From susanna.bartsch at email.de Thu Dec 1 10:47:11 2005 From: susanna.bartsch at email.de (susanna.bartsch at email.de) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 11:47:11 +0100 Subject: Call for Papers - Workshop on ''Acquisition and impairments of inflectional morphology'' Message-ID: Call for papers Workshop on ''Acquisition and impairments of inflectional morphology'' We cordially invite abstracts for the above mentioned workshop which will be held during the 12th International Morphology Meeting in Budapest, May 25-28, 2006. Submission deadline for abstracts: Dec 15 05 In Humboldt's and Sapir's language typology, the languages of the world are classified according to their inflectional morphology: They distinguished isolating from analytical from synthetic languages; the latter can be inflectional, agglutinative, or polysynthetic. In language acquisition, the intensity or richness of inflection is a further important feature for the detection of the structure of the target language and the course of the acquisition process. Similarly, in language impairments, the distribution and severity of defects may depend on the structure of the inflectional morphology of the respective language. Against this typological background, we aim in our workshop to discuss findings and hypotheses concerning universal and language-specific factors playing a role in the acquisition and impairments of inflectional morphology. The workshop aims to contribute to suggestions towards the following general questions: 1) How does the morphological typology of the target language(s) influence the L1 acquisition process or the results of language impairments? 2) What are characteristic delays in the acquisition of inflectional morphology in impaired children (in dependence of the morphological typology of the input)? 3) Which conclusions about the structure of inflectional systems can be drawn from the study of child language acquisition and language impairments? We invite contributions from all theoretical backgrounds dealing with acquisition or impairments of inflectional morphology, especially if they take the typological variety of human languages into account. We particularly encourage studies comparing the morphological acquisition process in impaired and unimpaired children. Colleagues interested in participating in the workshop are invited to announce their participation as soon as possible and to send a one-page abstract (preferably pdf) by e-mail to both of the organizers, Wolfgang U. Dressler and Dagmar Bittner, by December 15th, 2005: wolfgang.dressler at univie.ac.at, dabitt at zas.gwz-berlin.de Sincerely, Wolfgang U. Dressler and Dagmar Bittner From p.monaghan at psych.york.ac.uk Thu Dec 1 10:52:48 2005 From: p.monaghan at psych.york.ac.uk (p.monaghan at psych.york.ac.uk) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 10:52:48 -0000 Subject: new word learning Message-ID: Hello, Gareth Gaskell and colleagues have looked at testing word learning by investigating cohort effects resulting from when the novel word is entered into the lexicon. This only works well if your novel words have late uniqueness points (like cathedruke interfering with cathedral): Gaskell, M. G., & Dumay, N. (2003). Lexical competition and the acquisition of novel words. Cognition, 89, 105-132. Padraic Monaghan > We are looking for a task or tasks that probe word learning. Ideally we would > be able to use the task (or variants of it) in both cognitively impaired and > intact kids and adults. > > We are *not* looking for episodic memory types of tasks such as > the AVLT or CVLT, in which the subjects have to remember a list of real words. > Rather we want to test learning of new words, ideally in a > (relatively) naturalistic context. > Note that fast mapping tasks seem to be good in principle, though in practice one would likely get ceiling effects for adults. > > Any ideas? > > Best, > > Michael Ullman From ioana_goga04 at yahoo.com Thu Dec 1 12:54:32 2005 From: ioana_goga04 at yahoo.com (Goga Ioana) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 04:54:32 -0800 Subject: Romanian contribution to CHILDES Message-ID: Hello everyone, I am wandering if there is anyone on this list, or if you know someone, who is Romanian native speaker (or at least understands Romanian) and knows CHAT and INCA-A. We are trying to contribute to CHILDES a Romanian corpus on the infant-caregiver interaction during the imitation of a seriation task. We would find helpful any feedback on the transcription of the audio files, and on the usage of the coding system INCA-A. We have the files transcribed, coded and linked to video, so it should not be very difficult to follow the action and to provide some feedback. Cheers, Ioana Goga www.coneural.org --------------------------------- Yahoo! Music Unlimited - Access over 1 million songs. Try it free. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov Sun Dec 4 23:03:52 2005 From: bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov (Bornstein, Marc (NIH/NICHD)) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 18:03:52 -0500 Subject: Marc Bornstein is out of office. Message-ID: I am away from my office on a Travel Order until mid-December and will reply to your email when I return. If you require assistance, please contact Cheryl Varron, Laboratory Secretary, at 301-496-6832 or . Marc H. Bornstein From michael at georgetown.edu Mon Dec 5 18:29:02 2005 From: michael at georgetown.edu (Michael Ullman) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 13:29:02 -0500 Subject: summary: word learning tasks Message-ID: Hi, Thanks to everyone for their responses to my recent query on word learning tasks. The initial query and all responses are included just below. Best, Michael Ullman Initial query: >We are looking for a task or tasks that probe word learning. Ideally we would >be able to use the task (or variants of it) in both cognitively impaired and >intact kids and adults. > >We are *not* looking for episodic memory types of tasks such as >the AVLT or CVLT, in which the subjects have to remember a list of real words. >Rather we want to test learning of new words, ideally in a >(relatively) naturalistic context. >Note that fast mapping tasks seem to be good in principle, though >in practice one would likely get ceiling effects for adults. > >Any ideas? Responses: (1) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:30:49 -0600 From: "McGregor, Karla K" Hi, If you have a large enough set of novel words, you can keep the adults away from ceiling. You might try a "quick incidental learning paradigm," the variant on fast mapping that Mabel Rice has used in the past in which multiple new targets are embedded in a story script. You might also try multiple dependent variables, the children with cognitive impairments might demonstrate learning in recognition tasks only or in production tasks when given multiple retrieval cues; the children with normal development and the adults may learn well enough for production without the need of scaffolding. I'll be interested to see the other suggestions, Karla K. McGregor, Ph.D. Associate Professor Speech Pathology and Audiology University of Iowa 121c WJSHC Iowa City, IA 52242 phone 319-335-8724 fax 319-335-8851 (2) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:47:30 -0600 From: "Aleka A. Blackwell" Dear Michael, I am teaching a course this spring called "The Science of Words" and I plan to explore the question you pose below. I have reviewed some of the literature on lexical acquisition, and it seems Anglin's work seems most diverse in its methodology for testing word meaning knowledge. I understand from your message that you are interested in word learning, instead, especially since you refer to fast mapping. I am also in the process of thinking about ways to probe adjective learning (property concept word mapping vs. object concept word mapping), but I am not satisfied with the design I am using. Would you be so kind to forward the ideas you receive as a result of your posting. I would appreciate it. Best, Aleka Blackwell (3) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 11:41:46 -0800 From: Gedeon Deák Fast mapping is overrated. You tend to get shallow, transitory representations of new lexemes. for example-- Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 25, 318-323 “Slow Mapping” in Children’s Learning of Semantic Relations Gedeon O. Deák (deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu) Department of Cognitive Science, 9500 Gilman Dr. La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 USA Jennifer Hughes Wagner Department of Psychology and Human Development, Box 512 GPC, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 372003 USA Problem is that as I'm sure you know, "word learning" is not one thing. If you're looking for learning novel phonological patterns, it's one thing; exact subcategorization frame is another, nuances of meaning is another; pragmatically appropriate usage yet another. We have a long-term project examining multiple measures of learning (comprehension, production, & generalization) of object words, over the first 5 ostensive exposures to a word (or other kinds of information), which shows SOME dissociation of these measures, though they're all significantly correlated. As far as "naturalistic," it's a very difficult order, and what counts will be quite different for older kids than for adults; populations with different disabilities that are associated with different cultural learning environments further complicates the picture (e.g., for a child who has a dedicated tutor during much of the school day, one-on-one ostensive learning from an unrelated adult might actually be more "natural" than for a typical 10-year-old, or adult. In short, no standardized test such as you're looking for exists, to my knowledge. Most of the experimental tests people have used don't do a very good job w/ regard to the constraints you've mentioned. That are a few older studies (e.g. Nelson & Bonvillian) that did a better job, but those tested infants/toddlers. Studies of vocab. learning in L2 students (often adults) are closer, but the ones I've seen have limited ecological validity, shallow testing of what's been learned, or both--in short, not valid, sensitive tests of individual differences. Best of luck! (4) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:17:14 -0500 From: Barbara Pearson Dear Michael, You might look at the DELV-NR (Seymour, Roeper, & de Villiers, 2005). There is a long section on Fast-mapping in the Semantics domain (and we have even more items from the pilot version, the Dialect Sensitive Language Test). And Valerie Johnson has even more in her dissertation (UMass, 2001, "Fast mapping verb meaning from argument structure.") There are fairly complex "complement" sentences as well as easier intransitives. When we tried it with children 4 to 12, it is one of the few areas we didn't get a ceiling effect, although I don't know how it would be for "intact adults." There's a scaled score for the children 4 to 9, but of course you can use it with older people. Let us all hear what you come up with. Cheers, Barbara Pearson Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. Project Manager, Research Assistant Dept. of Communication Disorders University of Massachusetts Amherst MA 01003 413.545.5023 fax: 545.0803 bpearson at comdis.umass.edu http://www.umass.edu/aae/ (5) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:51:20 -0600 From: Margaret Fleck Does it matter what sorts of (unfamiliar) objects you use? E.g. does the (relative) performance of adults and children differ if you make them learn (say) -- unfamiliar animals -- unfamiliar abstract objects -- unfamiliar kitchen tools -- new Pokemon characters Can choice of domain be exploited to help keep the adults off-balance? Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois, Computer Science (6) Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 10:52:48 +0000 (GMT) From: p.monaghan at psych.york.ac.uk Hello, Gareth Gaskell and colleagues have looked at testing word learning by investigating cohort effects resulting from when the novel word is entered into the lexicon. This only works well if your novel words have late uniqueness points (like cathedruke interfering with cathedral): Gaskell, M. G., & Dumay, N. (2003). Lexical competition and the acquisition of novel words. Cognition, 89, 105-132. Padraic Monaghan (7) Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:30:02 -0500 (EST) From: Marnie Arkenberg Hi, I'm not sure if this will be helpful or not-- We taught children (normal-language 4-year-olds) 450 novel words (150 dogs, birds, and horses)over 3 months during free play sessions (2-3 per week for 45 minutes). To test their learning we assessed the number of items children could remember at the next session. This helped us get some learning rate information but we did not assess what children remembered after the study was over so we do not know what overall retention was. Children learned between 35% and 95% of the words when assessed during the following session, but I doubt that they retained that much. I'm currently putting together an experiment that will *hopefully* tap into what words children remember from story books. Please let me know if any of this sounds like what you are looking for and might be helpful. Cheers, Marnie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aschnepf at cisunix.unh.edu Mon Dec 5 23:03:58 2005 From: aschnepf at cisunix.unh.edu (Anne K Schnepf) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 18:03:58 -0500 Subject: phoneme acquisition Message-ID: Hi, I am looking for articles on the acquisition of phonemes for normally developing, monolingual children learning a languages other than English. Any thoughts? Thanks much, Anne Schnepf From htagerf at bu.edu Thu Dec 8 02:21:36 2005 From: htagerf at bu.edu (htagerf at bu.edu) Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 21:21:36 -0500 Subject: Opening for a Research Assistant Message-ID: Please bring this to the attention of all your bright qualified students who may be graduating this winter! Immediate opening for a Research Assistant We are looking for an energetic, experienced person to join our lab. Our main focus is on multi-disciplinary research programs investigating the essential characteristics of the cognitive/linguistic phenotypes that define different neurodevelopmental disorders, and the relationship between these phenotypic characteristics and brain structure and function. The RA will carry out diagnostic, developmental and experimental testing of infants and young children in a research program investigating early markers and development of children with autism or language impairment. Additional responsibilities include writing reports for the families, coding children's social and communicative behaviors, data entry and other research-related activities. The position is full-time with a minimum commitment of 2 years required. Competitive salary and full benefits. Requirements: Bachelors degree in Psychology, or related field; research/clinical experience with infants, young children, and children with disabilities; strong interest and motivation to work in the field of development/clinical psychology and neurodevelopmental disorders. For more information see: www.bu.edu/autism Lab of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston University School of Medicine (Director: Helen Tager-Flusberg Ph.D) Interested applicants should send a letter, resume, copy of transcript, and the names of 3 references to: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nbatman at hunter.cuny.edu Sat Dec 10 17:51:36 2005 From: nbatman at hunter.cuny.edu (Natalie Batmanian) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 12:51:36 -0500 Subject: indefinite nouns in discourse Message-ID: Dear Info Childes: I am looking for references on work in corpora analyses or experiments that shows adult and child preferences for definite animate nouns to be the subject in a sentence and correspondingly interpret an indefinite animate noun to be the direct object in the same sentence. Thanks in advance. Best, Natalie Batmanian -- Natalie Batmanian Post-doctoral Fellow Hunter College Psychology Department (212)773-5557/8 From aurelie.nardy at u-grenoble3.fr Mon Dec 12 13:23:05 2005 From: aurelie.nardy at u-grenoble3.fr (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Aur=E9lie?= NARDY) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 14:23:05 +0100 Subject: Rate of agreement for transcriptions Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES Members, I'm looking for references on the rate of agreement of transcriptors for the same transcription. Firstly, I would like to know how compute a rate of agreement and secondly, which rate value determines the reliability of a given transcription being transcribed by 2 transcriptors. Many thanks Aurélie Aurélie Nardy Université Stendhal Laboratoire Lidilem BP 25, 38040 Grenoble cedex 9 Tel (bureau) : 04 76 82 68 13 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov Mon Dec 12 20:38:51 2005 From: bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov (Bornstein, Marc (NIH/NICHD) [E]) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 15:38:51 -0500 Subject: info-childes Digest - 12/11/05 Message-ID: Hi Kelley, Is there some way to eliminate my out-of-office message form being sent around? Marc -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2005 6:00 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: info-childes Digest - 12/11/05 info-childes Digest - Sunday, December 11, 2005 Marc Bornstein is out of office. by "Bornstein, Marc \(NIH/NICHD\)" summary: word learning tasks by "Michael Ullman" phoneme acquisition by "Anne K Schnepf" Opening for a Research Assistant by indefinite nouns in discourse by "Natalie Batmanian" From deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu Tue Dec 13 08:10:15 2005 From: deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu (Gedeon De=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=E1k?=) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:10:15 -0800 Subject: Research Design -- drawing pictures or phtos ? In-Reply-To: <20051213055852.96048.qmail@web17210.mail.tpe.