The role of chunking and analogy in early vocabulary acquisition and processing

Chunking and analogy, learning through associations and similarities respectively, are crucial cognitive processes in a usage-based theory of language development. Assessing their roles in child naturalistic word learning has posed significant challenges. In this thesis, I offer methodological solutions to examine the developmental plausibility of these processes. Chapter 2 discusses limitations in studies of early word segmentation from naturalistic speech, affecting conclusions about the processes' developmental plausibility. I present a new chunking-based model, CLASSIC Utterance Boundary (CLASSIC-UB), to study how English infants discover words from continuous naturalistic speech. Its plausibility is assessed through new metrics focusing on child production vocabularies from large-scale conversational corpora. I show the advantages of using large word production samples and how this can improve the refinement of early word segmentation and learning theories. In Chapter 3, conclusions about CLASSIC-UB’s plausibility are supported by extending this approach cross-linguistically, using Italian as a case study. Across Chapters 2 and 3, CLASSIC-UB more accurately captures child productions than other chunking and non-chunking accounts, supporting its plausibility in early word segmentation and learning. In Chapter 4, I identify methodological challenges in assessing the independent effects of chunking and analogy in child word processing. I focus on how children use sentence context to resolve ambiguous word meanings (word sense disambiguation). I present ChiSense-12, a new open-access sense-tagged corpus of child-directed speech, and describe its use in creating experimental stimuli to disentangle variables (verb-object associations and verb-event structures) that are informative about the independent role of chunking and analogy. Using this corpus, I showed - for the first time - that 4-year-old children exploit both bottom-up verb-object associations and top-down verb-event structures to resolve lexical ambiguities. Overall, this thesis makes a significant contribution to usage-based theories of language development and improves our understanding of how children acquire language in real-life contexts

Sociololinguistic competence and the bilingual's adoption of phonetic variants: auditory and instrumental data from English-Arabic bilinguals

This study is an auditory and acoustic investigation of the speech production patterns developed by English-Arabic bilingual children. The subjects are three Lebanese children aged five, seven and ten, all born and raised in Yorkshire, England. Monolingual friends of the same age were chosen as controls, and the parents of all bilingual and monolingual children were also taped to obtain a detailed assessment of the sound patterns available in the subjects' environment. The study addresses the question of interaction between the bilingual's phonological systems by calling for a refinement of the notion of a `phonological system' using insights from recent phonetic and sociolinguistic work on variability in speech (e. g. Docherty, Foulkes, Tillotson, & Watt, 2002; Docherty & Foulkes, 2000; Local, 1983; Pisoni, 1997; Roberts, 1997; Scobbie, 2002). The variables under study include /1/, In, and VOT production. These were chosen due to the existence of different patterns in their production in English and Arabic that vary according to contextual and dialectal factors. Data were collected using a variety of picture-naming, story-telling, and free-play activities for the children, and reading lists, story-telling, and interviews for the adults. To control for language mode (Grosjean, 1998), the bilinguals were recorded in different language sessions with different interviewers. Results for the monolingual children and adults in this study underline the importance of including controls in any study of bilingual speech development for a better interpretation of the bilinguals' patterns. Input from the adults proved highly variable and at times conflicted with published patterns normally found in the literature for the variables under study. Results for the bilinguals show that they have developed separate sociolinguistically-appropriate production patterns for each of their languages that are on the whole similar to those of monolinguals but that also reflect the bilinguals' rich socio-phonetic repertoire. The interaction between the bilinguals' languages is mainly restricted to the bilingual mode and is a sign of their developing sociolinguistic competence

FOUND IN SPACE: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN ENGLISH MAP TASK PERFORMANCE

Understanding the relationship between first and second language use in the area of spatial language has broader implications for our understanding of language learning and consequences for the construction of bilingual assessment instruments for second language learners. This study shows that observing and interpreting the task of map drawing and the related behavior of explaining maps can be a way to explore the linguistic emergence of the conceptualization of spatial language (at a moment of simultaneous and synchronized incarnation). Altogether, 50 dyads (pairs) participated in the New Mexico Map Task Project; the project included native speakers of English, Russian, Japanese, Navajo, and Spanish. In an examination of how the grammatical constructions used for spatial descriptions in a speaker\u27s first language carry over into the usage of this speaker\u27s second language, new observations include the intra-subject comparison of dyadic map task performances. Each non-native English-speaking dyad participates in two map task performances: one in their native language and one in their second language, English. Evidence was generated through morphosyntactic, phonological, and pragmatic analyses performed on the sound files of the transcripts. This evidence confirms the connection between the participants\u27 productions of tokens of selected landmark names both in their native language and their second language. Combining the results of linguistic analyses with educational assessment frameworks predicts the development of an instrument for use with immigrant and refugee students from areas of conflict

