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As schools around the world increasingly use digital text, research is needed to understand the impact different media may have on opportunities for language and literacy development. Using mixed methods to analyze students’ collaborative interactions across different media, this study examined how linguistically diverse students engaged with digital and paper books in a cross-age peer-learning literacy program. Findings revealed that the quality of students’ engagement differed across media. Students were more likely to engage in meaningful talk, use text features to support comprehension, and attend to text when using paper books. Findings have implications for how educators may reconsider instruction using digital texts in order to support language and literacy development with students learning an additional language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates spontaneous 'metaphors' produced by two three-year-old children, bilingual in English and Hindi. It suggests that children's bodies, no matter which of their languages they use, provide them with durable analogical grids early on in language acquisition to process their inconstant environments. Such an embodied space for metacognitive exploration seems crucial as children bootstrap themselves into adult-like language use through productive and pleasurable processes of guesswork, first producing 'mimic' metaphors, malapropisms and puns around at age 3+ before they progress to the 'true' forms at about age 4+. In this connection, the paper proposes the new interactional measure of corrigibility or 'hypothesis correction' by caregivers and the subsequent acceptance of, or resistance to, this different hypothesis by children. • Focuses on metaphor acquisition in Hindi-English bilingual children aged 3–5 years. • Proposes that the (child's) body provides a reliable analogical grid in early cognition. • Considers puns and malapropisms as well as metaphors and similes in children. • Postulates a 'mimic' stage before the occurrence of 'true' metaphors and puns. • Presents 'corrigibility criteria' as interactional elements in adult-child exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A texting-based vocabulary program was tested in early childhood classrooms. • Teachers sent weekly texts about vocabulary from stories read in class. • An RCT of 49 classrooms found treatment impacts on target vocabulary knowledge (d = 0.17). • No impacts were found on general receptive vocabulary (PPVT). • The program showed high rates of fidelity of implementation. This paper presents the results of an intervention study focused on understanding how a 5-month, vocabulary-focused texting program called Text to Talk can enhance home-school connections concerning vocabulary and preschool children's language learning. Classrooms (49) were randomly assigned to intervention or control status in an urban preschool program in the eastern United States. Intervention teachers delivered Text to Talk, a curriculum-aligned program that provides weekly texts for teachers to send to families that include vocabulary words and related activities from books being read in the classroom. Children's target word knowledge and receptive language skills (PPVT) were measured at baseline and follow-up, with treatment effects on target word knowledge (d = 0.17). Treatment families reported much higher use of texting as a source of communication with teachers, but otherwise rates of home-school communication in person, phone, and with paper were unchanged; family self-report of general home learning activities was also unaffected by treatment status. Implementation analysis showed moderate to high fidelity among teachers and families, with greater family fidelity associated with larger treatment impacts. The findings suggest that a family-focused texting-based program, aligned with the school curriculum, leads to improved taught-word knowledge among children from under-resourced communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Large speaker-specific spectral variation present in Swedish children's voiceless fricatives. • Spectral centre of gravity, spectral peak and low-mid spectral balance were most important variables in classification of voiceless fricatives. • Contrast between sibilants increased with age, although inter-speaker variation was substantial. In this study, we explore individual variation and contrast in Swedish children's voiceless fricatives. Thirty-one children between three and eight years of age participated in a picture-prompted word repetition task, wherein they repeated fricative-initial words in a variety of vowel contexts. The fricatives were transcribed and acoustically analysed, using spectral moments 1–4, spectral peak and spectral balance measures. Random forests were used to estimate the relative importance of each spectral feature in the classification of correct fricative productions, as well as to measure robustness of the late-emerging contrast between sibilants [s] and [ɕ] in individual children. Transcription analysis revealed that substitutions involving a more anterior place of articulation were common. Acoustic analysis showed individual differences in variability and contrast in the children's fricative systems across and within age groups. Cue weighting of spectral characteristics in classification was similar in all age groups for correct productions, while the magnitude of the acoustic contrast between sibilants increased with age. This paper provides a description of individual variation in Swedish children's acquisition of fricatives which can inform future large-scale speech-acquisition research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critical period hypothesis (CPH) as an explanation of age effects on language learning has been a perennial source of contention in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Although this hypothesis – which suggests that adult language learning is constrained by biological or maturational changes in the brain – has been based on the work of Eric Lenneberg (i.e. Biological Foundations of Language , 1967), it does not reflect Lenneberg's original biological theory of language. In this paper, the CPH is examined in light of a comprehensive review of Lenneberg's work and related disciplines. By outlining Lenneberg's notion of epigenesis in language development, it is argued that the CPH interpretation of the critical period notion that has long skewed the debate over age effects in SLA must be re-evaluated, and that any reference to "Lenneberg's CPH" can – and should – be abandoned. • The conceptual foundations of the critical period hypothesis (CPH) explanation of age effects in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) are reviewed. • The CPH interpretation of Eric Lenneberg's (1967) biological theory of language development is found to be unwarranted in light of Lenneberg's epigeneticist stance. • It is suggested that maturational explanations of second language acquisition should adopt an epigeneticist view critical periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language acquisition and learning literatures favour mother-tongue education policies, particularly in the early years of schooling. However, English Medium Instruction (EMI) remains a popular language policy position in multilingual contexts. This paper studies EMI transition policies using a longitudinal dataset from Ethiopia, by leveraging regional variation in education language policy reforms for causal identification. Employing a dynamic value-added model, this paper shows that students in schools using English as a medium of instruction have lower mathematics test scores (−0.25 standard deviations) compared to students in mother tongue education schools. Furthermore, English medium learners do not perform any better in their English test scores compared to mother tongue learners. These findings are in line with the international education literature on skill development, learning and second language acquisition. The main results support the prolonged utilisation of mother tongue instruction in primary education. These results are particularly relevant for policy makers in linguistically diverse contexts. • This paper studies the impact of English medium instruction policies on children's learning outcomes in the context of Ethiopia. • A value-added model of student attainment is used to estimate the impact of English medium instruction on student learning outcomes. • The main results show that mother tongue instruction has a positive impact on student learning. • Social and political contexts matter. As such, there is not one optimal language policy for all multilingual contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presuppositions are traditionally understood as a set of backgrounded, and thus not-at-issue, projective inferences that are taken for granted by communicators. In the last decades it has been observed that presuppositions behave heterogeneously, which lead to a discussion about the distinction between soft and hard presupposition triggers. In this paper, another property of presuppositions is exploited to test if there is evidence for a soft-hard dichotomy: their reluctance to answer the current Question Under Discussion, as observed by Simons et al. (2010). Using a modified acceptability judgment task, we tested children between 4 and 6 years of age and adult