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Greetings-- The shape bias for count nouns is a highly context-dependent phenomenon. This is one line of evidence for the argument that constraint-based accounts can't adequately explain word learning (covered in G. Deák, 2000, Developmental Review, 20, 29-80). As one example of context-dependency, certain sentential contexts draw children's attention away from similarity of shape when generalizing novel count nouns, as shown in G. Deák, 2000, Journal of Cognition and Development, 1, 157-192. One reason SOME studies (not all) find an apparent shape bias is that most pictorial stimuli tend to artificially enhance similarity of shape (or a 2-dimensional projection thereof). This enhancement makes preschoolers seem more shape-biased, as shown by G. Deák & P. Bauer, 1996, Child Development, 67, 740-767. The point is not that object shape is unimportant--of course it IS--but that it is best thought of as one object regularity that can flexibly be attended-to in the service of certain kinds of responses or inferences, e.g. about possible word meanings. Children will learn to attend to shape in CERTAIN word-learning situations, if past inferences about words of the same type, in similar contexts, have pointed to shape as a diagnostic feature. This does not mean children represent object word meanings as shape-based. Of course, there are many other interesting relevant sources, including papers by Linda Smith, Susan Jones, Barbara Landau, Dedre Gentner, Susan Gelman, and others; references to many of these (through 2000) can be found in the papers cited above. Good luck-- Gedeon --- "UG, NCKU :)" wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES members, > > I'm now conduct a research in which normal hearing > and hearing-impaired children's cognition will be > tested respectively based on three constraints of > lexical learning (shape, whole object, and > taxonomic) by means of matching. > > When matching, the chidren have to pick one item > from the two to match the standard one. One of the > two items are shape-like as the standard one while > the other has certain semantic relationship as the > standard. Therefore, the following items is a set: > Butterfly-Hair bow-Tiger, in which butterfly is the > standard one. > > And my research question is, > In the lexical development for hearing-impaired > children in Taiwan, is the noun-category bias really > a noun-shape bias? > > And the problem I come up with now is which kind > of following material I sould use when conducting > such experiments -- drawing picture or real photo? > > The previous literatures I have read adapt drawing > pictures as materials. > And the current research is mainly based on: > > Poulin-Bubois, D., Klein, B. P., Graham, S. A., & > Frank, L. (1993). Is the noun-category bias a > noun-shape bias? In E. V. Clark (Ed.), The > proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual child > language research forum (pp. 221-226). Stanford: > Stanford Linguistics Association. > > Many thanks. > > Best, > Hsin-chin. > > Hsin-chin Wang > Graduate Student > College of Liberal Art > Foreign Language and Literature Department, NCKU, > Taiwan > eugenew45 at yahoo.com.tw > eugenew.languag at msa.hinet.net > > ___________________________________________________ > ³Ì·sª© Yahoo!©_¼¯§Y®É³q°T 7.0¡A§K¶Oºô¸ô¹q¸Ü¥ô§A¥´¡I http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/ Gedeon O. Deak, Ph.D. Department of Cognitive Science 9500 Gilman Dr. University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 ph: (858) 822-3352 fax: (858) 534-1127 e: deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~deak From roberta at UDel.Edu Tue Dec 13 13:18:10 2005 From: roberta at UDel.Edu (Roberta Golinkoff) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 08:18:10 -0500 Subject: Research Design -- drawing pictures or phtos ? In-Reply-To: <20051213055852.96048.qmail@web17210.mail.tpe.yahoo.com> Message-ID: We have found [Liu, J., Golinkoff, R. M., & Sak, K. (2001). One cow does not an animal make!: Children can extend novel words at the superordinate level. Child Development, 72, 1674- 1694], as had researchers before us, that whether you use pictures or real objects really matters to young children on these forced-choice triad tasks. It depends on children's age as the younger they are, the more they need the richness and detail found in objects --> photos --> drawings in that order. Also see [Golinkoff, R. M., Shuff-Bailey, M., Olguin, R., & Ruan, W. (1995). Young children extend novel words at the basic level: Evidence for the principle of the categorical scope. Developmental Psychology, 31, 494-507.] for more stimulus ideas and ideas on what in the forced choice paradigm makes a difference for children showing taxonomic responses. Good luck! Roberta On Dec 13, 2005, at 12:58 AM, UG, NCKU :)) wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES members, >   > I'm now conduct a research in which normal hearing and > hearing-impaired children's cognition will be tested respectively > based on three constraints of lexical learning (shape, whole object, > and taxonomic) by means of matching. >   > When matching, the chidren have to pick one item from the two to match > the standard one. One of the two items are shape-like as the standard > one while the other has certain semantic relationship as the standard. > Therefore, the following items is a set: Butterfly-Hair bow-Tiger, in > which butterfly is the standard one. >   > And my research question is, > In the lexical development for hearing-impaired children in Taiwan, is > the noun-category bias really a noun-shape bias? >   > And the problem I come up with now is which kind of following material > I sould use when conducting such experiments -- drawing picture or > real photo? >   > The previous literatures I have read adapt drawing pictures as > materials. > And the current research is mainly based on: >   > Poulin-Bubois, D., Klein, B. P., Graham, S. A., & Frank, L. (1993). Is > the noun-category bias a noun-shape bias? In E. V. Clark (Ed.), The > proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual child language research forum > (pp. 221-226). Stanford: Stanford Linguistics Association. >  ! > Many thanks. >   > Best, > Hsin-chin. >   > Hsin-chin Wang > Graduate Student > College of Liberal Art > Foreign Language and Literature Department, NCKU, Taiwan > eugenew45 at yahoo.com.tw > eugenew.languag at msa.hinet.net > > ___________________________________________________ 最新版 Yahoo!奇摩即時通訊 > 7.0，免費網路電話任你打！ http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/ _____________________________________________________ Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph. D. H. Rodney Sharp Professor School of Education and Departments of Psychology and Linguistics University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 Office: 302-831-1634; Fax: 302-831-4110 Web page: http://udel.edu/~roberta/ Please check out our doctoral program at http://www.udel.edu/educ/graduate/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3738 bytes Desc: not available URL: From andrearo84 at hotmail.com Tue Dec 13 18:44:46 2005 From: andrearo84 at hotmail.com (Andrea Ruiz Ordosgoitti) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 14:44:46 -0400 Subject: I need information Message-ID: I am looking for information about the acquisition of interrogatives sentences in spanish or english. Thanks for help me. Andrea Ruiz/ Caracas- Venezuela. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latam.msn.com/amor/ From htagerf at bu.edu Fri Dec 16 16:34:21 2005 From: htagerf at bu.edu (htagerf at bu.edu) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:34:21 -0500 Subject: Information about a quote Message-ID: Does anyone know the exact wording and especially the source for a quote from Liz Bates (I think) stating that "Language is a new car made up of old parts" Thanks for you help! Helen ______________________________________________ Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience ( www.bu.edu/autism ) Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L814 Boston MA 02118 Fax: 617-414-1301 Voice: 617-414-1312 Email: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbrea1 at tampabay.rr.com Fri Dec 16 16:58:15 2005 From: mbrea1 at tampabay.rr.com (Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:58:15 -0500 Subject: Information about a quote Message-ID: Bates, E. (2004). Explaining and interpreting deficits in language development across clinical groups: Where do we go from here? Brain and Language, 88, 248-253. "Language may be a new machine that nature has constructed out of old parts" p. 250 Maria Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn, M.S., CCC-SLP Doctoral Candidate Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Psychology and Communication Sciences and Disorders University of South Florida Tampa, FL Mbrea1 at tampabay.rr.com "Explore and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry." --Ralph Waldo Emerson ----- Original Message ----- From: htagerf at bu.edu To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Cc: sjrogers at ucdavis.edu Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 11:34 AM Subject: Information about a quote Does anyone know the exact wording and especially the source for a quote from Liz Bates (I think) stating that "Language is a new car made up of old parts" Thanks for you help! Helen ______________________________________________ Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience (www.bu.edu/autism) Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L814 Boston MA 02118 Fax: 617-414-1301 Voice: 617-414-1312 Email: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From htagerf at bu.edu Fri Dec 16 17:07:29 2005 From: htagerf at bu.edu (htagerf at bu.edu) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 12:07:29 -0500 Subject: Liz Bates' Quote Message-ID: Here are the responses I received - thanks to everyone! Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn, M.S., CCC-SLP: Bates, E. (2004). Explaining and interpreting deficits in language development across clinical groups: Where do we go from here? Brain and Language, 88, 248-253. "Language may be a new machine that nature has constructed out of old parts" p. 250 Elena Lieven: In Bates & MacWhinney 1989, The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, p.10 they say: "Language could be viewed as a new machine constructed entirely out of old parts" Erika Hoff: language is "a new machine built out of old parts" in "Bates, Thal, & Marchman (1991). Smbols and syntax: A darwinian approach ot language development. In N. A. Krasnegor, D. M. Rumbaugh, R. L. Schiefelbusch, & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Biological and behavioral determints of language development (pp. 29-66). Nillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. The quote is on p. 5. Ping Li: "the human capacity for language could be both innate and species-specific, and yet involve no mechanisms that evolved specifically and uniquely for language itself. Language could be viewed as a new machine constructed entirely out of old parts." (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989; see also Bates et al., 1979). Bates, E., Benigni, L., Bretherton, I., Camaioni, L., & Volterra, V. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in infancy. New York: Academic Press. Bates, E.& MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition model, In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds), The cross-linguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 3-73).Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ______________________________________________ Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience ( www.bu.edu/autism ) Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L814 Boston MA 02118 Fax: 617-414-1301 Voice: 617-414-1312 Email: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From DaleP at health.missouri.edu Fri Dec 16 17:20:22 2005 From: DaleP at health.missouri.edu (Dale, Philip S.) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:20:22 -0600 Subject: Information about a quote Message-ID: Another variation, from the 1979 book: "... this particular work of art is a collage, put together out of a series of old parts that developed quite independently. This does not make the achievement any less wonderful. But it does begin to make it understandable." (p. 1) Philip Dale -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 10:58 AM To: htagerf at bu.edu; info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Cc: sjrogers at ucdavis.edu Subject: Re: Information about a quote Bates, E. (2004). Explaining and interpreting deficits in language development across clinical groups: Where do we go from here? Brain and Language, 88, 248-253. "Language may be a new machine that nature has constructed out of old parts" p. 250 Maria Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn, M.S., CCC-SLP Doctoral Candidate Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Psychology and Communication Sciences and Disorders University of South Florida Tampa, FL Mbrea1 at tampabay.rr.com "Explore and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry." --Ralph Waldo Emerson ----- Original Message ----- From: htagerf at bu.edu To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Cc: sjrogers at ucdavis.edu Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 11:34 AM Subject: Information about a quote Does anyone know the exact wording and especially the source for a quote from Liz Bates (I think) stating that "Language is a new car made up of old parts" Thanks for you help! Helen ______________________________________________ Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience ( www.bu.edu/autism) Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L814 Boston MA 02118 Fax: 617-414-1301 Voice: 617-414-1312 Email: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrearo84 at hotmail.com Fri Dec 16 18:55:39 2005 From: andrearo84 at hotmail.com (Andrea Ruiz Ordosgoitti) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 14:55:39 -0400 Subject: Necesito informaci=?iso-8859-1?Q?=F3n?= Message-ID: Hola, soy estudiante universitaria y necesito que ayuden a encontrar información acerca del proceso de adquisición de las oraciones interrogativas en el inglés o el español. Les agradecería todavía más si dicha información está en español ya que tengo poco dominio del idioma inglés. Muchísimas gracias de antemano, Andrea Ruiz. _________________________________________________________________ Consigue aquí las mejores y mas recientes ofertas de trabajo en América Latina y USA: http://latam.msn.com/empleos/ From pli at richmond.edu Fri Dec 16 20:56:17 2005 From: pli at richmond.edu (Ping Li) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:56:17 -0500 Subject: bilingualism and schizophrenia Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, I am writing to ask if you have any pointers/references for research on schizophrenic patients (mainly the thought-disordered patients) who speak two languages. I could not find much on this topic. Thanks, and Happy Holidays. Ping Li ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------ Ping Li, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science Graduate Program Coordinator Department of Psychology University of Richmond Richmond, VA 23173, USA Email: pli at richmond.edu http://www.richmond.edu/~pli/ http://cogsci.richmond.edu/ Bilingualism: Language and Cognition: http://cogsci.richmond.edu/bilingualism/bilingualism.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------- From macw at mac.com Fri Dec 16 22:16:36 2005 From: macw at mac.com (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 17:16:36 -0500 Subject: Liz Bates' Quote In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Helen et al., By the time Liz and I wrote the introductory chapter for our 1989 book, she had been using this particular phrasing for years in her inimitably articulate way. The idea is fundamental to Darwin, but the source that she and I thought was the clearest on this was Werner and Kaplan's Symbol Formation from 1960. By the way, the final shape of phrasing she adopted can itself be viewed metalinguistically as a new machine out of many old parts :) --Brian MacWhinney On Dec 16, 2005, at 12:07 PM, htagerf at bu.edu wrote: > Here are the responses I received - thanks to everyone! > > > Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn, M.S., CCC-SLP: > Bates, E. (2004). Explaining and interpreting deficits in language > development across clinical groups: Where do we go from here? Brain > and Language, 88, 248-253. > > "Language may be a new machine that nature has constructed out of > old parts" p. 250 > > Elena Lieven: > > In Bates & MacWhinney 1989, The Crosslinguistic Study of Language > > Acquisition, p.10 they say: > > "Language could be viewed as a new machine constructed entirely out of > > old parts" > > Erika Hoff: > language is "a new machine built out of old parts" in "Bates, Thal, > & Marchman (1991). Smbols and syntax: A darwinian approach ot > language development. In N. A. Krasnegor, D. M. Rumbaugh, R. L. > Schiefelbusch, & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Biological and > behavioral determints of language development (pp. 29-66). > Nillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. The quote is on p. 5. > Ping Li: > > "the human capacity for language could be both innate and species- > specific, and yet involve no mechanisms that evolved specifically > and uniquely for language itself. Language could be viewed as a new > machine constructed entirely out of old parts." (Bates & > MacWhinney, 1989; see also Bates et al., 1979). > > Bates, E., Benigni, L., Bretherton, I., Camaioni, L., & Volterra, > V. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in > infancy. New York: Academic Press. > > Bates, E.& MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition > model, In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds), The cross-linguistic > study of sentence processing (pp. 3-73).Cambridge University Press, > Cambridge. > > > ______________________________________________ > Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD > Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology > Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience (www.bu.edu/autism) > Boston University School of Medicine > 715 Albany Street L814 > Boston MA 02118 > > Fax: 617-414-1301 > Voice: 617-414-1312 > Email: htagerf at bu.edu > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk Fri Dec 16 23:30:29 2005 From: r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk (Robin Campbell) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 23:30:29 +0000 Subject: Liz Bates' Quote In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I recall this as Werner's Law: 'New forms first carry out old functions; New functions are first carried out by old forms'. I think Dan Slobin may have referred to it in that way sometime in the 60s. However, I'm sure that Werner got it from Ernst Mayr. Now, where is that reference . . . - Robin Campbell On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Helen et al., > By the time Liz and I wrote the introductory chapter for our > 1989 book, she had been using this particular phrasing for years in > her inimitably articulate way. > The idea is fundamental to Darwin, but the source that she and > I thought was the clearest on this was Werner and Kaplan's Symbol > Formation from 1960. > By the way, the final shape of phrasing she adopted can itself > be viewed metalinguistically as a new machine out of many old parts :) > > --Brian MacWhinney -- The University of Stirling is a university established in Scotland by charter at Stirling, FK9 4LA. Privileged/Confidential Information may be contained in this message. If you are not the addressee indicated in this message (or responsible for delivery of the message to such person), you may not disclose, copy or deliver this message to anyone and any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful. In such case, you should destroy this message and kindly notify the sender by reply email. Please advise immediately if you or your employer do not consent to Internet email for messages of this kind. From aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk Sat Dec 17 01:51:27 2005 From: aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk (aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 01:51:27 +0000 Subject: Information about a quote In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range, etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the eight or so language universals, structure dependency, endo-centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude cannibalism? And: Why? Aubrey Nunes PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., 52, Bonham Road, London SW2 5HG 0207 652 1347 From macw at mac.com Sat Dec 17 21:18:38 2005 From: macw at mac.com (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 16:18:38 -0500 Subject: Information about a quote In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Aubrey, Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that does not arise from old parts? Without concrete examples of this, I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude cannibalism. Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in mind. Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful idea" that arises in the usual way in one evolutionary configuration, but then spreads like wildfire because of the adaptive advantage it provides. Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right? --Brian MacWhinney On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: > Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in > the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in > Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language > improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range, > etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary > Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the > eight or so language universals, structure dependency, endo- > centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human > divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what > order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude > cannibalism? And: Why? > > Aubrey Nunes > PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT > Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., > 52, Bonham Road, > London SW2 5HG > 0207 652 1347 > > > From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Sat Dec 17 20:52:49 2005 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 20:52:49 +0000 Subject: bilingualism and schizophrenia In-Reply-To: <673F1CB7-6E76-11DA-BE91-0011246FEB0E@richmond.edu> Message-ID: An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From aurelie.nardy at u-grenoble3.fr Mon Dec 19 13:00:22 2005 From: aurelie.nardy at u-grenoble3.fr (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Aur=E9lie?= NARDY) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 14:00:22 +0100 Subject: Rate of agreement for transcriptions Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, Many thanks to all who responded to my request concerning the rate of agreement for transcriptions. Two main points emerge: percentage of agreement and Cohen’s Kappa (a statistical test allowing to assess the agreement between two or more observant of (?) the same phenomenon, fore more information, see http://kappa.chez-alice.fr/) I put below the initial query, the references that I received and then I give some replies. Dear Info-CHILDES Members, I'm looking for references on the rate of agreement of transcriptors for the same transcription. Firstly, I would like to know how compute a rate of agreement and secondly, which rate value determines the reliability of a given transcription being transcribed by 2 transcriptors. Many thanks Aurélie References: Roberts, F., Robinson, J.D., (2004), Interobserver agreement on first-stage conversation analytic transcription, Human Communication research, Vol.30, n°3. Yoon, Tae-Jin / Chavarria, Sandra / Cole, Jennifer / Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark (2004): "Intertranscriber reliability of prosodic labeling on telephone conversation using toBI", In INTERSPEECH-2004, 2729-2732. Pye, C., Wilcox, K. A., Siren, K. A. (1988). Refining transcriptions:The significance of transcriber "errors." Journal of Child Language.Vol 15(1), 17-37. Gut, U. & Bayerl, P. S. (2004): Measuring the Reliability f Manual Annotations of Speech orpora. Proceedings of Seech Prosody 2004, Nara, 565-568. Shriberg, L. D., & Lof, G. L. (1991). Reliability studies in broad and narrow phonetic transcription. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 5, 225279. Kent, R. D. (1996). Hearing and believing: some limits to the auditory-perceptual assessment of speech and voice disorders. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 5(3), 7-23. A bout Cohen's Kappa:(by Julian Lloyd). The two main methods for assessing inter-transcriber reliability are percentage agreement and Cohen's kappa. Regarding percentage agreement, the type of study you are carrying out will obviously determine your level of analysis (e.g., word-by-word, phoneme-by-phoneme, utterance segmentation, etc).You assess reliability for a sample of your data, say 20%. Taking words as an example, you would calculate the number of times that the two transcribers agree and disagree on words. Percentage agreement is then calculated as follows: PA = 100 x number of agreements / number of agreements + number of disagreements A limitation of percentage agreements is that they do not make any corrections for chance (i.e., the transcriber guessing). Cohen's (1960) kappa is a reliability index that does correct for chance. k = (Po - Pe) / (1 - Pe) Po = proportion of observed agreements Pe = proportion of agreements that would be expected by chance You're looking for a result greater than 0.7. About the methodology: (by Diane Pesco) CALCULATING RELIABILITY FOR WORD-WORD AGREEMENT: Transcriber 2 transcribes segment of pre-established length Transcriber 1 & 2 comparison: On the "original" transcript 1: underline words that are discrepant (that is, a word is marked in transcriber 2's file but it is not the same word that transcriber 1 transcribed) circle words that transcriber 2 did not transcribe/omitted draw a circle to indicate words that transcriber 1 omitted AND pencil in word (this way single printout can be used to review video & reach consensus as necessary) count all the words in transcriber 1 printout + all circles with penciled words to obtain total # words total at bottom of each page to ensure accuracy in counting calculate disagreement (then derive agreement) by dividing # discrepant + # omissions (both those of transcriber 1 and 2) by total # words About the methodology: (by Gisela Szagun) I think different researchers have approached this problem differently. In our research we started with a training of transcribers. First, transcribers are introduced into the transcription rules (i.e. spelling of contractions etc.). We made our own rules for German. Then they do a transcript which is checked by an experienced transcriber. Then all the transcribers (we had up to 7) meet and discuss problems. Then they all do the same transcript and transcriptions are compared and differences discussed. If things are moderately okay after this training, we work in pairs of transcribers. Each member of the pair has their transcript checked by the other member who has the transcript and listens to the tape. If the person checking hear something different they make a comment. You can also have both transcribers do 100 utterances independently, actually transcribing them. In our big study (more than 400 2-hour recordings) we obtained agreement in this way on 7.3 % of the speech samples. We simply calculated percentage agreement, i.e. the number of utterances agreeing and those which don't. Agreement should be 90 %. We obtained between 96 % and 100 % . To my knowledge there is no conventional standard for agreement, like for instance we have in statistical analyses of observer reliabilities. Many thanks also to Elena Lieven, Ulrike Gut, Eve V. Clark, Joe Stemberger and Christelle Dodane for their replies. Kind regards. Aurélie Aurélie Nardy Université Stendhal Laboratoire Lidilem BP 25, 38040 Grenoble cedex 9 Tel (bureau) : 04 76 82 68 13 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aschnepf at cisunix.unh.edu Mon Dec 19 13:39:28 2005 From: aschnepf at cisunix.unh.edu (Anne K Schnepf) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:39:28 -0500 Subject: Summary: phoneme acquisition Message-ID: Hello, Thanks everyone for giving me so many responses and references. By request, all responses and the initial query are listed below. Many thanks, Anne Schnepf Initial Query: Hi, I am looking for articles on the acquisition of phonemes for normally developing, monolingual children learning languages other than English. Any thoughts? Thanks much, Anne Schnepf Responses: Quoting Jean Pierre Chevrot : > > Two papers about acquisition of phonemes inventory in French > > AICART DE FALCO, S. et VION, M. (1987). La mise en place du système > phonologique du français chez les enfants entre 3 et 6 ans, étude de la > production, Cahiers de psychologie Cognitive, 7 (3), 247-266. > VINTER, S. (2001). Les habiletés phonologiques chez l'enfant de deux > ans, Glossa, 77, 4-19. > > > Jean-Pierre Chevrot Quoting Leah Fabiano : > Hello Anne, > > I saw your request on the Childes list and wanted to send > you some references that I have for Spanish phoneme > acquisition (monolinguals): > > Acevedo, 1993 > Fantini, 1984 > Jimenez, 1987 > Linares, 1981 > Melgar, 1976 > Anderson & Smith, 1987 > de la Fuente, 1985 > > You can also look for a compilation of these studies in > Bedore (1999). > > I hope this helps! > > Leah > > Leah Fabiano, M.S., CCC-SLP > Temple University Quoting Annick De Houwer : > See > The Acquisition of Dutch, editors Steven Gillis and Annick De Houwer, 1998, > Amsterdam: John Benjamins > > Best regards, > > > Annick De Houwer Quoting "Gerrits E (NP)" : > Dear Anne, > Here are some references. > > French: > Bogliotti, C. (2003). Relation between categorical perception of speech > and reading acquisition. Proceedings of ICPhS, Barcelona, 885 - 888. > > Plaza, M., and Rigoard, M-T. (2001). Phoneme discrimination and phoneme > identification in French language-impaired and normally-developing > children. > Clinical linguistics and phonetics 15:57-61. > > Dutch: > Clement, C.J., and Wijnen, F. (1994). Acquisition of vowel contrasts in > Dutch. journal of speech and hearing research 37:83-89. > > Gerrits, P.A.M. (2001). The categorisation of speech sounds by adults > and children, Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University. > > Kuijpers, C.T.L. (1996). Perception of the voicing contrast by Dutch > children and adults. Journal of phonetics 24:367-382. > > Other: > Oller, D.K., and Eilers, R.E. (1983). Speech identification in Spanish- > and English-learning 2-year-olds. Journal of speech and hearing research > 26:50-53. > > dr. Ellen Gerrits > Speech and language pathologist > > Maastricht University, Brain & Behaviour Institute Quoting Marilyn Vihman : > > If you go to my website, Anne, you will find my list of publications, > which include studies of French, Estonian, Welsh, Finnish...I don't > work on the 'acquisition of phonemes' though, if you are expecting a > specific order. Instead, I see phonology emerging out of whole-word > forms. A number of my recent papers are in pdf form on the website. > They might be helpful. > > -marilyn > -- Quoting "Erkelens, M.A." : > Dear Anne, > > Paula Fikkert has written a lot about the acquisition of Dutch > phonology. You may want to check her website for references: > http://www.fikkert.com/. > > Kind regards, > Marian Erkelens. Quoting Ruth Berman : > You should contact Sharynne McLeod > > She is now completing editing of a handbook of speech acquisition for > dozens of different languages > Sincerely > Ruth Berman Quoting Barbara Zurer Pearson : > Dear Anne, > > We are doing an article on the acquisition of phonemes > (and clusters) in typically developing African American > children. I don't think that's what you're looking for, > although there are some differences based on the differences > in the target dialect. > > I'm writing to ask you share what you find. (You might > check Barton & Macken 1980 or so for Spanish acquisition. > I'm sure there's more: I just haven't been watching out > for it.) > > Barbara Quoting Krisztina Zajd?t;zajdo at hotmail.com>: > Dear Anne, > > I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the acquisition of vowels in > Hungarian-speaking monolingual > children. Would you be interested in a copy? > > Best wishes, > > Krisztina Zajdo Quoting Tania.Zamuner at mpi.nl: > Dear Anne, > > For the acquisition of Dutch, you could look at Mieke Beers dissertation. > > Beers, M. (1995) The Phonology of Normally developing and Language > Impaired Children. PhD Dissertation. University of Amsterdam. > > > Tania Zamuner From pli at richmond.edu Mon Dec 19 17:32:00 2005 From: pli at richmond.edu (Ping Li) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 12:32:00 -0500 Subject: Summary: Bilingualism and Schizophrenia Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, Many thanks to the following colleagues who responded to my inquiry regarding research in schizophrenia and bilingualism: Jose Centeno, Ann Dowker, Roberta Golinkoff, Loraine Obler, Tomasina Oh Sim. Generally, it seems, this is not a very well examined topic. Perhaps there aren't too many schizophrenic bilingual patients? (note that none of these articles seems to deal specifically with thought-disordered patients). 1: De Zulueta FI, Gene-Cos N, Grachev S. Differential psychotic symptomatology in polyglot patients: Case reports and their implications. Br J Med Psychol. 2001 Sep;74 Part 3:277-292. 2: Wang JH, Morales O, Hsu LK. Auditory hallucinations in bilingual immigrants. J Nerv Ment Dis. 1998 Aug;186(8):501-3. PMID: 9717869 3: de Zulueta FI. The implications of bilingualism in the study and treatment of psychiatric disorders: a review. Psychol Med. 1984 Aug;14(3):541-57. 4: Grand S, Marcos LR, Freedman N, Barroso F. Relation of psychopathology and bilingualism to kinesic aspects of interview behavior in schizophrenia. J Abnorm Psychol. 1977 Oct;86(5):492-500. 5: Alpert M. Evaluation of psychopathology in bilinguals. Psychopharmacol Bull. 1975 Oct;11(4):60-1. Two other sources might also contain discussions of schizophrenic bilinguals. 6. Fabbro, F. (1999). The neurolinguistics of bilingualism: An introduction. East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press (I checked the book and there was a discussion of a hallucinative-paranoid schizophrenic patient who spoke Russian and Turkmenian). 7. Hyltenstam, K., & Stroud, C. (1989). Bilingualism in Alzheimer's dementia: Two case studies. In K. Hyltenstam & L. K. Obler, Bilingualism acorss the lifespan: Aspects of acquisition, maturity, and loss. Cambridge U. Press. Happy Holidays. Ping Li ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------ Ping Li, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science Graduate Program Coordinator Department of Psychology University of Richmond Richmond, VA 23173, USA Email: pli at richmond.edu http://www.richmond.edu/~pli/ http://cogsci.richmond.edu/ Bilingualism: Language and Cognition: http://cogsci.richmond.edu/bilingualism/bilingualism.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------- From mjwilcox at asu.edu Tue Dec 20 01:05:35 2005 From: mjwilcox at asu.edu (Jeanne Wilcox) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:05:35 -0700 Subject: Doctoral Fellowships in Child Language Message-ID: Are You Considering a Ph.D. with an Emphasis in Child Language? The Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University is recruiting a cohort of six new doctoral students to begin study in Fall, 2006 Full Tuition Remission * Student Stipend Private Office Space * Excellent Lab Facilities Great Colleagues * Great Mentors * Great Location Travel Allowance Possible Areas of Emphasis: Bilingual Language Intervention * Cross-Linguistic First Language Acquisition Early Intervention (Infants and Toddlers) * Early Literacy * Language Impairment Phonological Acquisition * Vocabulary Acquisition Arizona State University is one of the premier metropolitan public research universities in the nation. ASU is research-driven but focused on learning-teaching is carried out in a context that encourages the creation of new knowledge. ASU maintains a tradition of academic excellence and has become an important global center for innovative interdisciplinary teaching and research. The Department of Speech and Hearing Science is in the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It is home to 40 faculty and staff that support its mission to educate undergraduate students in the scientific field of human communication; to train graduate students to provide clinical services in speech-language pathology and audiology; to provide community service; and to conduct research and train future educators and scientists. Together with outstanding faculty from other related departments including Early Childhood Education, Special Education, Family Studies, and Nursing, our faculty provides interdisciplinary depth in early childhood and school age training. Doctoral students are encouraged to develop an individualized program of study and research with the goal of becoming our next generation of faculty researchers. Each student will have a primary mentor with funded research in the area of child language. Child language faculty include Drs. Shelley Gray, David Ingram, Laida Restrepo, and Jeanne Wilcox. For more information please contact any of the following faculty: Shelley Gray (shelley.gray at asu.edu), Laida Restrepo (Laida.Restrepo at asu.edu ), Jeanne Wilcox (mjwilcox at asu.edu ) and visit our SHS Department website at http://www.asu.edu/clas/shs/ ============================================ M. Jeanne Wilcox, Ph.D. Director, Infant Child Research Programs Professor, Department of Speech & Hearing Science PO Box 871908 Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-1908 Voice: 480-965-9397 FAX: 480-965-0965 e-mail: mjwilcox at asu.edu http://icrp.asu.edu (Infant Child Research Programs) http://www.asu.edu/clas/shs (Speech & Hearing Science http://tnt.asu.edu (Tots N Tech Research Institute) From aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk Tue Dec 20 04:22:14 2005 From: aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk (aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 04:22:14 +0000 Subject: Information about a quote Message-ID: Dear Brian You're right in guessing that I wasn't invoking divinity. My metaphors were festive season ones. But in order to extend the idea of new parts from old to phenomena like binding, endocentricity, structure dependency, I think that the old has to be both identifiable and such as to help explain why things are the way they are. I just don't see how this can be done so as to account for the main outlines of these theories and various others. Take endocentricity and its most outward appearance with edgemost maximal projections. In human perception generally there seems to be a default expectation of symmetry. In single-family dwellings built in Britain for the last 150 years, a double-fronted layout is rare. But in a British child's picture of a house, I have yet to see the normal terraced layout with the front door on one side. The same preference for symmetry seems to be attested in metaphor - with the centre favoured over the edges. In both syntax and phonology, a symmetrical layout would be easy to define, with words and sentences built strictly from the middle. But whatever the number of cases where this might be appropriate, it seems to me that they are so few in number, and that the preponderance of asymmetry and directionality in headedness, Wh movement, syllable structure, and more, should be treated as highly significant. I make no guesses as to the likely triggering or rate of spread of linguistic change. These seem to me to be some of the most fascinating questions in linguistics. But from the extreme case of the school for the deaf in Nicaragua, where an entirely new language is said to have emerged in a single childhood, it seems to me that linguistic theory must be at least capable of accounting for change at the wildfire end of the scale rather than the glacial. I certainly wasn't assuming that the speed of change might provide a way of telling whether a given phenomenon was a case of new from old or speculating as to how this might be done. None of the cases are simple. Obviously the argument needs to be in detail. I was allowing that there might be a number of cases of new from old, and listed some cases where this seems to me most plausible. I was suggesting only that the new from old model may not be the only one, and that some changes may have been just by the odd roll of the genetic dice - to get back to the festive season, Aubrey Nunes On 17 Dec 2005, at 21:18, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Aubrey, > > Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that does > not arise from old parts? Without concrete examples of this, > I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude > cannibalism. Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing > Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in mind. > Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful idea" that > arises in the usual way in one evolutionary configuration, but then > spreads like wildfire because of the adaptive advantage it provides. > Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like > glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right? > > --Brian MacWhinney > > On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: > >> Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in the >> restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in >> Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language >> improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range, >> etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary >> Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the >> eight or so language universals, structure dependency, >> endo-centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human >> divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what >> order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude >> cannibalism? And: Why? >> >> Aubrey Nunes >> PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT >> Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., >> 52, Bonham Road, >> London SW2 5HG >> 0207 652 1347 >> >> >> > > > From pcnorton at yahoo.com Tue Dec 20 05:31:23 2005 From: pcnorton at yahoo.com (Pam Norton) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:31:23 -0800 Subject: Post-docs in Sociolinguistics? In-Reply-To: <68801.20544@mail.talkbank.org> Message-ID: Hello all, I am a doctoral candidate with a master's in communicative disorders and finishing up my doctoral program within the next year in Special Ed (focus on atypical psycholinguistics). I would love to get more experience on the linguistics end. (The Joint European Masters Clinical Linguistics is interesting but is master's level.) I am looking to get more experience in qualitative, ethnographic research, especially in sociolinguistics. I have looked for post-docs in sociolinguistics but apparently don't know where to look. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks, Pam Norton, M.S., CCC-SLP ABD, Joint Doctoral Program in Special Ed University of Berkeley with San Francisco State P.S. Thanks for everyone's assistance so far with fantastic references on AAE in children and dialect awareness (for those who remember me). I WILL compile them and send them in soon. Your advice regarding research equipment has been invaluable and right on. [My research is on whether school speech pathologists are able to distinguish language difference (AAE) from language disorder.] It's going along fine, I've collected language samples from 4 of the 10 children I need and am so grateful for all your advice regarding research equipment (got the Powerbook G4, am using IMovies and it's great!). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cnarayan at umich.edu Tue Dec 20 13:26:44 2005 From: cnarayan at umich.edu (cnarayan at umich.edu) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:26:44 -0500 Subject: Post-docs in Sociolinguistics? In-Reply-To: <20051220053123.15396.qmail@web81405.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Post-docs in sociolinguistics may be more difficult to find than post-docs in more psycholinguistic fields (i.e., speech perception, sentence processing, etc.). You can search for these on LinguistList under Jobs. You may want to also look at NIH training fellowships and propose a site for your training. Michigan has an excellent socio program as does Penn, though they are probably theoretically opposed. ================================ chandan r. narayan dept. of linguistics university of michigan -------------------------------- cnarayan at umich.edu www-personal.umich.edu/~cnarayan ================================ From lise.menn at colorado.edu Tue Dec 20 17:05:18 2005 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 10:05:18 -0700 Subject: Information about a quote In-Reply-To: <3a5e0eaa8fcf81095751bcf5a0b3d3ee@pigeonpostbox.co.uk> Message-ID: small note: temporal and spatial symmetry should not be casually equated. For spatial symmetry we can look back and forth from one side to another; evolution-wide, being able to find the middle of a gap automatically is very useful for getting thru narrow places with minimal bruising. Temporal symmetry, with our fast-fading auditory memories, is much less obvious, and that's the kind one would need for structures. the ability to consciously remember auditory sequences is temporally asymmetrical, for sure - what 's your telephone number backwards? And unconscious temporal processing is probably similarly limited - mirror image rules are rare indeed. We don't have that particular kind of computational ability built in. Lise On Dec 19, 2005, at 9:22 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: > Dear Brian > > You're right in guessing that I wasn't invoking divinity. My > metaphors were festive season ones. But in order to extend the idea > of new parts from old to phenomena like binding, endocentricity, > structure dependency, I think that the old has to be both > identifiable and such as to help explain why things are the way > they are. I just don't see how this can be done so as to account > for the main outlines of these theories and various others. Take > endocentricity and its most outward appearance with edgemost > maximal projections. In human perception generally there seems to > be a default expectation of symmetry. In single-family dwellings > built in Britain for the last 150 years, a double-fronted layout is > rare. But in a British child's picture of a house, I have yet to > see the normal terraced layout with the front door on one side. The > same preference for symmetry seems to be attested in metaphor - > with the centre favoured over the edges. > > In both syntax and phonology, a symmetrical layout would be easy to > define, with words and sentences built strictly from the middle. > But whatever the number of cases where this might be appropriate, > it seems to me that they are so few in number, and that the > preponderance of asymmetry and directionality in headedness, Wh > movement, syllable structure, and more, should be treated as highly > significant. > > I make no guesses as to the likely triggering or rate of spread of > linguistic change. These seem to me to be some of the most > fascinating questions in linguistics. But from the extreme case of > the school for the deaf in Nicaragua, where an entirely new > language is said to have emerged in a single childhood, it seems to > me that linguistic theory must be at least capable of accounting > for change at the wildfire end of the scale rather than the glacial. > > I certainly wasn't assuming that the speed of change might provide > a way of telling whether a given phenomenon was a case of new from > old or speculating as to how this might be done. None of the cases > are simple. Obviously the argument needs to be in detail. I was > allowing that there might be a number of cases of new from old, and > listed some cases where this seems to me most plausible. I was > suggesting only that the new from old model may not be the only > one, and that some changes may have been just by the odd roll of > the genetic dice - to get back to the festive season, > > Aubrey Nunes > > On 17 Dec 2005, at 21:18, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > >> Dear Aubrey, >> >> Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that >> does not arise from old parts? Without concrete examples of this, >> I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude >> cannibalism. Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing >> Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in >> mind. Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful >> idea" that arises in the usual way in one evolutionary >> configuration, but then spreads like wildfire because of the >> adaptive advantage it provides. >> Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like >> glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right? >> >> --Brian MacWhinney >> >> On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: >> >>> Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in >>> the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not >>> in Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language >>> improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, >>> range, etc,, but roughly once in every million years the >>> evolutionary Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This >>> gives us the eight or so language universals, structure >>> dependency, endo-centricity, binding principles, etc., since the >>> point of human divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to >>> me, are: in what order of things did the canny marketing prevail >>> over the crude cannibalism? And: Why? >>> >>> Aubrey Nunes >>> PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT >>> Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., >>> 52, Bonham Road, >>> London SW2 5HG >>> 0207 652 1347 >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> > > Lise Menn Office: 303-492-1609 Linguistics Dept. Fax: 303-413-0017 295 UCB Hellems 293 University of Colorado Boulder CO 80309-0295 Professor of Linguistics, University of Colorado, University of Hunan Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics] Office Hours Fall'05: Tues 2-3:30, Thurs 11-12 Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf Japanese version of "Shirley Says" http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/kinen9.htm Academy of Aphasia http://www.academyofaphasia.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ann at hawaii.edu Tue Dec 20 21:20:39 2005 From: ann at hawaii.edu (Ann Peters) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 11:20:39 -1000 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) Message-ID: Colleagues, I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about this than I do. Please respond directly to him. thanks ann **************************** Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus Graduate Chair http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ Department of Linguistics University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu 1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann/ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 From: Vince Dumond To: ann at hawaii.edu Subject: Second language acquisition Good Morning My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School in northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email in a paper you wrote (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/topics/filler.pdf) while doing research on second language acquisition. In three years our community will have a new school and I want to start planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first language until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end product being a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first language will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 years of school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. The English teachers who come to this community see children who perform poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English teachers insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the mother tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so the children can have a higher achievement score in English upon graduation. Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the first language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? Planning for this important step is crucial. Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. Many thanks Vince Vince Dumond Principal, JR Nakogee School Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. P0L 1A0 Phone: (705) 997-2114 Fax: (705) 997-1259 From genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca Tue Dec 20 22:43:18 2005 From: genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca (Fred Genesee) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 17:43:18 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Vince: Ann Peters posted your message on a listserv that I belong to and I thought I would email you because I have worked for some time with immersion/bilingual programs for both majority and indigenous language groups in Canada (primarily) but also in the U.S. There is good reason to be concerned that Cree-speaking students will not develop full competence in Cree unless they start early. This is a problem not because the students themselves lack the ability to acquire Cree and then English, but because English is so prominent that it is difficult to reinforce indigenous languages in school and outside school if English is the primary language of instruction in school. Students from minority language backgrounds who are "immersed" or "submersed" in the majority language at the outset of schooling often do not maintain or develop the language to high levels of competence because the majority language displaces the home language because it has such high prestige and currency in the larger community. We have found in our research on French immersion for Enlgish-speaking students that they are less enthuasiastic about French once English is used for instruction. And, perhaps of more direct relevance to your situation, research in the U.S shows that students who speak minority languages, such as Spanish, at home are drawn inexorably toward Enlgish as they get older and as English becomes more prominent in their lives. Thus, from a language survival point of view, using Cree initially as the primary language of instruction is probably most advisable. Research in the U.S. shows that minority Spanish-speaking students in Spanish-English programs from Kindergarten onward outperform other minority Spanish speaking students in English-only programs on both English language, home language, and academic achievement tests. Part of the success of these bilingual programs is linked to their use of coherent and integrated curriculum from K to upper grades and part of their success is related to high expectations with respect to attainment in both languages and in academic domains as well. I can send you copies of reviews of this research, if you are interested. There are a number of indigenous groups that have opted for immersion in the indigenous language during the pre-school and primary school grades -- with some success. For example, we have early total Mohawk immersion programs in the Montreal area that do that and there are total immersion programs in Hawaiian (where Ann lives) that provide total insturction in Hawaiin for all of elementary school. The students in these programs come to school already speaking English and usually do not speak thenindigeneous language. At some point, you might find it useful to contact people in those schools to share experiences. I could help you with contact information. At the same time, of course, you want to ensure that your children acquire full competence in English. There are several program models that you could think about for doing this. One would be early partial immersion in Cree and English, starting in K -- in this program, both Cree and English are used for instructional purposes; another model is delayed immersion in English which starts off in the home language and then includes the majority language starting in the middle elementary grades; and yet another model is late immersion starting in late elementary or middle school (this latter option could also include some English language instruction prior to immersion so that the students acquire basic skills in English). The ultimate success of these various options depends, of course, on the quality of your curriculum and the intsruction the students get. The option you choose would depend to some extent on how much English and Cree the children hear and use outside school and the resources (instructional, materials, and curricular) you have at your disposal. The success of such programs in promoting competence in two languages and in academic subjects is critically dependent on the quality of the curriculum, the instructional material, and the professional competence of the instructors. Like any school program, these things matter in immersion/bilingual programs as well. I can send you information about a book on Dual Language Instruction that I co-authored with colleagues that was written as a guide for developing bilingual programs that you might find useful. I will send it separately. Let me know if I can be of futher assistance. Fred Genesee At 11:20 AM 20/12/2005 -1000, you wrote: >Colleagues, >I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about >this than I do. Please respond directly to him. >thanks >ann > >**************************** >Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus >Graduate Chair http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ >Department of Linguistics >University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu >1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 >Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 >http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann/ > >---------- Forwarded message ---------- >Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 >From: Vince Dumond >To: ann at hawaii.edu >Subject: Second language acquisition > >Good Morning > >My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School in >northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email in a >paper you wrote (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/topics/filler.pdf) while doing >research on second language acquisition. > >In three years our community will have a new school and I want to start >planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and >kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. > >Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first language >until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end product being >a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? > >The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. > >There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first language >will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 years of >school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. > >The English teachers who come to this community see children who perform >poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English teachers >insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the mother >tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so the >children can have a higher achievement score in English upon graduation. >Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. > >Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the first >language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? > >Planning for this important step is crucial. > >Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. > >Many thanks > >Vince > > >Vince Dumond >Principal, JR Nakogee School >Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. >P0L 1A0 >Phone: (705) 997-2114 >Fax: (705) 997-1259 > > > > Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 From macw at mac.com Wed Dec 21 00:43:19 2005 From: macw at mac.com (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:43:19 -0500 Subject: new ideas Message-ID: Dear Aubrey, Right, there is certainly a big emphasis this time of year on marketing. That hadn't occurred to me. I much agree with your line of thinking that foregrounds principles such as spatial symmetry, embedding, and recursion as precursors to similar functions in language. We all perceive the salience of symmetry in houses and drawings. But, like Lise, I would argue that symmetry cannot apply directly to language on the sentential level, since judgments of symmetry require the copresence of all pieces and language evolves through a rapidly fading temporal medium. Lise's example of saying your phone number backwards was lovely. There may be some symmetry effects at the level of the word and syllable, since those units are perceptually copresent. There could also be some symmetry effects on the discourse or rhetorical levels, but those would be probably backed up by long-term training in rhetorical form. In regards to the speed of evolutionary change, my remarks about glacial change applied not to historical change or creolization, as in the case of the emergence of Nicaraguan sign language, but to the emergence of traits in the species. When I think of language evolution, I am thinking about that, not about linguistic diachrony. Having said this, I remain curious what evidence there is for "truly new" evolutionary ideas. Are you suggesting that binding and structural dependency are evolutionary new ideas? Let us focus first on binding, which is a clear phenomenon and which you mention in your message. I have become convinced that binding constraints emerge not from c-command but from pragmatic factors derived from perspective- switching (see my chapter in Pecher and Zwaan, 2005, "Ground Cognition). In this account, the child learns the binding principles by figuring out the cues to perspective switching. If we believe that the binding phenomena arise directly from c-command than that starts indeed to look like very much like a new evolutionary idea. But if binding is expressing perspective switching and flow, then it seems to be more closely pinned to cognitive developments that have emerged over millions of years in the context of shared social action. In that case, this is not a truly new idea, but an old function expressed by new forms, as Liz, Werner, Mayr, and Darwin would say. Structural dependency is another matter. Children are clearly able to process structures with linked grammatical relations built up through recursion. But is recursion itself a new idea or an old idea with new clothing? We see the core of recursion in the child's early learning and processing of item-based patterns. One can see precursors of item-based processing in the motor world, but the shift of item-based slot filling to language does seem rather remarkable. Is it a truly new idea in evolutionary terms? As you know, that is at the core of much recent argumentation and I would say that the jury is still very much out on that one. Perhaps some other readers have ideas about that. --Brian MacWhinney On Dec 19, 2005, at 9:08 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: Dear Brian You're right in guessing that I wasn't invoking divinity. My metaphors were festive season ones. But in order to extend the idea of new parts from old to phenomena like binding, endocentricity, structure dependency, I think that the old has to be both identifiable and such as to help explain why things are the way they are. I just don't see how this can be done so as to account for the main outlines of these theories and various others. Take endocentricity and its most outward appearance with edgemost maximal projections. In human perception generally there seems to be a default expectation of symmetry. In single-family dwellings built in Britain for the last 150 years, a double-fronted layout is rare. But in a child's picture of a house, I have yet to see the normal terraced layout with the front door on one side. The same preference for symmetry seems to be attested in metaphor - with the centre favoured over the edges. In both syntax and phonology, a symmetrical layout would be easy to define, with words and sentences built strictly from the middle. But whatever the number of cases where this might be appropriate, it seems to me that they are so few in number, and that the preponderance of asymmetry and directionality in headedness, Wh movement, syllable structure, and more, should be treated as highly significant. I make no guesses as to the likely triggering or rate of spread of linguistic change. These seem to me to be some of the most fascinating questions in linguistics. But from the extreme case of the school for the deaf in Nicaragua, where an entirely new language is said to have emerged in a single childhood, it seems to me that linguistic theory must be at least capable of accounting for change at the wildfire end of the scale rather than the glacial. I certainly wasn't assuming that the speed of change might provide a way of telling whether a given phenomenon was a case of new from old or speculating as to how this might be done. None of the cases are simple. Obviously the argument needs to be in detail. I was allowing that there might be a number of cases of new from old, and listed some cases where this seems to me most plausible. I was suggesting only that the new from old model may not be the only one, and that some changes may have been just by the odd roll of the genetic dice - to get back to the festive season, Aubrey On 17 Dec 2005, at 21:18, Brian MacWhinney wrote: Dear Aubrey, Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that does not arise from old parts? Without concrete examples of this, I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude cannibalism. Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in mind. Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful idea" that arises in the usual way in one evolutionary configuration, but then spreads like wildfire because of the adaptive advantage it provides. Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right? --Brian MacWhinney On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range, etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the eight or so language universals, structure dependency, endo- centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude cannibalism? And: Why? Aubrey Nunes PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., 52, Bonham Road, London SW2 5HG 0207 652 1347 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From v.c.gathercole at bangor.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 01:26:07 2005 From: v.c.gathercole at bangor.ac.uk (V.M.Gathercole) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:26:07 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I would like to second what Fred Genesee has said about immersion in the minority language before the majority language. I have had considerable experience, both in research and in living in the communities, with the Spanish-English bilingual situation in Miami and the Welsh-English bilingual situation in North Wales. In both cases, the minority language--not the majority language--is the one that is at risk of not being learned fully if it is not established firmly in the early years. North Wales is a particularly telling case in this regard. Although almost all Welsh-speaking adults are fully bilingual, the educational system requires that all students begin school with total immersion in Welsh. That includes the children who come from English-only homes. Most children have at least three full years of schooling in Welsh, and usually more, before they have any choice of instruction in English. The end result is striking. Children who come from Welsh-speaking homes end up fully fluent in BOTH Welsh and English. Children who come from English-speaking homes end up either fairly or fully fluent in Welsh and fully fluent in English. What is clear from work we've been doing here is that no children are at risk of not learning English fully. That includes the children who come from Welsh-only homes who do most of their schooling in Welsh. The majority language is so dominant that children cannot help but learn it. If the educational system started with instruction in English, in all likelihood, the Welsh language would gradually diminish, as it was doing during most of the 20th century. It was in the 1970s that the educational policy changed, and this has had the effect of bolstering the Welsh language in the community. In the last census, the use of Welsh went up for the first time in decades throughout Wales. If you'd like copies of any of the work we have been doing on Welsh--e.g., we recently completed a study of language transmission from parents to children throughout Wales that confirms what I've said above--I'd be happy to send you copies. You might also wish to consult work by Colin Baker, who has been intimately involved with the Welsh bilingual education policy. In the case of the Cree children, I think it is clear from both the Miami bilinguals' use of Spanish and Welsh bilinguals' use of Welsh that if the use of Cree is to be maintained in their community, it must be solidly established in the children's early years. The English will be acquired whatever strategy is taken. Best of luck in convincing the school system of this. Ginny Gathercole Quoting Ann Peters : > Colleagues, > I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about > this than I do. Please respond directly to him. > thanks > ann > > **************************** > Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus > Graduate Chair http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ > Department of Linguistics > University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu > 1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 > Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 > http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann/ > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 > From: Vince Dumond > To: ann at hawaii.edu > Subject: Second language acquisition > > Good Morning > > My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School in > northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email in a > paper you wrote (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/topics/filler.pdf) while doing > research on second language acquisition. > > In three years our community will have a new school and I want to start > planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and > kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. > > Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first language > until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end product being > a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? > > The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. > > There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first language > will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 years of > school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. > > The English teachers who come to this community see children who perform > poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English teachers > insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the mother > tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so the > children can have a higher achievement score in English upon graduation. > Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. > > Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the first > language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? > > Planning for this important step is crucial. > > Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. > > Many thanks > > Vince > > > Vince Dumond > Principal, JR Nakogee School > Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. > P0L 1A0 > Phone: (705) 997-2114 > Fax: (705) 997-1259 > > > > -- This mail sent through http://webmail.bangor.ac.uk From aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk Wed Dec 21 08:58:30 2005 From: aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk (aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:58:30 +0000 Subject: Language acquisition (Second or first) In-Reply-To: <000b01c605d7$383a4c10$230a0a0a@Nakogee.local> Message-ID: Dear Vince, Seconding what Ginny said, from my small experience of efforts to preserve all three Celtic languages stjll living in the British Isles, it seems to me that the critical objective is to ensure that they pass the 'Courting Test' . I mean by this that the minority language is the instinctive language of choice for chatting other people up, proposing marriage, and so on. The emotional signal is then as strong as can be. As long as this happens, the language has some chance of survival for another generation. Against the enormous cultural pressures of the majority language, it seems to me that everything should be done to raise the status of the minority language to one of full equivalence. One way is by its use as the sole-language in education, ideally from primary onwards, but otherwise for as long as possible. Even if parents go out of their way to minimise children's exposure to the majority language, children still learn it. I can, if you wish, put you in touch with a young adult who has been through this slightly unusual and rather extreme experience and is now an adult campaigner for G, the minority language concerned. The only unusual feature of the English of this particular L1 speaker of G, who only needed to use English from the age of eleven, is that the accentual traces of G are very noticeably light. This hardly seems like a disadvantage. For the sake of the Courting Test, there are other key issues such as the use of the minority language on public display and in the media, by the movers and shakers of the community in public, by the recognition of the language in official contexts, but these I imagine are beyond your control. Good luck Aubrey Nunes. From a.karmiloff at ich.ucl.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 12:13:40 2005 From: a.karmiloff at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:13:40 +0000 Subject: touch Message-ID: 1. Can anyone point me to work on touch discriminations in infants? I thought someone must have used something like habituation to see if babies can discriminate different surface textures. 2. Can anyone point me to work on biochemical changes in the baby when touch is used on their skin? 3. Quite different: does anyone have a picture of a baby asleep in an EEG net? I need this for a talk to a lay audience. Happy holidays and thanks in anticipation, Annette From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 13:06:21 2005 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:06:21 +0000 Subject: touch In-Reply-To: Message-ID: An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 13:31:29 2005 From: k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk (Katie Alcock) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:31:29 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition In-Reply-To: <1135128367.43a8af2f943ca@webmail.bangor.ac.uk> Message-ID: Does anyone have any information on studies where the minority language is the language of instruction for all of compulsory schooling (e.g. to 16 or 18), which I am informed is the current situation in the Basque country, where all public schooling is apparently in Basque, although most families speak exclusively Spanish or speak both languages. Likewise does anyone have any information on literacy at secondary and higher education levels in the non-instructed language, where all primary and secondary education is in the minority language? Is there any effect on performance at these higher levels if the transition to the majority language is made in the teens, and if there hasn't been very much formal literacy instruction in the majority language? It strikes me that most of the current programmes involve only a few years of primary education; however I know adults whose schooling has mainly been in a language other than the language of the community (for example, where instruction has been in Kiswahili and English while all day-to-day communication takes place in another African language), who have trouble with literacy materials in their home language, despite the fact that they are more fluent in speaking it. I realise that this is a slightly different situation, as there are rarely many literacy materials actually available in the home language, and broadcast media are often in the language(s) of instruction, but families rarely have a TV and everyone speaks all of the time outside school in the home language, including adolescent children, and adults would never use the language(s) of instruction in their day-to-day communication. So I'm wondering if there is any data on the parallel situation in a more literate society. Katie Alcock Katie Alcock, DPhil Lecturer Department of Psychology University of Lancaster Fylde College Lancaster LA1 4YF Tel 01524 593833 Fax 01524 593744 Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html From pss116 at bangor.