Regional Variation in New Zealand English: the Taranaki Sing-Song Accent

Although lay people confidently assert the existence of regional varieties of New Zealand English, linguists have produced very little evidence to support such claims. There are vocabulary items special to, or favoured by, the people of Southland and the West Coast of the South Island; there are traces of non-prevocalic /r/in Southland and Otago; and there are regional differences in the playground language of New Zealand school children. Attempts to identify further differences between regions have generally not been successful. In most cases linguistic evidence has pointed to either social class or ethnic variation, but not to regional variation. Nevertheless, many New Zealanders assert that a Taranaki variety of New Zealand English exists. This study was designed to test the validity of the claim by comparing samples of New Zealand English from Taranaki with samples from Wellington. The Taranaki sample included speakers from New Plymouth (population 50,000) and the South Taranaki dairy farming community. The Wellington sample was drawn from the Greater Wellington region extending from Porirua in the north to suburbs on the southern coast of the city. Interviewees were located by the social network approach, otherwise known as the 'friend of a friend' approach advocated by Lesley Milroy (1980, 1987a). An index of rural orientation was devised to indicate the degree to which a speaker was oriented towards town or country. This proved helpful in distinguishing between genuinely regional differences, and rural versus urban differences. Factors of gender and age were also considered. It has been claimed that Taranaki English has a 'sing-song' quality, suggesting that an investigation of the intonation of Taranaki speakers would be worthwhile. Comparing features of the intonation of a Taranaki sample with a Wellington sample, this thesis attempts to isolate and measure what contributes to the 'sing-song' perception of Taranaki English. 'Singsong' in this context was taken to mean that the speaker had dynamic pitch; in other words their speech was characterised by a lot of movement up and down in pitch. Auditory analysis of speech samples was undertaken, and intonation features were derived from that analysis. Averaging the number of times a speaker changed pitch direction in each intonation group and then in each accent unit provided global measures of changes in pitch direction. Analysis of nuclear accents gave an indication of whether speakers favoured tunes which were characterised by pitch movement. And analysis of the manner in which accents were approached, whether with a boosted step up in pitch, or with a more standard onset, provided a narrower focus on the amount of pitch movement present. Results indicated that, in general, most Taranaki speakers in the sample showed more pitch dynamism than the Wellingtonians; for some features the males showed more pitch dynamism than the females; and, overall, the elderly speakers showed more pitch dynamism than the younger speakers. There were, however, important exceptions to these generalisations. Factors of Location, Gander and Age interacted significantly for all but one of the features examined and there were clear indications that intonational patterns are undergoing change in both regions studied. Explanations for the exceptional cases are explored in the thesis, and sociolinguistic, social network and geolinguistic theories provide possible clues as to the sources of the differences. Evidence of differences in the degree of pitch dynamism present in the intonation of the Taranaki and Wellington speakers supports claims about regional variation in New Zealand English intonation, but it does not in itself prove the existence of a uniquely Taranaki or a uniquely Wellington way of speaking English

Nikolay Nevskiy’s Miyakoan dictionary: reconstruction from the manuscript and its ethnolinguistic analysis

Wydział Neofilologii: Katedra OrientalistykiDysertacja poświęcona jest rekonstrukcji oraz analizie rękopiśmiennych notatek leksykograficznych z lat dwudziestych XX wieku autorstwa rosyjskiego orientalisty Nikołaja Newskiego – niżej: „Materiały”. „Materiały” są nieukończonym, pozostawionym na roboczym etapie szkicem wielojęzycznego (miyako-japońsko-rosyjskiego) słownika języka miyako, poważnie zagrożonego języka z rodziny japonicznej, rodzimego dla wysp Miyako w subarchipelagu Sakishima archipelagu Ryukyu. Źródło to jest kluczowe dla dokumentacji i rewitalizacji języka miyako, a w szerszej perspektywie – dla badań nad całą rodziną japoniczną. Projekt autorki był pierwszym od czasu powstania „Materiałów” systematycznym i skutecznym wysiłkiem dążącym do akademickiej publikacji słownika Newskiego. Jedna część dysertacji, The reconstructed dictionary, stanowi zasadniczo wierne odtworzenie „Materiałów”, przy sporadycznych interwencjach redakcyjnych mających na celu poprawienie czytelności i spójności źródła. Druga część, Studies on the manuscript, składa się z trzech rozdziałów, czterech indeksów oraz pięciu dodatków. Rozdział pierwszy dotyczy tła powstania „Materiałów” oraz ich leksykograficznej zawartości. Rozdział drugi zawiera autorski opis języka miyako z lat dwudziestych oparty na materiale zrekonstruowanym ze słownika Newskiego. Rozdział trzeci ma za zadanie ustalić rangę „Materiałów” na tle riukiuanistycznego dorobku naukowego oraz wartość tkwiącą w ich rekonstrukcji, opracowywaniu i przyszłej publikacji. Dysertacja zawiera także stworzony w oparciu o „Materiały” mini-słownik miyako-angielski.The present dissertation is devoted to the reconstruction of handwritten lexicographic notes compiled in 1920s by a Russian orientalist Nikolay Nevskiy, henceforth the Materials. The Materials are an unfinished draft of a trilingual dictionary of Miyakoan, a seriously endangered minority language native to the Miyako islands in the Sakishima subarchipelago in the Ryukyus, Japan. This draft is a source of paramount importance to the documentation and revitalization of Miyakoan and, by extension, to the study of Japonic languages in general. This author’s Ph.D. project has been the first systematic and successful attempt at an academic publication of Nevskiy’s dictionary. One part of the dissertation, entitled The reconstructed dictionary, is essentially a faithful reconstruction of the Materials minimally edited for legibility, consistency and an overall user-friendliness. The other part, Studies on the manuscript, consists of three chapters, four indeces and five appendices. Chapter One discusses the background of the Materials and their lexicographic content. Chapter Two involves an original description of Miyakoan from the 1920s based on the data recovered from Nevskiy’s dictionary. Chapter Three aims at establishing the merit of the Materials against the background of other achievements in Ryukyuan linguistics, as well as the value of the reconstruction, editing and future publishing of the source. A Miyakoan-English wordlist based on the Materials has also been appended to the dissertation. In all likelihood, it is the first Miyakoan-English lexicographic source to have ever been published