Language Development Across the Lifespan (LDAL) - Papers Summary
Clark (2010)
How do adults offer new words from different parts of speech? This study examined the
offers in book-reading interactions for 48 dyads (parents and children aged 2- to 5-years-
old). The parents relied on fixed syntactic frames, final position, and emphatic stress to
highlight unfamiliar words. As they talked to their children about the referent objects,
events, or scenes, they also linked new words to other terms in the pertinent semantic
domain, thereby presenting further information about possible meanings. Children attended
to new words, often repeating them in the next turn, and, as they got older, they too related
new words to familiar terms as they talked about their referents with their parents. These
data add further evidence that interaction in conversation supports the process of language
acquisition.
These findings suggest that models of language acquisition need to take account of all the
sources of information available to children. Models need to be able to characterize those
inferences about probable meanings that are licensed in context as well as those licensed by
what adults offer in conversation along with a new word: the kinds of linguistic information
they supply about the referent object, action, property, or relation, and how they relate that
information to other terms from the same domain. They also need to track children’s
attention to new words, whether children acknowledge or ratify them after hearing them
offered, and the extent to which children, in their turn, try to relate a new word to others
they already know. In short, children discover word meanings in the course of interaction.
As Bowerman and Choi (2001, p. 505) pointed out, ‘Non-linguistic perceptual and
conceptual predispositions do not, then, shape children’s semantic categories directly, but
only in interaction with the semantic structure of the language being acquired’ (emphasis
added). But for children to become sensitive to the relevant semantic structure, they must
interact with more knowledgeable speakers – parents, caretakers, and older siblings. While
Brown (1968) proposed that interaction in discourse provided ‘the richest data for the
discovery of grammar,’ the present findings support the view that interaction itself plays a
vital role in children’s discovery of the basic elements in language as well – the meanings of
individual words.
, Nicoladis (2006)
One hypothesis holds that bilingual children’s cross-linguistic transfer occurs in spontaneous
production when there is structural overlap between the two languages and ambiguity in at
least one language (Dopke, 1998; Hulk and Muller, 2000). This study tested whether
overlap/ambiguity of adjective–noun strings in English and French predicted transfer. In
English, there is only one order (adjective–noun) while in French both adjective–noun and
noun–adjective order are allowed, with the latter as the default. Unidirectional transfer
from English to French was predicted. 35 French–English preschool bilingual children (and
35 age-matched English monolinguals and 10 French monolinguals) were asked to name
pictures by using an adjective–noun string. In addition to the reversing adjective–noun
strings in French as predicted by the overlap/ambiguity hypothesis, the bilingual children
reversed more adjective–noun strings in English than monolinguals. It is proposed that
cross-linguistic transfer might better be understood as an epiphenomenon of speech
production.
Burgess & Etherington (2002)
Grammar teaching has been and continues to be an area of some controversy and debate
have led to the emergence of a new classroom option for language teachers: that of Focus
on Form (as opposed to Focus on Meaning or Focus on FormS). Against this background of
‘interesting times’ for grammar teaching, this paper reports research into teachers’ attitudes
to grammar and its teaching and learning within an EAP context. Responses from 48 EAP
teachers in British university language centres produced both quantitative and qualitative
data. Results indicate that the majority of teachers in this study appreciate the value of
grammar for their students and possess a sophisticated understanding of the problems and
issues involved. There is evidence to support a favourable attitude to Focus on Form
approaches among this group. A further finding concerns the importance of student
characteristics, needs and wishes in influencing teachers’ classroom actions in relation to
grammar.
The research reported here has attempted to discover something about the state of
grammar teaching in EAP courses in British universities, both in relation to theoretical issues
and concerning problems of implementation of principles. The results paint a picture of the