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 13:42:34 2005 From: pss116 at bangor.ac.uk (Ginny Mueller Gathercole) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:42:34 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition Message-ID: Dear Vince, In response to your message to me, OK, first, here is a zip file of the whole report we submitted to the Welsh Language Board. The summary chapter is probably the most useful to you, although the "meat" of the study is in Chapter 4, on the verbal questionnaire we gave parents. Just to clarify--The study was on parents' transmission practices with regard to Welsh, so it isn't directly related to your question about education. But the findings of our study are directly relevant in the following way: 1) It is clear that parents (and teachers, of course, although we did not interview or test teachers in this study) use the language that they are most comfortable and most fluent in for speaking to their children. If they grew up speaking Welsh, they will speak Welsh to their children. 2) People become fully fluent in the language if adults are speaking Welsh to them as children. When there is only partial input in the language (I mean in terms of time of exposure to Welsh), there is a slight delay in development in Welsh, although children in all groups tend to 'catch up' for most structures. 3) However, it is not clear that all groups 'catch up' with regard to complex structures, which take everyone longer to learn. It may be that the children who were not hearing as much Welsh on a daily basis do not fully acquire such complex structures. This can ultimately have knock-on effects for the survival of the language. 4) EVERYONE learns English fully. This is clear from the adults we tested as well as from the children. The dominance of English is such that, as I said before, children cannot help but learn it. 5) One other factor that I think is highly relevant is that speaking a language to FRIENDS as children is very important to the ultimate attainment in that language (and perhaps to affect towards the language). We found this to be true for both the adults we tested and the children. 6) It is worth commenting on the Welsh bilingual situation versus the Miami situation. In Miami, you can find adults whose command of English is not perfect. This is not true in Wales. In Miami, there is a constant influx of new immigrants who bring a good source of 'native' Spanish--which is good in that it means children can hear Spanish being spoken by fully fluent speakers, but whose command of English is limited. As children may be hearing these limited English speakers as part of their input for English, this can affect those children's ultimate attainment of English. In Wales, this is not a factor. There is not a large pool of Welsh speakers whose command of English is limited. This means that virtually all of the English that children are hearing here is highly fluent. I assume that the Cree situation would be more similar to Wales in this regard than to Miami. This means that the children in the community should have little problem acquiring English as fully fluent speakers. (In fact, I would put money on it if I had the opportunity to bet on it!) I am also attaching some work we've done on children's acquisition of Welsh here. We've made it our practice to divide children according to the language(s) spoken in the home. And our consistent finding (which is parallel with our findings in Miami) is that attainment in the minority (and majority) language is directly related to the amount of exposure in the language. Finally, in both the Miami and Wales case, we have found that children TEND to speak English on the playgrounds, etc., especially if they know the other child comes from an English background (even if that child knows Welsh). If children are attending schools that use English as the medium of instruction, this means the minority language is going to be pushed even more into the background, and the prediction is that it will eventually die. Oh, and one other thing--One reason why the Welsh language policy for education has been so successful is because EVERYONE goes to school through the medium of Welsh. This means that all children become fairly competent in Welsh, not just the kids coming from Welsh-speaking families. This is important for a few reasons: (1) it means that people can speak Welsh in everyday conversations without feeling they might be 'excluding' someone; (2) it means that attitudes towards Welsh are quite positive--it's not an "us" versus "them" situation, as it tends to be, unfortunately, in Miami. This latter point is just as important for the speakers of the minority language (I mean children who come from Welsh-language homes) as it is for those coming from English-speaking homes: it means that they do not have to struggle with issues of identity (e.g., do I want to be more like "them"--which might mean giving up my home language) as much as some groups might in other contexts (e.g., in the Miami context). (3) It helps ultimately to ensure the survival of the language. Oh, I must also mention literacy. The educational establishment is going to be concerned about literacy issues. One thing you can mention is that in the Miami study (in the Oller & Eilers 2002 volume, Multilingual Matters), the one area in which knowledge in one language carried over to knowledge in the other was in reading and literacy skills. Thus, learning reading and literacy in one language does not necessarily prejudice those skills in the other language; in fact, they promote those skills in the other language. Well, I hope that is all of some help. If you should need further comments, do not hesitate to ask. Best wishes, Ginny P.S. I think I'll copy this to the CHILDES info exchange, in case anyone has any further comments on these issues. -- Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, Ph.D. Professor Ysgol Seicoleg School of Psychology Prifysgol Cymru, Bangor University of Wales, Bangor Adeilad Brigantia The Brigantia Building Ffordd Penrallt Penrallt Road Bangor LL57 2AS Bangor LL57 2AS Cymru Wales | /\ | / \/\ Tel: 44 (0)1248 382624 | /\/ \ \ Fax: 44 (0)1248 382599 | / ======\=\ | B A N G O R From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 13:51:03 2005 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:51:03 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition In-Reply-To: Message-ID: An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca Wed Dec 21 15:24:21 2005 From: genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca (Fred Genesee) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:24:21 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There are immersion type programs in Hawaii and in the Mohawk community outside Montreal that use the minority language for extensive instruction throughout elementary and into secondary school. I am not sure I recall exactly how it works in either program but my recollection is that they provide up to 80% instruction in Hawaiian and in Mohawk throughout the elementary grades and perhaps up to 50% in the secondary grades. These programs could provide information about teh students' literacy skills at the secondary level in the societal language and in the indigenous language. Both of these programs are in societies that are highly literate, but, as you point out, even in these cases finding appropriate materials is difficult since these languages have traditionally not be used in their written forms (although Hawaiians had an extremely high rate of literacy before the monarchy was overthrown in 1899). My own research and experience with any type of immersion program for students who speak Enlgish at home and live in predominantly English communities has been that these students acquire English language skills, including literacy, to the same level as comparable studnets in all-English programs regardless of the amount of exposure to English in school. This seems to be true whethere the students are from a majority or minority culture group -- as long as they speak English at home. In short, there is often no correlation between how much exposure students have to Enlgish in school and their proficiency in English (even in literacy) in English dominant societies. In contrast, there is usually a link between the amount of exposure to the minority language and attainment in that language -- not surprising given the overall lack of exposure to the minoirty langauge in the community at large. To be more specific, we did evaluations of a total immersion porgram in Mohawk for Mohawk background children who spoke English at home and found that even total immersion in Mohawk during the primary grades did not hamper their English language development. These programs have since expanded and provided lots of exposure to Mohawk throughout elementary and secondary school. The same pattern has been documented even in the case of Spanish-English bilingual programs for Enlgish language learners in the U.S. who speak Spanish predominantly outside of school and have extensive exposure to Spanish in the home. These students acquire the same or higher levels of proficiency in English as similar Spanish speaking students in all English programs. At the same time, the students in the Spanish programs achieve higher levels of oral language and literacy skills in Spanish. Thus, this appears to be a fairly robust finding in bilingual programs and has been found in Canada and the U.S. and for minority language as well as majority language sutdnets. I can send references to these findings if you are interested. Fred At 01:31 PM 21/12/2005 +0000, Katie Alcock wrote: >Does anyone have any information on studies where the minority language is >the language of instruction for all of compulsory schooling (e.g. to 16 or >18), which I am informed is the current situation in the Basque country, >where all public schooling is apparently in Basque, although most families >speak exclusively Spanish or speak both languages. > >Likewise does anyone have any information on literacy at secondary and >higher education levels in the non-instructed language, where all primary >and secondary education is in the minority language? Is there any effect on >performance at these higher levels if the transition to the majority >language is made in the teens, and if there hasn't been very much formal >literacy instruction in the majority language? > >It strikes me that most of the current programmes involve only a few years >of primary education; however I know adults whose schooling has mainly been >in a language other than the language of the community (for example, where >instruction has been in Kiswahili and English while all day-to-day >communication takes place in another African language), who have trouble >with literacy materials in their home language, despite the fact that they >are more fluent in speaking it. > >I realise that this is a slightly different situation, as there are rarely >many literacy materials actually available in the home language, and >broadcast media are often in the language(s) of instruction, but families >rarely have a TV and everyone speaks all of the time outside school in the >home language, including adolescent children, and adults would never use the >language(s) of instruction in their day-to-day communication. So I'm >wondering if there is any data on the parallel situation in a more literate >society. > > >Katie Alcock > > >Katie Alcock, DPhil >Lecturer >Department of Psychology >University of Lancaster >Fylde College >Lancaster LA1 4YF >Tel 01524 593833 >Fax 01524 593744 >Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html > > Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 From mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu Wed Dec 21 15:59:57 2005 From: mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu (Margaret Fleck) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 09:59:57 -0600 Subject: new ideas In-Reply-To: <72B38A58-673F-4373-AD38-3C309783C8EC@mac.com> Message-ID: Brian MacWhinney wrote: > I much agree with your line of thinking that foregrounds principles > such as spatial symmetry, embedding, and recursion as precursors to > similar functions in language. We all perceive the salience of > symmetry in houses and drawings. But, like Lise, I would argue that > symmetry cannot apply directly to language on the sentential level, > since judgments of symmetry require the copresence of all pieces and > language evolves through a rapidly fading temporal medium. Lise's > example of saying your phone number backwards was lovely. There may be > some symmetry effects at the level of the word and syllable, since > those units are perceptually copresent. There could also be some > symmetry effects on the discourse or rhetorical levels, but those would > be probably backed up by long-term training in rhetorical form. The mathematical term "symmetry" covers a wide range of type of self-similarity. A better one to look for in a moving temporal medium would be translational symmetry, better known as repetition of a pattern in the same order (rather than reflected). *THAT* is quite salient in language and in related domains such as music and poetry. Margaret (Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois) From k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 16:06:55 2005 From: k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk (Katie Alcock) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 16:06:55 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition In-Reply-To: <4.1.20051221101155.014ea598@ego.psych.mcgill.ca> Message-ID: That's very interesting, has anyone looked at transitions to higher education as well? This would apply to the Basque Country situation, but not really to the Kenyan situation, as children don't get literacy materials in their home language. Children's spoken fluency is never compromised in their home language, in fact their spoken English and/or Kiswahili is often a lot poorer, and although most adults CAN read in their home language, they really prefer not to as they do not feel comfortable doing so. It strikes me also that where we are talking about "minority" or "majority" languages, the minority or majority language almost always has the same status on the world language stage as it does in the communities in question: English is a majority language worldwide, as well as locally, and has a tendency to overcome Hawaiian, Mohawk, Cree, Welsh, and Spanish in the US. Spanish is also a majority language worldwide and has a tendency to dominate over Basque and Catalan. However, the situations I've come across are where the majority language locally (the one I know most about is Kigiriama, spoken by about 300,000 first language speakers) is not a player on the world language stage. I wonder if there is any research on situations where the local majority language is in a minority globally? Perhaps in parts of South America where the local majority language is not yet Spanish/Portuguese? Katie Alcock Katie Alcock, DPhil Lecturer Department of Psychology University of Lancaster Fylde College Lancaster LA1 4YF Tel 01524 593833 Fax 01524 593744 Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html > From: Fred Genesee > Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:24:21 -0500 > To: Katie Alcock , > > Subject: Re: Second language acquisition > > There are immersion type programs in Hawaii and in the Mohawk community > outside Montreal that use the minority language for extensive instruction > throughout elementary and into secondary school. I am not sure I recall > exactly how it works in either program but my recollection is that they > provide up to 80% instruction in Hawaiian and in Mohawk throughout the > elementary grades and perhaps up to 50% in the secondary grades. These > programs could provide information about teh students' literacy skills at > the secondary level in the societal language and in the indigenous > language. Both of these programs are in societies that are highly > literate, but, as you point out, even in these cases finding appropriate > materials is difficult since these languages have traditionally not be used > in their written forms (although Hawaiians had an extremely high rate of > literacy before the monarchy was overthrown in 1899). > > My own research and experience with any type of immersion program for > students who speak Enlgish at home and live in predominantly English > communities has been that these students acquire English language skills, > including literacy, to the same level as comparable studnets in all-English > programs regardless of the amount of exposure to English in school. This > seems to be true whethere the students are from a majority or minority > culture group -- as long as they speak English at home. In short, there is > often no correlation between how much exposure students have to Enlgish in > school and their proficiency in English (even in literacy) in English > dominant societies. In contrast, there is usually a link between the amount > of exposure to the minority language and attainment in that language -- not > surprising given the overall lack of exposure to the minoirty langauge in > the community at large. > > To be more specific, we did evaluations of a total immersion porgram in > Mohawk for Mohawk background children who spoke English at home and found > that even total immersion in Mohawk during the primary grades did not > hamper their English language development. These programs have since > expanded and provided lots of exposure to Mohawk throughout elementary and > secondary school. > > The same pattern has been documented even in the case of Spanish-English > bilingual programs for Enlgish language learners in the U.S. who speak > Spanish predominantly outside of school and have extensive exposure to > Spanish in the home. These students acquire the same or higher levels of > proficiency in English as similar Spanish speaking students in all English > programs. At the same time, the students in the Spanish programs achieve > higher levels of oral language and literacy skills in Spanish. > > Thus, this appears to be a fairly robust finding in bilingual programs and > has been found in Canada and the U.S. and for minority language as well as > majority language sutdnets. I can send references to these findings if you > are interested. > > Fred > > > At 01:31 PM 21/12/2005 +0000, Katie Alcock wrote: >> Does anyone have any information on studies where the minority language is >> the language of instruction for all of compulsory schooling (e.g. to 16 or >> 18), which I am informed is the current situation in the Basque country, >> where all public schooling is apparently in Basque, although most families >> speak exclusively Spanish or speak both languages. >> >> Likewise does anyone have any information on literacy at secondary and >> higher education levels in the non-instructed language, where all primary >> and secondary education is in the minority language? Is there any effect on >> performance at these higher levels if the transition to the majority >> language is made in the teens, and if there hasn't been very much formal >> literacy instruction in the majority language? >> >> It strikes me that most of the current programmes involve only a few years >> of primary education; however I know adults whose schooling has mainly been >> in a language other than the language of the community (for example, where >> instruction has been in Kiswahili and English while all day-to-day >> communication takes place in another African language), who have trouble >> with literacy materials in their home language, despite the fact that they >> are more fluent in speaking it. >> >> I realise that this is a slightly different situation, as there are rarely >> many literacy materials actually available in the home language, and >> broadcast media are often in the language(s) of instruction, but families >> rarely have a TV and everyone speaks all of the time outside school in the >> home language, including adolescent children, and adults would never use the >> language(s) of instruction in their day-to-day communication. So I'm >> wondering if there is any data on the parallel situation in a more literate >> society. >> >> >> Katie Alcock >> >> >> Katie Alcock, DPhil >> Lecturer >> Department of Psychology >> University of Lancaster >> Fylde College >> Lancaster LA1 4YF >> Tel 01524 593833 >> Fax 01524 593744 >> Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html >> >> > > Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 > McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 > 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave > Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 > From m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 16:18:52 2005 From: m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk (M.M.Vihman) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 16:18:52 GMT Subject: I am away until Jan 6. Message-ID: Dear all, I will be away until Jan 6; please be patient! Happy New Year! Regards Marilyn From bpearson at comdis.umass.edu Wed Dec 21 18:51:33 2005 From: bpearson at comdis.umass.edu (Barbara Pearson) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:51:33 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: <1135128367.43a8af2f943ca@webmail.bangor.