controls. Audio recordings with image stills featured both kinds of presupposition triggers in at-issue and non-at-issue exchanges, with non-restrictive relative clauses as controls, as they are conventionally not-at-issue but usually add new information. The results indicate that, for our adult participants, such backgroundedness violations are worse in the case of hard triggers, whereas soft triggers are markedly less deviant in such cases. Children are also sensitive to the soft-hard distinction but react less strongly than adult counterparts to oddity effects. Additionally, hard triggers pattern with non-restrictive relative clauses in both groups. • The split of presupposition triggers is reflected in their ability to be at-issue. • Violations of backgroundedness are markedly worse in the case of hard triggers. • Preschoolers are less sensitive to violations of the Not-At-Issueness Constraint. • Children are less sensitive to the difference between the soft and hard triggers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard computational models of language acquisition treat acquiring a language as a process of inducing a set of string-generating rules from a collection of linguistic data assumed to be generated by these very rules. In this paper I give theoretical and empirical arguments that such a model is radically unlike what a human language learner must do to acquire their native language. Most centrally, I argue that such models presuppose that linguistic data is directly a product of a grammar, ignoring the myriad non-grammatical systems involved in the use of language. The significance of these non-target systems in shaping the linguistic data children are exposed to undermines any simple reverse inference from linguistic data to grammatical competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper examines the perception of Mandarin tones by children with cochlear implants in both audio-only (AO) and audiovisua (AV) conditions across quiet and noisy environments. • A picture-pointing task was adopted. • Children with cochlear implants demonstrated higher tonal perception accuracy in the AV condition compared to the AO condition, implying that they can use visual-articulatory cues to enhance their tonal perception, although in noisy environments only. • Children who were implanted earlier are better able to use visual cues to facilitate tonal perception. • These findings highlight the importance of visual cues in speech communication for individuals with hearing impairments and their strong ability to perceive visual speech. Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in tonal perception under noise. Nevertheless, our previous research demonstrated that seeing visual-articulatory cues (speakers' facial/head movements) benefited these children to perceive isolated tones better, particularly in noisy environments, with those implanted earlier gaining more benefits. However, tones in daily speech typically occur in sentence contexts where visual cues are largely reduced compared to those in isolated contexts. It was thus unclear if visual benefits on tonal perception still hold in these challenging sentence contexts. Therefore, this study tested 64 children with CIs and 64 age-matched NH children. Target tones in sentence-medial position were presented in audio-only (AO) or audiovisual (AV) conditions, in quiet and noisy environments. Children selected the target tone using a picture-point task. The results showed that, while NH children did not show any perception difference between AO and AV conditions, children with CIs significantly improved their perceptual accuracy from AO to AV conditions. The degree of improvement was negatively correlated with their implantation ages. Therefore, children with CIs were able to use visual-articulatory cues to facilitate their tonal perception even in sentence contexts, and earlier auditory experience might be important in shaping this ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems excel at diverse tasks, from image classification to strategy games, even outperforming humans in many of these domains. After making astounding progress in language learning in the recent decade, AI systems, however, seem to approach the ceiling that does not reflect important aspects of human communicative capacities. Unlike human learners, communicative AI systems often fail to systematically generalize to new data, suffer from sample inefficiency, fail to capture common-sense semantic knowledge, and do not translate to real-world communicative situations. Cognitive Science offers several insights on how AI could move forward from this point. This paper aims to: (1) suggest that the dominant cognitively-inspired AI directions, based on nativist and symbolic paradigms, lack necessary substantiation and concreteness to guide progress in modern AI, and (2) articulate an alternative, "grounded", perspective on AI advancement, inspired by Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive Cognition (4E) research. I review results on 4E research lines in Cognitive Science to distinguish the main aspects of naturalistic learning conditions that play causal roles for human language development. I then use this analysis to propose a list of concrete, implementable components for building "grounded" linguistic intelligence. These components include embodying machines in a perception–action cycle, equipping agents with active exploration mechanisms so they can build their own curriculum, allowing agents to gradually develop motor abilities to promote piecemeal language development, and endowing the agents with adaptive feedback from their physical and social environment. I hope that these ideas can direct AI research towards building machines that develop human-like language abilities through their experiences with the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Previous research has identified a range of learner factors and contextual factors that mediate L2 learners' engagement with written corrective feedback (WCF). However, much remains to be known about how these factors impact individual learners' engagement with WCF in L2 classrooms. To address this issue, the paper draws upon the ecological perspective on language learning to discuss the data collected in a case study on Chinese university EFL students' engagement with WCF. Data were collected from multiple resources including students' writing, verbal reports, interviews, field notes, and class documents. While the context, ranging from the textual level to the broad sociocultural level, was found to provide resources that could afford learning, engagement hinged on whether students were able and willing to perceive and use those affordances. The findings suggest that learner engagement with WCF can be conceptualized as a process of perceiving and acting upon embedded learning opportunities afforded by WCF, and highlight the importance of establishing an alignment between affordances and learner agency to enhance individual students' engagement with written feedback. Highlights • The paper takes an ecological perspective on learner engagement with WCF. • WCF, among other learning resources, are situated in the multi-layered context. • Learner engagement with WCF is a process of perceiving and acting upon affordances. • Multiple learner factors and contextual factors influence learner engagement with WCF. • Engagement requires an alignment between learner agency and affordance in the context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental work in the field of language evolution has shown that novel signal systems become more structured over time. In a recent paper, Kirby, Tamariz, Cornish, and Smith (2015) argued that compositional languages can emerge only when languages are transmitted across multiple generations. In the current paper, we show that compositional languages can emerge in a closed community within a single generation. We conducted a communication experiment in which we tested the emergence of linguistic structure in different micro-societies of four participants, who interacted in alternating dyads using an artificial language to refer to novel meanings. Importantly, the communication included two real-world aspects of language acquisition and use, which introduce compressibility pressures: (a) multiple interaction partners and (b) an expanding meaning space. Our results show that languages become significantly more structured over time, with participants converging on shared, stable, and compositional lexicons. These findings indicate that new learners are not necessary for the formation of linguistic structure within a community, and have implications for related fields such as developing sign languages and creoles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic pronunciation error detection (APED) plays an important role in the domain of language learning. As for the previous ASR-based APED methods, the decoded results need to be aligned with the target text so that the errors can be found out. However, since the decoding process and the alignment process are independent, the prior knowledge about the target text is not fully utilized. In this paper, we propose to use the target text as an extra condition for the Transformer backbone to handle the APED task. The proposed method can output the error states with consideration of the relationship between the input speech and the target text in a fully end-to-end