in linguistic diversity are taken into consideration

Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages

Information structure is a relatively new field to linguistics and has only recently been studied for smaller and less described languages. This book is the first of its kind that brings together contributions on information structure in Austronesian languages. Current approaches from formal semantics, discourse studies, and intonational phonology are brought together with language specific and cross-linguistic expertise of Austronesian languages. The 13 chapters in this volume cover all subgroups of the large Austronesian family, including Formosan, Central Malayo-Polynesian, South Halmahera-West New Guinea, and Oceanic. The major focus, though, lies on Western Malayo-Polynesian languages. Some chapters investigate two of the largest languages in the region (Tagalog and different varieties of Malay), others study information-structural phenomena in small, underdescribed languages. The three overarching topics that are covered in this book are NP marking and reference tracking devices, syntactic structures and information-structural categories, and the interaction of information structure and prosody. Various data types build the basis for the different studies compiled in this book. Some chapters investigate written texts, such as modern novels (cf. Djenar’s chapter on modern, standard Indonesian), or compare different text genres, such as, for example, oral narratives and translations of biblical narratives (cf. De Busser’s chapter on Bunun). Most contributions, however, study natural spoken speech and make use of spoken corpora which have been compiled by the authors themselves. The volume comprises a number of different methods and theoretical frameworks. Two chapters make use of the Question Under Discussion approach, developed in formal semantics (cf. the chapters by Latrouite & Riester; Shiohara & Riester). Riesberg et al. apply the recently developed method of Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) to investigate native speakers’ perception of prosodic prominences and boundaries in Papuan Malay. Other papers discuss theoretical consequences of their findings. Thus, for example, Himmelmann takes apart the most widespread framework for intonational phonology (ToBI) and argues that the analysis of Indonesian languages requires much simpler assumptions than the ones underlying the standard model. Arka & Sedeng ask the question how fine-grained information structure space should be conceptualized and modelled, e.g. in LFG. Schnell argues that elements that could be analysed as “topic” and “focus” categories, should better be described in terms of ‘packaging’ and do not necessarily reflect any pragmatic roles in the first place

Bilingual first language acquisition in Malay and English : a morphological and suprasegmental study in the development of plural expressions in a bilingual child

This thesis investigates the development of plural marking in a child raised in Malay and English simultaneously, from the morphological and prosodic perspective. For the morphological plural development, the child’s plural acquisition is analysed within the Processability Theory (PT) framework de Bot (1992) de Bot (1992) thus widening PT’s typological range of application to a language such as Malay, which belongs to the Austronesian family (Dryer & Haspelmath, 2013). PT has been tested for morphological development in L2 English (Di Biase, Kawaguchi, & Yamaguchi, 2015; Johnston, 2000) and several typologically different languages as well as bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) such as Japanese-English (Itani-Adams, 2013). However, PT has not been empirically tested for any language of the Austronesian family nor in a Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) constellation involving Malay and English. The Malay-English language pair is interesting because of the remarkably different linguistic mechanisms used for encoding plurality in the two languages; morphologically, Malay marks plurality through distinct forms of reduplication such as rumah-rumah ‘houses’, buah-buahan’ (plural form of buah ‘fruit’) and bukit-bukau ‘hills’ (Sew, 2007). In contrast, English uses morphological inflections -s suffixed to the stem, e.g., cat/cats, dog/dogs, book/books (Carstairs-McCarthy, 2002). Malay reduplication, as previously shown, involves more than a single word, however, functionally speaking it is equivalent to one word plus a marker of plurality. Thus, prosodic mechanisms play a crucial role in distinguishing between mere repetition and grammatical reduplication in Malay (Gil, 2005). Since plurality is expressed very differently in each language, this study investigates how a bilingual child develops simultaneously two grammatical systems. The participant in this research is a female child named Rina, who was raised in Malay-English environment from birth. This investigation comprises of two parts; first is the longitudinal investigation of her plural acquisition from age 2;10 to 3;10. During this period, Rina was living in Australia, where the environmentally predominant language was English. The second complementary part is an investigation of Rina’s plural marking systems at age 4;8 when she had returned to Malaysia, where the predominant environmental language was Malay. For the longitudinal study, the database for the analyses was obtained from separate Malay and English recording sessions, which were conducted weekly from age 2;10 to 3;10. Likewise, the data for Rina’s plural expression at 4;8 was also obtained from separate Malay and English environment recordings. For the morphological plural development, results indicate that Rina developed two different systems to mark plurality in Malay and English. Her plural marking developed in the sequence predicted by PT. However, though she clearly distinguished the two languages, bidirectional influences from English to Malay and Malay to English were found in the corpus, both in the longitudinal study as well as at age 4;8. In the longitudinal study, it was found that in expressing plurals in Malay and English, Rina used various linguistic devices: one of the predominant strategies she employed in both languages was iteration, a strategy in which Rina expressed more than one objects by repeating the lexical item according to the number of individuated entities (hence four cats would be expressed as cat cat cat cat). Reduplication, the target grammatical Malay plural, only emerged at 3;8. Thus, we examine the prosodic development of the child’s iteration up till the emergence of reduplication. Findings indicate that the development from iteration to reduplication is gradual; the main acoustic correlate that she employed during the longitudinal study was final-syllable lengthening. She only began differentiating various prosodic mechanisms (such as pausing, duration and pitch) to distinguish repetition and reduplication in her plural marking at age 4;8. This study offers a new perspective on the interplay between the two languages in the early stages of grammatical development in a bilingual child. The specific features of plurality in Malay and English and how they develop in the bilingual child may shed light on the applicability of PT to BFLA. Also, the link between the child’s morphological development and prosodic mechanisms show that in acquiring the prosodic structures of reduplication, Rina creates partial and increasingly specific analyses of the grammatical forms, gradually approaching the conventional adult form