Categories, words and rules in language acquisition

Acquiring language requires learning a set of words (i.e. the lexicon) and abstract rules that combine them to form sentences (i.e. syntax). In this thesis, we show that infants acquiring their mother tongue rely on different speech categories to extract: words and to abstract regularities. We address this issue with a study that investigates how young infants use consonants and vowels, showing that certain computations are tuned to one or the other of these speech categories..

Greek Mythology Vocabulary Building

The guiding question addressed in this Capstone is: How will the use of task-based vocabulary activities to support literacy development affect the vocabulary acquisition of elementary Korean English language learners? It documents one teacher’s curriculum development of two units that offer a new perspective to ELL vocabulary acquisition by building vocabulary using morphological training then access and build on background knowledge through practical applications which lead to higher comprehension. This project explores a) the role that task-based curriculum plays on literacy development focused on the development activities that supports the vocabulary development of elementary Korean English language learners using Greek root words and affixes beyond vocabulary word lists. b) Uses grapheme, phoneme, morpheme awareness, integrated in a way that helps students understand how words are built and takes the form of a unit plan adapted from Understanding by Design Backward (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006). c) Activates student knowledge in the application phase through personalized communication practice

Exploring Cross-linguistic Effects and Phonetic Interactions in the Context of Bilingualism

This Special Issue includes fifteen original state-of-the-art research articles from leading scholars that examine cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech. These experimental studies contribute to the growing number of studies on multilingual phonetics and phonology by introducing novel empirical data collection techniques, sophisticated methodologies, and acoustic analyses, while also presenting findings that provide robust theoretical implications to a variety of subfields, such as L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, laboratory phonology, acoustic phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociophonetics, blingualism, and language contact. These studies in this book further elucidate the nature of phonetic interactions in the context of bilingualism and multilingualism and outline future directions in multilingual phonetics and phonology research

How Grammars Grow: Argument Structure and the Acquisition of Non-Basic Syntax

This dissertation examines the acquisition of argument structure as a window into the role of development in grammar learning. The way that children represent the data for language acquisition depends on the grammatical knowledge they have at any given point in development. Children use their immature grammatical knowledge, together with other non-linguistic conceptual, pragmatic, and cognitive abilities, to parse and interpret their input. But until children have fully acquired the target grammar, these input representations will be incomplete and potentially inaccurate. Our learning theory must take into account how learning can operate over input representations that change over the course of development. What allows learners to acquire new knowledge from partial and noisy representations of their data, one step at a time, and still converge on the right grammar? The case study in this dissertation points towards one way to characterize the role of development in grammar acquisition by probing more deeply into the resources that learners bring to their learning task. I consider two types of resources. The first is representational: learners need resources for representing their input in useful ways, even early in development. In two behavioral studies, I ask what resources infants in their second year of life use to represent their input for argument structure acquisition. I show that English learners differentiate the grammatical and thematic relations of clause arguments, and that they recognize local argument relations before they recognize non-local predicate-argument dependencies. The second type of resource includes mechanisms for learning from input representations even when they are incomplete or inaccurate early in development. In two computational experiments, I investigate how learners could in principle use a combination of domain-specific linguistic knowledge and domain-general cognitive abilities in order to draw accurate inferences about verb argument structure from messy data, and to identify the forms that argument movement can take in their language. By investigating some of the earliest steps of syntax acquisition in infancy, this work aims to provide a fuller picture of what portion of the input is useful to an individual child at any single point in development, how the child perceives that portion of the input given her current grammatical knowledge, and what internal mechanisms enable the child to generalize beyond her input in inferring the grammar of her language. This work has implications not only for theories of language learning, but also for learning in general, by offering a new perspective on the use of data in the acquisition of knowledge

Alliteration and assonance as mnemonic devices in second language word-pair learning

The central question addressed in this thesis is to what extent phonological patterns, in particular alliteration and assonance, aid the recall and retention of word pairs for Japanese L1 learners of English. The research builds on previous findings from a series of classroom-based quasi-experimental work, principally from the team of Boers, Lindstromberg and Eyckmans, which shows a mnemonic advantage for collocations and compounds that have phonological patterns, compared to equivalent word strings with no phonological overlap. This advantage appears in both free- and cued-recall tests, and across a variety of temporal intervals (up to two weeks). Much of the prior research has drawn participant samples from a Dutch L1 speaking population. Furthermore, these studies have mainly used target items deemed to be familiar to the participants. This thesis is motivated by the need to question if the previous empirical findings generalise to a population whose L1 phonological constructs are different from those of Dutch L1 speakers. The purpose is to test if Japanese L1 speakers have a different perception of alliteration and assonance, and if so, whether this impacts on their learning behaviour. A further aim is to investigate whether the mnemonic effect applies to unfamiliar target items. In addition, the thesis considers the extent to which the cognitive process of form-based priming underpins the mnemonic effect. A series of four experiments are conducted which progressively examine the processing advantage conferred by alliterating and assonating patterns. Different sets of experimental stimuli are used, including high-frequency, low-frequency, and pseudoword items. Treatment phases often incorporate a dictation activity when using familiar word stimuli, or a study phase when using unfamiliar stimuli. A variety of testing instruments are adopted to measure recall of the written forms of the stimuli, or the forms plus meanings of novel stimuli, over differing periods of time. One study uses a Lexical Decision Task to ascertain if phonological patterns aid lexical processing. Overall, the findings indicate that phonological patterns do confer a small mnemonic advantage for known stimuli, though the effect dissipates with time. However, the extent to which orthographic similarity plays a facilitatory role remains unclear. When participants are asked to learn novel word-pairs the results are more ambiguous; alliteration seems to have a greater mnemonic effect than assonance, but the cognitive challenge of learning new material appears to mitigate any robust mnemonic effects. The data from the Lexical Decision Task do not support any strong claims that perceptual priming is the determining factor for the processing advantage. In answer to the central question, it can be inferred from the findings that both phonological and orthographic patterns are a useful pedagogical tool for helping language learners recall and retain multi-word strings