fashion. Meanwhile, as the prior target text is used as a condition for the decoder input, the Transformer works in a feed-forward manner instead of autoregressive in the inference stage, which can significantly boost the speed in the actual deployment. We set the ASR-based Transformer as the baseline APED model and conduct several experiments on the L2-Arctic dataset. The results demonstrate that our approach can obtain 8.4% relative improvement on the F 1 score metric. • Incorporate the target text into the automatic pronunciation error detection task. • Fully end-to-end feed-forward Transformer. • A more reasonable false rejection rate and the false acceptance rate. • The degree of strictness can be easily adjusted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infants learn their native language(s) at an amazing speed. Before they even talk, their perception adapts to the language(s) they hear. However, the mechanisms responsible for this perceptual attunement and the circumstances in which it takes place remain unclear. This paper presents the first attempt to study perceptual attunement using ecological child-centered audio data. We show that a simple prediction algorithm exhibits perceptual attunement when applied on unrealistic clean audio-book data, but fails to do so when applied on ecologically-valid child-centered data. In the latter scenario, perceptual attunement only emerges when the prediction mechanism is supplemented with inductive biases that force the algorithm to focus exclusively on speech segments while learning speaker-, pitch-, and room-invariant representations. We argue these biases are plausible given previous research on infants and non-human animals. More generally, we show that what our model learns and how it develops through exposure to speech depends exquisitely on the details of the input signal. By doing so, we illustrate the importance of considering ecologically valid input data when modeling language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A later start of English as a foreign language (EFL) lessons is beneficial to pupils with DLD. • Pupils with more positive attitudes towards EFL lessons obtain higher scores. • In pupils with DLD, more EFL anxiety is associated with lower achievement. • Predictors of EFL achievement change over time. Like children with typical language development, their peers with developmental language disorder (DLD) are expected to learn English as a foreign language (EFL). For pupils without DLD, it is well-established that amount of informal exposure to English outside of the classroom, starting age of EFL instruction and motivation are strong positive predictors of EFL learning rate and/or achievement, whereas anxiety is negatively related to performance. This paper is the first attempt to investigate how these predictors of EFL performance operate in learners with DLD. Participants were nineteen Dutch-speaking 7th graders with DLD learning English as a school subject at a specialist education facility in the Netherlands. English receptive grammar and receptive vocabulary were measured twice, with a four-month interval. Foreign language learning motivation, anxiety and (length and amount of) informal exposure to and instruction in English were measured via questionnaires. The participants did not show any progress on English vocabulary and grammar. At Time 1, vocabulary and grammar scores were positively related to starting age of EFL instruction and negatively related to anxiety. For vocabulary, achievement was also positively predicted by attitudes towards English lessons. Only the relationship between starting age of instruction and vocabulary outcomes was visible at Time 2. Amount and length of informal exposure to English did not predict performance, which is in stark contrast to the patterns observed in EFL learners with typical language development. We conclude that children with DLD benefit from a later onset of foreign language lessons, whereas length and amount of out-of-school exposure to English are less important in the context of DLD, possibly due to difficulty with implicit learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the appropriation of the affordances of text-based communication in digital media to evoke associations with multimodal communication, specifically visual, auditory and haptic experiences accompanying observed nonverbal phenomena and actions in text-messages. In order to account for these phenomena, the notion of kineticon is introduced and theorised from the perspective of its constitutive elements, established conventions, and functions. Through the analysis presented here, I identify a user-initiated language development serving to express multimodal meanings within a written medium often simplistically treated as mono-modal. I also demonstrate that the Goffmanian categories of given and given off expression need to be reconsidered in the light of the emergence of the expression of multimodal content in text-based digital media. The paper proposes a methodological approach to the analysis of user-initiated language phenomena, which includes naturally occurring data collection, the use of online participant observations, and detailed interviews using data as prompts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developmental research in L2 pragmatics addresses two essential issues: changes within the L2 pragmatics systems and influences on the systems (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999). These two issues can be best examined through the lens of longitudinal research, which by design allows us to observe how L2 learners change over time and helps establish causal relationships between change and time. Although the body of longitudinal studies describing changes has expanded in the past decade, not many studies have documented influences on the changing pragmatic systems. Existing studies are largely descriptive rather than explanatory, and do not explain how and why changes occurred. To address this limitation, this paper presents mixed methods research as a promising approach. By integrating quantitative and qualitative data analyses in a single study, mixed methods research can reveal patterns of change over time, and at the same time help reveal individual and contextual factors influencing the observed patterns. Using example studies, this paper illustrates how mixed methods approaches can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of pragmatic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study, we investigated (i) to what extent the early literacy skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and word decoding) along with cognitive (nonverbal reasoning, attention, phonological short-term memory, sequential memory, executive functioning) and linguistic (auditory discrimination, rapid naming, articulation, vocabulary) precursor measures of 53 six-year old children with intellectual disabilities (ID) differ from a group of 74 peers with normal language acquisition (NLA) and (ii) whether the individual variation of early literacy skills in the two groups to the same extent can be explained from the precursor measures. Results showed that children with ID scored below the NLA group on all literacy and precursor measures. Structural equation modeling evidenced that in the children with NLA early literacy was directly predicted by phonological awareness, PSTM and vocabulary, with nonverbal reasoning and auditory discrimination also predicting phonological awareness. In children with ID however, the variation in word decoding was predicted by letter knowledge and nonverbal reasoning, whereas letter knowledge was predicted by rapid naming, which on its turn was predicted by attentional skills. It can be concluded phonological awareness plays a differential role in the early literacy skills of children with and without ID. As a consequence, the arrears in phonological awareness in children with ID might put them on hold in gaining proper access to literacy acquisition.What This Paper Adds: This paper adds to the theoretical knowledge base on literacy acquisition in a special population, namely children with intellectual disabilities (ID). It addresses factors that influence early literacy learning, which have not been investigated thoroughly in this special and specific group. Furthermore, the children are not tested solely on literacy, but also on cognitive measures that may influence literacy acquisition. Whereas most research in ID focuses on groups with specific syndromes/etiologies, this paper takes a varied group of children with ID into account. The paper also adds to educational insights, since the findings imply that children with ID are able to use phonological pathways in learning to read. Educators could teach these children phonics-based literacy skills tailored to their individual learning needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even when both use and cognition are incorporated in its theorizing about grammatical change, research in diachronic construction grammar which explicitly subscribes to a “usage-based” approach does not always distinguish between abstraction from the observed usage of a linguistic community and individual linguistic knowledge. Given that language change starts with innovations by individuals, such a distinction crucially needs to be made to arrive at a realistic usage-based account of grammatical change. This paper first assesses the extent to which