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dear All, I have only two small comments to add to the excellent commentary already provided on this topic. 1. I think a good part of the animus against minority language programs in the U.S. is directed against programs that delay the introduction of English till 2nd and 3rd grade. Even someone like Rosalie Porter, who spearheaded the English-only referendum in Massachusetts, will say that two-way programs (L1 and L2 together) were not the target of her campaign (although they, too, got effectively crippled by it-- but that is another question). With that in mind, I take a different perspective on the results that have been reported. I think the research shows that children learn both languages equally if they are presented equally. As Ginny Gathercole has pointed out, the poorly developed Spanish of even the children who had Spanish and English at school in Miami was not so much a function of the presence of the part- time English in their school, as of the overwhelming presence of English in their homes and communities. Their Spanish was improved by the time they spent in Spanish in school, and probably would have improved more with a greater percentage of the day in Spanish, (the minority language). I don't know the political situation in the James Bay Coast, but one may need to compromise with those English-teaching outsiders. If that happens, it may be comforting to look at the other side of the research coin--that learning to read in two languages at once is not confusing and may even be facilitating. (You might get the Oller & Eilers, 2002, on the Miami study for support of that.) You could end up including a little English from Kindergarten without completely compromising the program, if you are careful to safeguard the status of Cree in the children's minds. I think we've been saying that if English (or any language) is the majority language, more school time in it does not seem to be necessary; but if English is the minority language in the children's lives, more time in English will help it--as long as their L1 is supported as well. One needs to evaluate what the balance of power of the languages is in their community. 2. The second comment is a reaction/ realization of the power of literacy in all this. We are not talking just about waiting until children are 10, but waiting until they've had time to master reading and begin writing in the L1. We had a rule of thumb that among our college students it was rare for someone who had had basic literacy training in a language not to prefer to speak that language when presented with the opportunity (at college). (I think 2nd grade was my cut-off, but I didn't have enough data to contrast one grade or another.) By contrast, students who had not had literacy training in a language (i.e. 98% of most Spanish-background children born in Miami) generally preferred the other language, the one in which they had learned to read and had read extensively. I used to joke that the speed of light is that much faster than the speed of sound, but I'm wondering now if that isn't more than a metaphor, whether there is something more to the modality (or whether it's just the *added* modality, not that it's visual). Meanwhile, I'd like Ginny's references too! Best, Barbara Pearson On Dec 20, 2005, at 8:26 PM, V.M.Gathercole wrote: > I would like to second what Fred Genesee has said about immersion in > the > minority language before the majority language. I have had > considerable > experience, both in research and in living in the communities, with the > Spanish-English bilingual situation in Miami and the Welsh-English > bilingual > situation in North Wales. In both cases, the minority language--not > the > majority language--is the one that is at risk of not being learned > fully if it > is not established firmly in the early years. North Wales is a > particularly > telling case in this regard. Although almost all Welsh-speaking > adults are > fully bilingual, the educational system requires that all students > begin school > with total immersion in Welsh. That includes the children who come > from > English-only homes. Most children have at least three full years of > schooling > in Welsh, and usually more, before they have any choice of instruction > in > English. The end result is striking. Children who come from > Welsh-speaking > homes end up fully fluent in BOTH Welsh and English. Children who > come from > English-speaking homes end up either fairly or fully fluent in Welsh > and fully > fluent in English. > > What is clear from work we've been doing here is that no children are > at risk of > not learning English fully. That includes the children who come from > Welsh-only homes who do most of their schooling in Welsh. The majority > language is so dominant that children cannot help but learn it. > > If the educational system started with instruction in English, in all > likelihood, the Welsh language would gradually diminish, as it was > doing during > most of the 20th century. It was in the 1970s that the educational > policy > changed, and this has had the effect of bolstering the Welsh language > in the > community. In the last census, the use of Welsh went up for the first > time in > decades throughout Wales. > > If you'd like copies of any of the work we have been doing on > Welsh--e.g., we > recently completed a study of language transmission from parents to > children > throughout Wales that confirms what I've said above--I'd be happy to > send you > copies. You might also wish to consult work by Colin Baker, who has > been > intimately involved with the Welsh bilingual education policy. > > In the case of the Cree children, I think it is clear from both the > Miami > bilinguals' use of Spanish and Welsh bilinguals' use of Welsh that if > the use > of Cree is to be maintained in their community, it must be solidly > established > in the children's early years. The English will be acquired whatever > strategy > is taken. > > Best of luck in convincing the school system of this. > > Ginny Gathercole > > > Quoting Ann Peters : > >> Colleagues, >> I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about >> this than I do. Please respond directly to him. >> thanks >> ann >> >> **************************** >> Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus >> Graduate Chair http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ >> Department of Linguistics >> University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu >> 1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 >> Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 >> http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann/ >> >> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- >> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 >> From: Vince Dumond >> To: ann at hawaii.edu >> Subject: Second language acquisition >> >> Good Morning >> >> My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School >> in >> northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email >> in a >> paper you wrote (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/topics/filler.pdf) while >> doing >> research on second language acquisition. >> >> In three years our community will have a new school and I want to >> start >> planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and >> kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. >> >> Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first >> language >> until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end >> product being >> a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? >> >> The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. >> >> There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first >> language >> will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 >> years of >> school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. >> >> The English teachers who come to this community see children who >> perform >> poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English >> teachers >> insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the >> mother >> tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so >> the >> children can have a higher achievement score in English upon >> graduation. >> Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. >> >> Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the >> first >> language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? >> >> Planning for this important step is crucial. >> >> Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. >> >> Many thanks >> >> Vince >> >> >> Vince Dumond >> Principal, JR Nakogee School >> Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. >> P0L 1A0 >> Phone: (705) 997-2114 >> Fax: (705) 997-1259 >> >> >> >> > > > > > -- > This mail sent through http://webmail.bangor.ac.uk > > ***************************************** Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. Project Manager, Research Assistant Dept. of Communication Disorders University of Massachusetts Amherst MA 01003 413.545.5023 fax: 545.0803 bpearson at comdis.umass.edu http://www.umass.edu/aae/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 9055 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu Wed Dec 21 21:16:53 2005 From: mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu (Margaret Fleck) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:16:53 -0600 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: <788d70c341dc4905e72c4adcf80e55d2@comdis.umass.edu> Message-ID: Barbara Pearson wrote: > 1. I think a good part of the animus against minority language > programs in the U.S. is directed against programs that delay > the introduction of English till 2nd and 3rd grade. It's also important to realize that bad schools can make almost any approach perform badly. California, one of the big battlegrounds on this topic, has a range of issues with the quality of its public schools, which could easily have sabotaged the actual performance of its bilingual programs, helping lead to their unpopularity. Another source of variation would be availability of materials in the minority language. If I can believe the numbers I just found on the internet, there are maybe 31 million Spanish speakers in the US alone, about 500,000 Welsh speakers, but the total Cree population is barely enough to support a small high school. In addition to the basic textbooks, a switched-on school kid is going to need -- popular cultural materials (e.g. Pokemon and Harry Potter books and movies) -- library and classroom enrichment materials (e.g. books on spiders, medieval knights, digital photography) which is a big feature even in my son's first grade class -- textbooks and off-site courses for advanced subjects (e.g. calculus, computer programming), and non-academic subjects (e.g. music, car repair, driver's ed) -- internet resources All this stuff is readily available in Spanish. A lot can probably be found in Welsh. I really wonder how much is going to be available in, say, Cree. Worrying about sufficient exposure to L2 may be a moot point if decent-quality L1 instruction requires significant use of L2 resources anyhow. Margaret (Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois) From genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca Wed Dec 21 23:02:04 2005 From: genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca (Fred Genesee) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 18:02:04 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: <788d70c341dc4905e72c4adcf80e55d2@comdis.umass.edu> Message-ID: I might add to all this that I,along with colleagues from thte U.S. (Kathryn Lindholm-Leary, Bill Saunders, and Donna Christian) did a review of research on the oral language, literacy and academic development of English language learners in the U.S., and this will appear in print in January (Cambridge University Press). The goal of this review was to discern what research has to say about these domains of development in the case of minority language learners in the U.S. IN Chapter 5 of this volume Kathryn reviews research that evaluated alternative educational programs for English language learners and compares the results of these programs with one another with respect to, among other things, literacy. Aside from the interesting finding that initial literacy instruction in the students' L1 did not hamper them from acquiring literacy skills in English (and to the contrary sometimes produces better results that instruction in only English), she also found that programs that provide consistent, integrated, and high quality instruction across grade levels, regardless of language of instruction, are more effective than programs in which there is a lack of such consistency -- not surprising, but a point that is often lost in the heat of debate about whether to use ELLs' native language or not. In Chapter 3, we look at the more psycholinguistic side of L2 reading acquisition. IN addition, Diane August and Tim Shanahan chaired a panel of experts who carried out an exhaustive review of research on literacy development in K-12 students who are learning to read a second language -- the panel was called the National Literacy Panel. While the focus was on minority language students in the U.S., there is also a lot of coverage on L2 literacy development in other countries and in majority as well as minority language learners. The results of that review are going to be published by Lawrence Erlbaum sometime in 2006. This volume is exhaustive in its coverage and should be of interest to researchers interested in L2 reading acquisition and instruction. Katie asked if there are other bilingual programs with students' whose L1 is a majority language locally, but a minority globally. Donna Christian and I edited a book called Bilingual Education (TESOL, 2001) that includes a number of case studies of such situations: trilingual programs for Ladin-speaking students in Northern Italy; bilingual schools in Hungarian and Slovak for Hungarian students in Slovakia; and Maori immersion porgrams in New Zealand. It can be tricky defining what is minority -- for example, even in Quebec, French which is clearly a majority language in the province (80% of Quebecers are monlingual speakers of FRench), it nevertheless has many hallmarks of a minority language and needs some of the same kinds of protections of even more "minority languages". Two things that seem pretty clear when talking about bilingual education for minority language learners, almost however minority is defined; one is that such students acquire the majority language well, especially if the majority language is of global significance -- like English; and the other is that quality of curriculum and instruction also matter. Fred At 01:51 PM 21/12/2005 -0500, Barbara Pearson wrote: > > Dear All, > > I have only two small comments to add to the excellent > commentary already provided on this topic. > > 1. I think a good part of the animus against minority language > programs in the U.S. is directed against programs that delay > the introduction of English till 2nd and 3rd grade. Even someone > like Rosalie Porter, who spearheaded the English-only > referendum in Massachusetts, will say that two-way programs > (L1 and L2 together) were not the target of her campaign > (although they, too, got effectively crippled by it-- > but that is another question). > > With that in mind, I take a different perspective on the > results that have been reported. I think the research shows > that children learn both languages equally if they are presented > equally. As Ginny Gathercole has pointed out, the poorly developed > Spanish of even the children who had Spanish and English at > school in Miami was not so much a function of the presence of the part- > time English in their school, as of the overwhelming presence > of English in their homes and communities. Their Spanish was > improved by the time they spent in Spanish in school, and probably > would have improved more with a greater percentage of the day > in Spanish, (the minority language). > > I don't know the political situation in the James Bay Coast, but one may > need to compromise with those English-teaching outsiders. If that > happens, it may be comforting to look at the other side of > the research coin--that learning to read in two languages at once > is not confusing and may even be facilitating. (You might > get the Oller & Eilers, 2002, on the Miami study for support of that.) > You could end up including a little English from Kindergarten without > completely compromising the program, if you are careful > to safeguard the status of Cree in the children's minds. > > I think we've been saying that if English (or any language) is the > majority language, more school time in it does not seem to be > necessary; but if English is the