The role of interactive and cognitive biases in language use and language change

The richness and diversity of human languages is remarkable. Researchers have tried to understand how languages evolved to be how they are now, identifying how processes in language acquisition, transmission, interaction, and use shape their structure. This research comes from different disciplines and methodological approaches, such as typological research, cognitive science, pragmatics, or developmental psychology. This thesis attempts to integrate the learnings from these disparate fields using novel methodological approaches to understand the process and forces in language evolution. This first part of this dissertation, Chapters 2 and 3, explore the effect of interaction in language learning and evolution. We expand on the existing artificial language learning paradigms to allow a real-time observation and monitoring of language learning process through interaction. This novel paradigm allows as to observe how asking participants to guess the meaning of a word before producing it boosts the speed of language acquisition. We also discuss and propose different ways in which these paradigms can be used to directly observe the way in which sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and communicative processes affect language structure while it is being acquired through interaction. Aside from interactive biases, individual cognitive biases also have been shown to affect language evolution. The second part of the dissertation, Chapters 4, 5, and 6, address how domain-general biases in processing can affect language change. We find evidence that illusion of causality and category accentuation biases shape language acquisition, leading to language change and interacting with other communicative and cognitive pressures for language evolution. In summary, this dissertation bridges the gaps between the different disciplines working on understanding language evolution. It offers methodological innovations for the study of language learning through interaction and it shows how domain-general biases can explain some of the variability and observations in language evolution and interact with other better-studied pressures

Incorporating Holistic Activities into a First Grade Phonics-Based Basal Reading Program

This project reviews the literature on basal reading programs, the whole language approach, and phonics instruction. The related research was used to identify the need for a more balanced approach to elementary reading instruction. Holistic strategies, based on the whole language philosophy, were explained. These strategies were applied to a first grade phonics-based basal reading program. Lessons and activities were developed to integrate holistic strategies with the phonics-based basal reading program. Implications for further research and teacher training were discussed

Discourse Analysis and ADHD in the English as a Second Language teaching context

[ES] This thesis analyses the teaching practice of an English as a second language teacher in a Primary School. The aim of this inquiry is to revise the pedagogy used during the teaching practice regarding attention to diversity, more specifically about ADHD, and the elaboration of a proper plan to teach English to ADHD as a foreign language in inclusive classes. The study shows how to address the needs of ADHD children while they learn English as a second language under a discourse analysis scope. A large proportion of published material about the matter of study shows how to cope with the difficulties of ADHD individuals in the basic areas, literacy and Mathematics. The majority of these studies and research literature are based on the teaching of subjects in the L1 of students, that is, using their mother tongue. Teaching a second language to ADHD students is starting to gain importance in the field of language acquisition. The present thesis is a compilation of strategies, games and activities to make language learning possible and fun for hyperkinetic children. Under a desk research scope, discourse analysis, language acquisition and ESL (English as a Second Language), as well as ADHD have been studied and discussed to outline a realistic model in the paradigm of teaching and learning English as a second language with ADHD students in inclusive classrooms. These issues have been tackled over several sections. The teaching of second languages and an approximation of the definition of discourse analysis conform the theoretical framework on section four. A deeper investigation about discourse analysis can be found in section five, as a basis to the teaching of languages. An approach to the concept of ADHD is submitted in section six, while further explanations about the matter and considerations for teachers are to be found in section seven. Besides that, section eight shows a compilation of different techniques, implementations and activities suggested to teach ESL with ADHD students in inclusive classes. Finally, a case intervention is presented in section nine. Additionally, this thesis also presents two cognitive training self-instruction models for children, with and without ADHD, for oral and written activities in ESL

Order and structure in syntax I

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language

The nature of novel word representations : computer mouse tracking shows evidence of immediate lexical engagement effects in adults

Simplistically, words are the mental bundling of a form and a referent. However, words also dynamically interact with one another in the cognitive system, and have other so-called ‘lexical properties’. For example, the word ‘dog’ will cue recognition of ‘dock’ by shared phonology, and ‘cat’, by shared semantics. Researchers have suggested that such lexical engagement between words emerges slowly, and with sleep. However, newer research suggests that this is not the case. Herein, seven experiments investigate this claim.Fast mapping (FM), a developmental word learning procedure, has been reported to promote lexical engagement before sleep in adults. Experiment 1 altered the task parameters and failed to replicate this finding. Experiment 2 attempted a methodological replication – again, no effect was found. It is concluded that the effect reported is not easily replicable.Other findings of pre-sleep lexical engagement were then considered using a novel methodology – computer mouse tracking. Experiments 3 and 4 developed optimal mouse tracking procedures and protocols for studying lexical engagement. Experiment 5 then applied this methodology to novel word learning, and found clear evidence of immediate lexical engagement. Experiment 6 provided evidence that participants were binding the word form to the referent in these pre-sleep lexical representations. Experiment 7 sought to strengthen this finding, but has been postponed due to the CoViD-19 pandemic.The results are discussed in the context of the distributed cohort model of speech perception, a complementary learning systems account of word learning, and differing abstractionist and episodic accounts of the lexicon. It is concluded that the results may be most clearly explained by an episodic lexicon, although there is a need to develop hybrid models, factoring in consolidation and abstraction for the efficient storage of representations in the long term