the conflicting models of Elizabeth Traugott and Olga Fischer succeed in teasing apart internal and external systems, concluding that while the former's reanalysis model results from an external semasiological perspective, the latter's analogy model is more radically usage-based in that it does not inherently entangle intra- and extra-individual knowledge. By way of illustration of a fundamentally analogy-based approach, the main part of the paper proposes an onomasiological account of how the pattern be bound to came to be used as a non-deontic/epistemic necessity marker, offering an alternative to viewing it as a development from the historically prior deontic be bound to construction. The data are mainly drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the distributed intelligence or federated inference that emerges under belief-sharing among agents who share a common world—and world model. Imagine, for example, several animals keeping a lookout for predators. Their collective surveillance rests upon being able to communicate their beliefs—about what they see—among themselves. But, how is this possible? Here, we show how all the necessary components arise from minimising free energy. We use numerical studies to simulate the generation, acquisition and emergence of language in synthetic agents. Specifically, we consider inference, learning and selection as minimising the variational free energy of posterior (i.e., Bayesian) beliefs about the states, parameters and structure of generative models, respectively. The common theme—that attends these optimisation processes—is the selection of actions that minimise expected free energy, leading to active inference, learning and model selection (a.k.a., structure learning). We first illustrate the role of communication in resolving uncertainty about the latent states of a partially observed world, on which agents have complementary perspectives. We then consider the acquisition of the requisite language—entailed by a likelihood mapping from an agent's beliefs to their overt expression (e.g., speech)—showing that language can be transmitted across generations by active learning. Finally, we show that language is an emergent property of free energy minimisation, when agents operate within the same econiche. We conclude with a discussion of various perspectives on these phenomena; ranging from cultural niche construction, through federated learning, to the emergence of complexity in ensembles of self-organising systems. • Communication—and language in particular—is an emergent property of agents that seek evidence for generative models of their shared world. • Nested free energy minimising—evidence maximising—processes explain the emergence of language and its transmission over generations. • Reading these processes as inference integrates perspectives on communication; from generalised synchrony to cultural niche construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children whose mother tongue is different from the language of instruction at school face additional challenges developing literacy skills. One approach to this favours immersion in the language of instruction, while another favours a transitional period of bilingual education. This paper evaluates the impact of a primary school literacy intervention. In addition to multi-faceted literacy support, the programme included a component of transitional bilingual education for students whose mother tongue is not the usual language of instruction. Over two years, the intervention raised literacy scores in the language of instruction by ＋0.41 sd, and literacy in mother tongue for minority language speakers by ＋0.75 sd. Our findings suggests that a light-touch transitional bilingual component can support minority language literacy without crowding out acquisition of the language of instruction. • This paper evaluates an early primary school literacy intervention piloted in rural Bangladesh. • The intervention targeted literacy through high-quality bilingual story books. • The intervention improved literacy in the language of instruction (＋0.41 sd) and in mother tongue (＋0.75 sd). • Literacy improvements in the language of instruction were similar across language backgrounds. • Literacy improvements in mother tongue neither sped nor slowed improvements in the other language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the ongoing need to support all students' academic language development throughout their university studies, the academic language and learning team at an Australian university has established the Academic Language Development (ALD) program. This program screens all commencing students at the university and offers an innovative whole-of-institution approach to discipline-specific language development. The purpose of this paper is to report on a large-scale, long-term and multi-faceted evaluation of the ALD program, considering the impact of attending compulsory language development tutorials on 3922 students, the majority of whom were L2 users of English. Surveys have been carried out and data collected on academic language development, academic outcomes, student perceptions of their confidence, and other gains from attending the tutorials. A particular focus of this analysis is on the affective aspects of language development. In addition to developing academic language proficiency, the findings show that students benefited in multiple ways from the ALD program. Key themes emerged from the data around confidence, agency, and social connections, as well as a greater ability to navigate the university landscape. This paper offers an innovative approach to the evaluation of language programs that will be relevant to those teaching and researching linguistically diverse cohorts across faculties in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment by written exams and coursework is common practice in pre-sessional and preliminary year EAP programmes, but the allocation of marks for written assessment is complex, as is training raters to apply specified assessment standards. This practitioner research uses a Logic Model, a visual diagram commonly used in programme evaluation, to evaluate the rater training procedure for writing assessment in an English-medium university department. This study integrates data from surveys, interviews and workshops with the stakeholders involved in the rater training procedure to develop a Logic Model as part of an ongoing theory of change evaluation. The final product is a Model that reveals the guiding principles of rater training in the department, text that describes the evaluation process, and a measurement plan. This paper showcases how practitioner research can enhance EAP practice by demonstrating how an essential component of EAP assessment, rater training, and the rationale behind it, can be made cogent to the various stakeholders involved in the procedure. This paper offers considerations for EAP practitioners, managers, and testing staff when developing or working with rater training, bridging the gap between EAP and language testing and assessment communities. • The process of developing a Logic Model as part of an ongoing evaluation of a rater training procedure in EAP programmes in a Higher Education Institution is described. • Creating a Logic Model is a key step in examining the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, and recognising various approaches used to measure the effectiveness of rater training. • Logic Models can guide communication between stakeholders and highlight congruencies and inconsistencies, ultimately encouraging faculty buy-in. • Lessons for EAP practitioners, managers, and testing staff who wish to develop and use Logic Models in future evaluations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings can be used to quantify the amount of verbal communication in a recording environment. One key application of WCE is to measure language input heard by infants and toddlers in their natural environments, as captured by daylong recordings from microphones worn by the infants. Although WCE is nearly trivial for high-quality signals in high-resource languages, daylong recordings are substantially more challenging due to the unconstrained acoustic environments and the presence of near- and far-field speech. Moreover, many use cases of interest involve languages for which reliable ASR systems or even well-defined lexicons are not available. A good WCE system should also perform similarly for low- and high-resource languages in order to enable unbiased comparisons across different cultures and environments. Unfortunately, the current state-of-the-art solution, the LENA system, is based on proprietary software and has only been optimized for American English, limiting its applicability. In this paper, we build on existing work on WCE and present the steps we have taken towards a freely available system for WCE that can be adapted to different languages or dialects with a limited amount of orthographically transcribed speech data. Our system is based on language-independent syllabification of speech, followed by a language-dependent mapping from syllable counts (and a number of other acoustic features) to the corresponding word count estimates. We evaluate our system on samples from daylong infant recordings from six different corpora consisting of several languages and socioeconomic environments, all manually annotated with the same protocol to allow direct comparison. We compare a number of alternative techniques for the two key components in our system: speech activity detection and automatic syllabification of speech. As a result, we show that our system can reach relatively consistent WCE accuracy across multiple corpora and languages (with some limitations). In addition, the system outperforms LENA on three of the four corpora consisting of different varieties of English. We also demonstrate how an automatic neural network-based syllabifier, when trained on multiple languages, generalizes well to novel languages beyond the training data, outperforming two previously proposed unsupervised syllabifiers as a feature extractor for WCE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages change due to social, cultural, and cognitive influences. In this paper, we provide an assessment of these cognitive influences on diachronic change in the vocabulary. Previously, tests of stability and change of vocabulary items have been conducted on small sets of words where diachronic change is imputed from cladistics studies. Here, we show for a substantially larger set of words that stability and change in terms of documented borrowings of words into English and into Dutch can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties of words that reflect their representational fidelity. We found that grammatical category, word length, age of acquisition, and frequency predict borrowing rates, but frequency has a non-linear relationship. Frequency correlates negatively with probability of borrowing for high-frequency words, but positively for low-frequency words. This borrowing evidence documents recent, observable diachronic change in the vocabulary enabling us to distinguish between change associated with transmission during language acquisition and change due to innovations by proficient speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Recent trends in the numbers of minority language speakers have given cause for concern as to the effectiveness of traditional language-acquisition and survival strategies. This paper addresses the establishment of a recognized survival scenario, that of diglossia , the allocation of different languages to complementary social domains. The method is the novel application of an analogue of the partition function of statistical mechanics, embodied in a cellular automaton, to a population of subsets of social domains in which either of two languages may be spoken. The case of modern Wales is discussed in detail. Conclusions are drawn regarding the role of diglossia in the preservation of endangered languages. Highlights • An examination of the criteria of diglossia. • The use of the partition function in the context of opinion. • A cellular automaton (CA) of language use over a set of persons. • A CA of the evolution of diglossia over a set of social domains in two dimensions. • An application of the general CA to the case of 20th-century Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The accessibility of online resources in English means that today informal contexts offer a multitude of language development opportunities. The main objective of this paper concerns the investigation of smartphone use for the online informal learning of English among undergraduate students in Slovenia. An online survey and semi-structured interviews were used to explore the most frequent smartphone activities involving language use, the predominant language for these activities, and the level of co-evolution between smartphone activities in English and perceived language competence in English. The results show that, despite the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies, the participants still predominantly access online content for receptive rather than interactive/productive activities, in particular when English and not their mother tongue is involved. In terms of perceived communicative competence and online informal learning of English, the results indicate the co-evolution of two complex dynamic systems: the use of the digital context in English and the system of participants' communicative competence levels in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In contemporary education, students often need to use the Internet to find information for solving a problem and completing a learning task. Teachers assume that students are sufficiently skilled to do so, but research shows the skills necessary for effective information problem solving (IPS) are more often than not underdeveloped. This paper presents a study on embedded IPS training consisting of whole IPS tasks integrated in a 20-week course on vocabulary development, and its effects on student teachers' IPS skills. Skill measurements show that student teachers receiving the training search and select information more systematically in the short term, but their search queries, sources, and solutions are not of significantly higher quality than those of student teachers who received the regular course without IPS training. In addition, the improvements were no longer visible after five weeks. The training therefore succeeded in developing cognitive strategies for approaching an information problem, but did not create lasting improvements in all aspects of the IPS skill. Methodological and practical implications are discussed. Highlights • Students received an embedded, whole-task information problem solving training. • Trained students improved their approach to searching and selecting information. • No improvements were found on quality of queries, selected sources and solutions. • Improvements were no longer visible on a test five weeks after training stopped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary purpose of the paper was to review several secondary sources in the field of Second Language Acquisition. Consequently, various literatures available from PubMed, Scopus, the Cochrane Library, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Google Scholar, reference lists, and ongoing studies were reviewed. The current research identified and analyzed psycholinguistic factors that impact second language acquisition by immigrants with special emphasis on psychological, linguistic, and social determinants. From the literature review that was conducted, it was established that several previous studies confirmed that age at migration has an inverse correlation with mastery of the second language. Also, it was found that immigrants from groups that are largely represented in the host country have a lower probability of achieving second language proficiency. Further, the linguistic distance between the native and the target language is associated with second language acquisition. Concerning social and psycholinguistic factors, a difference exists between genders in the achievement of good oral skills and family particularly matters in the assimilation into the new culture. Therefore, this review paper highlighted the need for support from the local communities, the government and the non-governmental organizations to help the immigrants effectively learn a second language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the potential advantages of regional assessments, such as ERCE 2019, in addressing challenges faced by larger international large scales assessments with heterogeneous populations. The paper investigates whether a regionally focused assessment, developed with the active involvement of all participating countries and targeting more homogeneous populations in terms of language, culture, and economic development, can result in better alignment between measurement instruments and participants' proficiency. Using construct mapping techniques and item response theory reliability indexes, the study aims to identify whether the measurement gaps observed in studies with more heterogeneous populations studies like TIMSS and PISA also exist in ERCE. • Test difficulty-country proficiency misalignment is common in large scale assessment. • Countries in the misaligned score region receive unreliable results. • However large-scale assessment limitations are not homogenous to all studies. • Regional large-scale assessment studies can minimize the sources of this misalignment. • ERCE is an example where test difficulty is well-aligned to participating countries' proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Children's labeling accuracy was higher for the adult speaker than for themselves. • Of the three Polish sibilants, the alveolo-palatal /ɕ/ is acquired first. • The acoustic measures that best predict children's labeling differ for the three fricatives /s, ʂ, ɕ/ are F2 and COG. • The perceptual data suggest sibilant-specific changes in cue weighting over age in contrast to previous studies based on simple fricative systems. This paper reports a developmental production-perception study of the three-way Polish sibilant contrast /s, ʂ, ɕ/ in typically developing children (N = 76). Children aged 2;11–7;11 produced words with sibilants in word-medial and initial position. They then identified the same words they produced, and the words as produced by an unknown adult female. Results show higher identification accuracy for adult productions across all ages. Production and perception data suggest that the alveolo-palatal /ɕ/ is acquired first, and that it is differentiated mainly by formant patterns. In the perceptual discrimination task, most errors were found for child-produced /ʂ/, and this persisted into the oldest ages. Early acquisition of /ɕ/ has been observed in other languages and may reflect motoric considerations as well as a focus on formant information in child speech perception. Cue weighting appears to change over age in sibilant-specific ways. While all children weight formants highest for /ɕ/, spectral cues appear to be more important for /s/ and /ʂ/, and reliance on formants may decrease with age. This work contributes to the study of cross-language differences in acquisition, provides an acoustic characterization of child-produced Polish sibilants, and elucidates the acoustic characteristics that children use in perceptual judgments of sibilants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The spatial impact of socioeconomic determinants on the macro-level early developmental vulnerability of children was analyzed in this paper using Local Government Areas (LGAs) as samples. Five domains of developmental outcomes: physical, social, emotional, language and cognitive, and communication have been addressed as ordinal outcomes, and fitted by the proportional odds model. Areas with a high percentage of low-income, welfare dependent and single parent families significantly increased the proportion of vulnerable children in all five domains. Other factors that significantly affect some aspects of developmental vulnerability in children are participation of women in the labor market, availability of home Internet and unemployment rate in the locality. The macro-level results match with previous micro-level assessments showing the relationship between household socioeconomic features and childhood vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exaggerated intonation and special rhythmic properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been hypothesized to attract infants' attention to the speech stream. However, there has been little work actually connecting the properties of IDS to models of attentional processing or perceptual learning. A number of such attention models suggest that surprising or novel perceptual inputs attract attention, where novelty can be operationalized as the statistical (un)predictability of the stimulus in the given context. Since prosodic patterns such as F0 contours are accessible to young infants who are also known to be adept statistical learners, the present paper investigates a hypothesis that F0 contours in IDS are less predictable than those in adult-directed speech (ADS), given previous exposure to both speaking styles, thereby potentially tapping into basic attentional mechanisms of the listeners in a similar manner that relative probabilities of other linguistic patterns are known to modulate attentional processing in infants and adults. Computational modeling analyses with naturalistic IDS and ADS speech from matched speakers and contexts show that IDS intonation has lower overall temporal predictability even when the F0 contours of both speaking styles are normalized to have equal means and variances. A closer analysis reveals that there is a tendency of IDS intonation to be less predictable at the end of short utterances, whereas ADS exhibits more stable average predictability patterns across the full extent of the utterances. The difference between IDS and ADS persists even when the proportion of IDS and ADS exposure is varied substantially, simulating different relative amounts of IDS heard in different family and cultural environments. Exposure to IDS is also found to be more efficient for predicting ADS intonation contours in new utterances than exposure to the equal amount of ADS speech. This indicates that the more variable prosodic contours of IDS also generalize to ADS, and may therefore enhance prosodic learning in infancy. Overall, the study suggests that one reason behind infant preference for IDS could be its higher information value at the prosodic level, as measured by the amount of surprisal in the F0 contours. This provides the first formal link between the properties of IDS and the models of attentional processing and statistical learning in the brain. However, this finding does not rule out the possibility that other differences between the IDS and ADS also play a role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous developmental studies have revealed variation in children's ability to compute scalar inferences. While children have been shown to struggle with standard scalar inferences (e.g., with scalar quantifiers like "some") (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2001; Guasti et al., 2005; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003), there is also a growing handful of inferences that children have been reported to derive quite readily (Barner & Bachrach, 2010; Hochstein, Bale, Fox, & Barner, 2016; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016; Stiller, Goodman, & Frank, 2015; Tieu, Romoli, Zhou, & Crain, 2016; Tieu et al., 2017). One recent approach, which we refer to as the Alternatives-based approach, attributes the variability in children's performance to limitations in how children engage with the alternative sentences that are required to compute the relevant inferences. Specifically, if the alternative sentences can be generated by simplifying the assertion, rather than by lexically replacing one scalar term with another, children should be better able to compute the inference. In this paper, we investigated this prediction by assessing how children and adults interpret sentences that embed disjunction under a universal quantifier, such as "Every elephant caught a big butterfly or a small butterfly". For adults, such sentences typically give rise to the distributive inference that some elephant caught a big butterfly and some elephant caught a small butterfly (Crnič, Chemla, & Fox, 2015; Fox, 2007; Gazdar, 1979). Another possible interpretation, though not one typically accessed by adults, is the conjunctive inference that every elephant caught a big butterfly and a small butterfly (Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016). Crucially, for our purposes, it has been argued that both of these inferences can be derived using alternatives that are generated by deleting parts of the asserted sentence, rather than through lexical replacement, making these sentences an ideal test case for evaluating the predictions of the Alternatives-based approach. The findings of our experimental study reveal that children are indeed able to successfully compute this class of inferences, providing support for the Alternatives-based approach as a viable explanation of children's variable success in computing scalar inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English article system presents a particular challenge to learners. This paper explores the acquisition of articles by Chinese learners of English in two corpora: one of Asian college EFL students, and one of Chinese professionals living and working in the United States. It seeks to describe patterns of L2 English articles across different proficiency levels. Our results show a surprising level of conformity of accuracy rates across participant proficiency levels. L2 speakers use articles in the most native-like manner in plural contexts. Certain errors are common, such as overusing the zero article in inappropriate contexts. Other errors are nonexistent, such as using more than one determiner in a noun phrase. In the end, we emphasize the importance of educators examining their students’ L2 article use with an eye towards the commonly made errors that we uncover. In addition, we advise that L2 article patterns might appear grammatical, but still represent an oversimplified understanding of the English article system. We also suggest further topics for research in L2 acquisition of the noun phrase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postgraduates increasingly write in multilingual contexts. Studies have focused on developing bilingual expertise or harnessing expressions of writer identity. Yet, the role of students’ linguistic ideologies and their writing experiences has so far not been problematised. Based on Busch's sociolinguistic model of linguistic repertoire (2012), this paper investigates how students develop their academic writing across language codes and registers in the multilingual contexts of a Swedish university. The qualitative, longitudinal study presents data from two students including interviews based on the students’ written text relating to their master's thesis. Findings show that students’ linguistic ideologies and their experiences can enable or restrict their capacity to draw on their varied repertoires. When enabled, students create translanguaging spaces for meaning making in collaboration with peers and institutional actors. I argue that the metaphor of translanguaging space can be fruitfully applied as a pedagogic tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how a pair of Korean–American siblings interact and socialize and how their interactions change over time as the younger sibling starts to go to an English-speaking preschool. A 7-year-old Korean–English bilingual girl and her 3-year-old sister were observed in their home over 23 visits within a year. Their discourse data, including 33 h of audio-recordings, were analyzed from the Language Socialization perspective. The older sibling's authority derived from the age-based Korean family hierarchy inevitably played a role in creating shared benefits in the bilingual sibling relationship. After the younger sibling began to speak English, there were noticeable changes in the power asymmetry and language parallelism—the younger sibling's repetition of older sibling's utterances. This study offers insight into the bidirectionality of sibling socialization processes of sibling interactions in relation to their bilingual and bicultural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose This paper examines whether bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) showed limited comprehension of Direct Object (DO) pronoun sentences and/or morphosyntactic priming compared to children with Typical Language Development (TLD) and adults. We analyzed the relation of these morphosyntactic processes to other psycholinguistic abilities, according to the MUC (Memory-Unification-Control) model. Method Ten bilingual native Spanish-speaking children with SLI (8;3–10;6) and 10 age-matched children with TLD (7;6–10;10) received a psycholinguistic evaluation in Spanish-English. The 20 children and 10 adults (19–34) performed an on-line cross-modal pronoun task. They listened to long distance animate DO pronoun sentences, and filler sentences without any pronoun. At the offset of the pronoun in each pronoun sentence, a picture of an animal for the antecedent (match condition), another animal for the second noun (mismatch), or an unrelated object (neutral) was displayed on the screen. In the filler sentences, a picture of an object that depicted the first noun, appeared at the offset of another later noun. Participants decided whether that pictured item was “alive”/“not alive” by pressing two keys on the computer keyboard. Immediately after, they answered an oral comprehension question about the DO pronoun sentence. Results Bilingual children with SLI showed significantly poorer comprehension of DO pronoun sentences than bilingual children with TLD. Pronoun sentence understanding in the overall children correlated significantly with oral sentence completion, expressive vocabulary abilities, auditory story comprehension, and the non-word repetition task, all in Spanish. Adults showed significantly the highest pronoun sentence comprehension, and the fastest animacy decisions across conditions; it was the only group showing a significant behavioral morphosyntactic priming effect. All groups exhibited high accuracy in the animacy decisions across conditions, although children with SLI showed lower accuracy and more variability. Conclusion Bilingual Spanish-English children with SLI showed significant limitations in understanding long distance animate DO pronoun sentences. The deficits were also related to weak morphosyntactic, lexical, and/or phonological representations stored in their memory. These processes may be harder to combine in the unification process, and also to control for answering the comprehension questions. Clinical and educational implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) System is a relatively new recording technology that can be used to investigate typical child language acquisition and populations with language disorders. The purpose of this paper is to familiarize language acquisition researchers and speech-language pathologists with how the LENA System is currently being used in research. The authors outline issues in peer-reviewed research based on the device. Considerations when using the LENA System are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex sentences involving adverbial clauses appear in children’s speech at about three years of age yet children have difficulty comprehending these sentences well into the school years. To date, the reasons for these difficulties are unclear, largely because previous studies have tended to focus on only sub-types of adverbial clauses, or have tested only limited theoretical models. In this paper, we provide the most comprehensive experimental study to date. We tested four-year-olds, five-year-olds and adults on four different adverbial clauses ( before, after, because, if ) to evaluate four different theoretical models (semantic, syntactic, frequency-based and capacity-constrained). 71 children and 10 adults (as controls) completed a forced-choice, picture-selection comprehension test, providing accuracy and response time data. Children also completed a battery of tests to assess their linguistic and general cognitive abilities. We found that children’s comprehension was strongly influenced by semantic factors – the iconicity of the event-to-language mappings – and that their response times were influenced by the type of relation expressed by the connective (temporal vs. causal). Neither input frequency (frequency-based account), nor clause order (syntax account) or working memory (capacity-constrained account) provided a good fit to the data. Our findings thus contribute to the development of more sophisticated models of sentence processing. We conclude that such models must also take into account how children’s emerging linguistic understanding interacts with developments in other cognitive domains such as their ability to construct mental models and reason flexibly about them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two of the key tasks facing the language-learning infant lie at the level of phonology: establishing which sounds are contrastive in the native inventory, and determining what their possible syllabic positions and permissible combinations (phonotactics) are. In 2002-2003, two theoretical proposals, one bearing on how infants can learn sounds (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002) and the other on phonotactics (Chambers, Onishi, & Fisher, 2003), were put forward on the pages of Cognition, each supported by two laboratory experiments, wherein a group of infants was briefly exposed to a set of pseudo-words, and plausible phonological generalizations were tested subsequently. These two papers have received considerable attention from the general scientific community, and inspired a flurry of follow-up work. In the context of questions regarding the replicability of psychological science, the present work uses a meta-analytic approach to appraise extant empirical evidence for infant phonological learning in the laboratory. It is found that neither seminal finding (on learning sounds and learning phonotactics) holds up when close methodological replications are integrated, although less close methodological replications do provide some evidence in favor of the sound learning strand of work. Implications for authors and readers of this literature are drawn out. It would be desirable that additional mechanisms for phonological learning be explored, and that future infant laboratory work employ paradigms that rely on constrained and unambiguous links between experimental exposure and measured infant behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how to achieve highly accurate unsupervised spatial lexical acquisition from speech-recognition results including phoneme recognition errors. In most research into lexical acquisition, the robot has no pre-existing lexical knowledge. The robot acquires sequences of some phonemes as words from continuous speech signals. In a previous study, we proposed a nonparametric Bayesian spatial concept acquisition method (SpCoA) that integrates the robot’s position and words obtained by unsupervised word segmentation from uncertain syllable recognition results. However, SpCoA has a very critical problem to be solved in lexical acquisition; the boundaries of word segmentation are incorrect in many cases because of many phoneme recognition errors. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised machine learning method (SpCoA++) for the robust lexical acquisition of novel words relating to places visited by the robot. The proposed SpCoA++ method performs an iterative estimation of learning spatial concepts and updating a language model using place information. SpCoA++ can select a candidate including many words that better represent places from multiple word-segmentation results by maximizing the mutual information between segmented words and spatial concepts. The experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement of the phoneme accuracy rate of learned words relating to place in the proposed method by word-segmentation results based on place information, in comparison to the conventional methods. We indicate that the proposed method enables the robot to acquire words from speech signals more accurately, and improves the estimation accuracy of the spatial concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to present a tutorial on a diagnostic framework developed to assess children who stutter and exhibit co-existing disorders. While we have guidelines for treating these children, there are no specific guidelines for assessing them. We provide a rationale for the development of T-PALS with support from the literature. The T-PALS framework assesses 5 foundational key elements for the child: Temperament (T), Pragmatics (P), Articulation/phonology (A), Language (L), and Stuttering (S). Both qualitative and quantitative measures are used within each dimension. This framework is discussed with reference to using two clinical case examples. T-PALS observation data are presented as well as treatment suggestions for each case. We conclude that T-PALS may be a useful framework for both clinicians and researchers, working with children who present with stuttering and comorbid conditions. Clinicians are encouraged to reach beyond the traditional focus on solely assessing the stuttering behavior, even when that is the main concern for referral, and to consider a broader view of the child. It is hoped that this more integrative approach to assessment may yield a more holistic diagnostic picture of a dual diagnosis child from which treatment goals can be derived. • The T-PALS framework is explained to include the components of Temperament, Pragmatics, Language, Articulation, and Stuttering. • A view of each of component improves the SLP's ability to assess children who stutter and present with coexisting disorders. • Thorough assessment using T-PALS could lead to better treatment planning. • Using the T-PALS model, two case studies are provided of a preschooler and a school age child who stutter with coexisting concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This discussion note concerns a key finding in a recent paper [Lundell and Erman (2012). High-level requests: A study of long residency L2 users of English and French and native speakers]. That paper examines how highly advanced Swedish long-stay L2 speakers of English and of French perform L2 requests, and finds that they used downgrading internal modifiers a good deal less often than did native speakers. The authors seek to explain that finding solely in terms of the learners’ states of knowledge, or willingness to use that knowledge. However, an equally important cause is probably that the learners were unable to access much of their knowledge during real-time task performance. This highlights the difficulty of explaining spoken interactive pragmatic performance solely from performance data. It also highlights the value of a well-known two-dimensional model of pragmatic acquisition as a tool for analyzing L2 behavior. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The present paper deals with the requestive development of a consecutive trilingual boy from ages 3.6 to 5.6. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study has accounted for the requestive development (i.e. use of directives) of successive trilinguals in early childhood. Yet, in previous analyses of our data involving years 2.6–3.6, we identified an increase in the use of conventionally indirect forms and a decrease in the production of direct request types coinciding with the introduction of a third language. On account of our results, we wondered whether the act of requesting would evolve differently or similarly in the three languages involved. The goal of the present paper is thus to further examine the direct, conventionally indirect and indirect forms employed during preschool years, that is, from ages 3.6 to 5.6. We hypothesized that while the three pragmatic systems were closely linked during ages 2.6 and 3.6 (e.g. indirectness in English requests affected Catalan and Spanish request forms) (i) requestive behaviour would vary across languages in line with Pau's sociolinguistic development (Barnes, 2001, 2006), and (ii) the addressee's perceived status will affect the choice of pragmalinguistic routines employed (Peccei, 1999, 2006). Data were obtained from audio and video-recordings while Pau was playing at home and there was interaction with the mother-researcher. The corpus we have analyzed includes 45 scripts of 30–60min each. The time period between recordings was 30 days. Results from our analysis confirm our two hypotheses and they shed new light on early multilingual pragmatic development by providing a multilingual focus. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper addresses the normative and reflexive foundations of language socialization. In several publications Meredith Williams makes a strong case for placing Wittgenstein’s discussions of the normative character of social learning at the heart of an account of the child’s development of language and mind. This paper examines Williams’ argument, concluding that it needs to be complemented by an account of the child’s scaffolded socialization into the community’s metadiscursive practices. It is by means of the child’s increasing metadiscursive competence that the child comes to measure the phenomena and experiences of language as ‘we’ do in ‘our’ community’s linguistic-cultural world. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Since Lieberman and Crelin (1971), the question of vocal tract abilities and the link between anatomy and control has been the object of a number of conflicting papers. Part of the debate concerns the acoustic possibilities of the Variable Linear Articulatory Model (VLAM), an articulatory model that has provided the foundation of our own work for many years. VLAM is considered by Lieberman and some others as misleading because of its supposed overestimation of phonetic capabilities of human newborns. In this paper, we compare the VLAM simulations between 0 and 5 years with acoustic data on infant and child vocalizations from a number of studies in the literature. We show that the agreement is globally quite good, with no hint of overestimation above the age of 6 months for first formant and 15 months for second formant, while on the contrary simulations assessing the hypothetical role of proportions in an angled vocal tract with another model clearly diverge from ground truth child data. We conclude that limitations in infancy are a matter of control rather than anatomy. Then we lay a framework to situate “efficient acoustic modulation” within speech communication in general. We propose that the Frame-Content (FC) Theory by MacNeilage and Davis (2000) provides the basis of a vertical first component of a “principle of efficient modulation,” giving birth to manner of articulation. We further propose that constriction control is the basis of the horizontal second component of efficient modulation, giving birth to place of articulation. These linked components provide a valid foundation for exploring the development of human vocal tract anatomy and control, now in two dimensions. We close by summarizing our own perspective on the possible role of swallowing in the evolution of this control, as a possible extension of the role of mastication in FC. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Natural language syntax is unbounded, but syntactic processes respect fundamental locality principles. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate linguistic locality through various phenomena uncovered by formal and comparative syntacticians, and show the relevance of syntactic locality for the experimental study of language as a cognitive capacity, both in acquisition and in adult speakers. Two major concepts of locality seem to be operative: impenetrability, expressing the fact that certain syntactic configurations are impervious to rules (e.g., island constraints), and intervention locality, blocking movement and other processes across an intervening element. This paper will focus on a subclass of locality effects, looking at intervention on movement dependencies. One crucial property of intervention locality is that it is calculated in hierarchical, not in linear terms, the crucial hierarchical relation being c-command: this is just a subcase of the general fact that linguistic computations are typically sensitive to hierarchical properties (dominance, c-command) rather then to linear properties (precedence in the linear order). The paper will present featural Relativized Minimality, a particular formal implementation of intervention locality, will illustrate its application through various kinds of locality effect in cases of extractions from embedded domains, and will show its explanatory capacity not only on issues of comparative syntax, but also on aspects of the acquisition of syntactic dependencies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper a general cognitive architecture of spoken language processing is specified. This is followed by an account of how this cognitive architecture is instantiated in the human brain. Both the spatial aspects of the networks for language are discussed, as well as the temporal dynamics and the underlying neurophysiology. A distinction is proposed between networks for coding/decoding linguistic information and additional networks for getting from coded meaning to speaker meaning, i.e. for making the inferences that enable the listener to understand the intentions of the speaker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the biolinguistic approach to language acquisition. We contrast the biolinguistic approach with a usage-based approach. We argue that the biolinguistic approach is superior because it provides more accurate and more extensive generalizations about the properties of human languages, as well as a better account of how children acquire human languages. To distinguish between these accounts, we focus on how child and adult language differ both in sentence production and in sentence understanding. We argue that the observed differences resist explanation using the cognitive mechanisms that are invoked by the usage-based approach. In contrast, the biolinguistic approach explains the qualitative parametric differences between child and adult language. Explaining how child and adult language differ and demonstrating that children perceive unity despite apparent diversity are two of the hallmarks of the biolinguistic approach to language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]