minority language in the children's > lives, more time in English will help it--as long as their L1 is > supported as well. One needs to evaluate what the balance of > power of the languages is in their community. > > 2. The second comment is a reaction/ realization of the power > of literacy in all this. We are not talking just about waiting until > children are 10, but waiting until they've had time to master reading > and begin writing in the L1. We had a rule of thumb that among our > college students it was rare for someone who had had > basic literacy training in a language not to prefer to speak > that language when presented with the opportunity (at college). > (I think 2nd grade was my cut-off, but I didn't have enough data to > contrast one grade or another.) By contrast, students who had not had > literacy training in a language (i.e. 98% of most Spanish-background > children born in Miami) generally preferred the other > language, the one in which they had learned to read and had > read extensively. I used to joke that the speed of light is > that much faster than the speed of sound, but I'm wondering > now if that isn't more than a metaphor, whether there is something > more to the modality (or whether it's just the *added* modality, > not that it's visual). > > Meanwhile, I'd like Ginny's references too! > > Best, > Barbara Pearson > > On Dec 20, 2005, at 8:26 PM, V.M.Gathercole wrote: > >> >> I would like to second what Fred Genesee has said about immersion in the >> minority language before the majority language. I have had considerable >> experience, both in research and in living in the communities, with the >> Spanish-English bilingual situation in Miami and the Welsh-English bilingual >> >> situation in North Wales. In both cases, the minority language--not the >> majority language--is the one that is at risk of not being learned fully if >> it >> is not established firmly in the early years. North Wales is a particularly >> >> telling case in this regard. Although almost all Welsh-speaking adults are >> fully bilingual, the educational system requires that all students begin >> school >> with total immersion in Welsh. That includes the children who come from >> English-only homes. Most children have at least three full years of >> schooling >> in Welsh, and usually more, before they have any choice of instruction in >> English. The end result is striking. Children who come from Welsh-speaking >> >> homes end up fully fluent in BOTH Welsh and English. Children who come from >> >> English-speaking homes end up either fairly or fully fluent in Welsh and >> fully >> fluent in English. >> >> What is clear from work we've been doing here is that no children are at >> risk of >> not learning English fully. That includes the children who come from >> Welsh-only homes who do most of their schooling in Welsh. The majority >> language is so dominant that children cannot help but learn it. >> >> If the educational system started with instruction in English, in all >> likelihood, the Welsh language would gradually diminish, as it was doing >> during >> most of the 20th century. It was in the 1970s that the educational policy >> changed, and this has had the effect of bolstering the Welsh language in the >> >> community. In the last census, the use of Welsh went up for the first time >> in >> decades throughout Wales. >> >> If you'd like copies of any of the work we have been doing on Welsh--e.g., >> we >> recently completed a study of language transmission from parents to children >> >> throughout Wales that confirms what I've said above--I'd be happy to send >> you >> copies. You might also wish to consult work by Colin Baker, who has been >> intimately involved with the Welsh bilingual education policy. >> >> In the case of the Cree children, I think it is clear from both the Miami >> bilinguals' use of Spanish and Welsh bilinguals' use of Welsh that if the >> use >> of Cree is to be maintained in their community, it must be solidly >> established >> in the children's early years. The English will be acquired whatever >> strategy >> is taken. >> >> Best of luck in convincing the school system of this. >> >> Ginny Gathercole >> >> >> Quoting Ann Peters : >> >>> >>> Colleagues, >>> I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about >>> this than I do. Please respond directly to him. >>> thanks >>> ann >>> >>> **************************** >>> Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus >>> Graduate Chair >>> http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ >>> Department of Linguistics >>> University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu >>> 1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 >>> Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 >>> >>> http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/facu >>> lty/ann/ >>> >>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- >>> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 >>> From: Vince Dumond >>> To: ann at hawaii.edu >>> Subject: Second language acquisition >>> >>> Good Morning >>> >>> My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School in >>> northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email in a >>> paper you wrote >>> (http://childes.psy.cmu.ed >>> u/topics/filler.pdf) while doing >>> research on second language acquisition. >>> >>> In three years our community will have a new school and I want to start >>> planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and >>> kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. >>> >>> Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first language >>> until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end product >>> being >>> a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? >>> >>> The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. >>> >>> There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first >>> language >>> will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 years of >>> school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. >>> >>> The English teachers who come to this community see children who perform >>> poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English teachers >>> insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the mother >>> tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so the >>> children can have a higher achievement score in English upon graduation. >>> Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. >>> >>> Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the first >>> language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? >>> >>> Planning for this important step is crucial. >>> >>> Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. >>> >>> Many thanks >>> >>> Vince >>> >>> >>> Vince Dumond >>> Principal, JR Nakogee School >>> Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. >>> P0L 1A0 >>> Phone: (705) 997-2114 >>> Fax: (705) 997-1259 >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> This mail sent through >> http://webmail.bangor.ac.uk >> > > > ***************************************** > Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. > Project Manager, Research Assistant > Dept. of Communication Disorders > University of Massachusetts > Amherst MA 01003 > > 413.545.5023 > fax: 545.0803 > > bpearson at comdis.umass.edu > http://www.umass.edu/aae/ Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 From genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca Wed Dec 21 23:21:35 2005 From: genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca (Fred Genesee) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 18:21:35 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: <43A9C645.1060600@cs.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: Margaret's point about quality materials is certainly true; bad education will result in weak outcomes no matter what language is used and no matter how much it is used. However, I would not want to underestimate the ambition and competence of indigenous groups to create curricula and materials in their native language -- the Hawaiian and Mohawk communities have done remarkable work in this regard although it has been extremely demanding and time-consuming. The Inuit in Northern Quebec have likewise created early heritage language programs in Inuktitut and had to create their own materials, train Inuktitut-speaking teachers, etc. The task is complicated further by the fact that these languages do not always lend themselves easily to modern day mathematical and scientific concepts. In Hawaii, they had to create a lexicography (??) committee to create terms for concepts, processes, and entities that did not already have a word in Hawaiian. My experience with immersion programs for students who are learning a heritage language, like Mohawk or Hawaiian, versus immersion for students learning a non-heritage language (like anglophone students learning French in Canada) is that the former demonstrate a level of involvement and commitment that can be truly remarkable; likewise for the teachers and administrators in heritage language programs. Arguably, this reflects the fact that they are learning and recovering a part of who they are; whereas students who are learning an L2 that is not part of their cultural heritage have a different configuration of attitudes and motivation ... Fred At 03:16 PM 21/12/2005 -0600, Margaret Fleck wrote: >Barbara Pearson wrote: > >> 1. I think a good part of the animus against minority language >> programs in the U.S. is directed against programs that delay >> the introduction of English till 2nd and 3rd grade. > >It's also important to realize that bad schools can make almost >any approach perform badly. California, one of the big >battlegrounds on this topic, has a range of issues with the >quality of its public schools, which could easily have sabotaged >the actual performance of its bilingual programs, helping lead >to their unpopularity. > >Another source of variation would be availability of materials in >the minority language. If I can believe the numbers I just >found on the internet, there are maybe 31 million Spanish speakers >in the US alone, about 500,000 Welsh speakers, but the total Cree >population is barely enough to support a small high school. In addition >to the basic textbooks, a switched-on school kid is going to need > > -- popular cultural materials (e.g. Pokemon and Harry Potter > books and movies) > -- library and classroom enrichment materials (e.g. books on > spiders, medieval knights, digital photography) which is > a big feature even in my son's first grade class > -- textbooks and off-site courses for advanced subjects (e.g. > calculus, computer programming), and non-academic subjects > (e.g. music, car repair, driver's ed) > -- internet resources > >All this stuff is readily available in Spanish. A lot can probably >be found in Welsh. I really wonder how much is going to be available >in, say, Cree. Worrying about sufficient exposure to L2 may be >a moot point if decent-quality L1 instruction requires significant >use of L2 resources anyhow. > >Margaret > (Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois) > > > > > Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 From jordan.zlatev at ling.lu.se Thu Dec 22 09:40:28 2005 From: jordan.zlatev at ling.lu.se (Jordan Zlatev) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:40:28 +0100 Subject: Second Call for Language, Culture & Mind Conference - Paris 2006 Message-ID: SECOND CALL FOR LANGUAGE CULTURE AND MIND CONFERENCE (LCM 2) INTEGRATING PERSPECTIVES AND METHODOLOGIES IN THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE PARIS 17-20 JULY 2006 The second `Language Culture and Mind' Conference (LCM 2) will be held in Paris in July 2006, following the successful first LCM conference in Portsmouth in 2004. The goals of LCM conferences are to contribute to situating the study of language in a contemporary interdisciplinary dialogue, and to promote a better integration of cognitive and cultural perspectives in empirical and theoretical studies of language. The second edition will be held at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST), 46 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris France. Further information concerning the organization, accommodation and fees will be provided as soon as available at the site of the conference: http://www.lcm2006.net  PROVISIONAL TIMETABLE Deadline for submissions:  January 15 (for further detail see underneath) Notification to authors by March 30, 2006 Pre-registration by April 15, 2006 PRESENTATION Human natural languages are biologically based, cognitively motivated, affectively rich, socially shared, grammatically organized symbolic systems. They provide the principal semiotic means for the complexity and diversity of human cultural life. As has long been recognized, no single discipline or methodology is sufficient to capture all the dimensions of this complex and multifaceted phenomenon, which lies at the heart of what it is to be human. In the recent past, perception and cognition have been the basis of general unifying models of language and language activity. However, a genuine integrative perspective should also involve such essential modalities of human action as: empathy, mimesis, intersubjectivity, normativity, agentivity and narrativity. Significant theoretical, methodological and empirical advancements in the relevant disciplines now provide a realistic basis for such a broadened perspective. This conference will articulate and discuss approaches to human natural language and to diverse genres of language activity which aim to integrate its cultural, social, cognitive and bodily foundations. We call for contributions from scholars and scientists in anthropology, biology, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, semiotics, semantics, discourse analysis, cognitive and neuroscience, who wish both to impart their insights and findings, and learn from other disciplines. Preference will be given to submissions which emphasize interdisciplinarity, the interaction between culture, mind and language, and/or multi-methodological approaches in language sciences. Topics include but are not limited to the relation between language and: - biological and cultural co-evolution  - comparative study of communication systems, whether animal or artificial - cognitive and cultural schematization  - emergence in ontogeny and phylogeny  - multi-modal communication - normativity  - thought, emotion and consciousness - perception and categorization - empathy and intersubjectivity - imitation and mimesis - symbolic activity - discourse genres in language evolution and ontogeny - sign, text and literacy Further information about LCM 2 will be presented at http://www.lcm2006.net. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Caroline David (Université de Montpellier) Jean-Louis Dessalles (École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris) Jean Lassègue (CNRS, Paris) Victor Rosenthal (Inserm-EHESS, Paris) Chris Sinha (University of Portsmouth) Yves-Marie Visetti (CNRS, Paris) Joerg Zinken (University of Portsmouth) Jordan Zlatev (Lund University) SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE (current composition) Iraide Ibarretxe Antunano (University of Zaragoza) Jocelyn Benoist (Université de Paris 1) Raphael Berthele (Université de Fribourg, Switzerland) Per Aage Brandt, (Case Western Reserve University) Peer F. Bundgård (Aarhus Universitet) Seana Coulson, (Department of Cognitive Science, UCSD) Jules Davidoff (Goldsmith's, University of London) Jean-Pierre Durafour (University of Tubingen) Michel de Fornel (EHESS, Paris) Vyvyan Evans, (University of Sussex, Grande-Bretagne) Dirk Geeraerts, (Department of Linguistics, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgique) Clarisse Herrenschmidt (CNRS-Laboratoire Anthropologie Sociale, Paris) Chris Knight (University of Edinburgh) Bernard Laks (Université de Paris 10-Nanterre) Sandra Laugier (Université d'Amiens) Maarten Lemmens, (Université Lille III) Lorenza Mondada (Université Lyon II) François Nemo (Université Orléans) Domenico Parisi (CNR, Roma) David Piotrowski (CREA, Paris) Stéphane Robert (CNRS, Paris) François Rastier (CNRS-Modico, Paris) Lucien Scubla (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris) Göran Sonesson (Lund, Semiotics) John Stewart (Université de Technologie de Compiègne) Frederik Stjernfelt (University of Copenhagen) Wolfgang Wildgen (University of Bremen) SUBMISSIONS Submissions are solicited either for oral presentations or for poster sessions. They will be reviewed by members of the International Scientific Committee. Oral presentations should last 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes discussion). All submissions should follow the abstract guidelines below. Submissions should be in English. Abstracts should not exceed 1200 words (about two A4 pages), single-spaced, font size 12 pt or larger, with 2.5 cm margins on all sides. Any diagrams and references must fit on this two page submission. Head material (at the top of the first page): - Title of the paper, - Author name(s), - Author affiliation(s) in brief (1 line), - Email address of principal author - Type of submission (oral presentation, poster) Abstracts should be emailed to submission at lcm2006.net as an ATTACHMENT (i.e. not included in the message) preferably as a MS Word document, but in PDF or postscript format if it is necessary to include a diagram or figure. Abstracts should be submitted by January 15, 2006. Notification of acceptance by March 30, 2006. All abstracts will be reviewed by members of the International Scientific Committee. *************************************************** Jordan Zlatev, Associate Professor Department of Linguistics Center for Languages and Literature Lund University Box 201 221 00 Lund, Sweden email: jordan.zlatev at ling.lu.se http://www.ling.lu.se/persons/JordanZlatev.html *************************************************** From eblasco at libero.it Fri Dec 23 10:49:56 2005 From: eblasco at libero.it (Eduardo Blasco Ferrer) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2005 11:49:56 +0100 Subject: second minor language Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I have been working since 20 years as linguist and psycholinguist with all minority( = lesser used) languages LSU) in the Romance field, particularly with Sardinian (last book 2005: Methods and Techniques with Learning and Teaching Sardinian, Cagliari, Della Torre, dellatorre at tiscali.it ). I can tell you that I still agree with the formulaic sentence of Claude Levi-Strauss: minority languages disappear more rapidly than radioactive particles. If there is no concrete support from administrations (in obligatory learning at school, if possible before 6; in public use etc.), no corpus and status planning (Einar Haugen), no Authority in language (both Milroy), the decay will be unescapable (J. Vendryes: a language does not die by itself, it is a prolonged lost of interest, of passion which leads to its decay). In some recent experiments conducted by a team I lead we have noticed (1) a fairly good competence in the LSL when kids of 4-6 were administered some psycholinguistic tests (auditory verbal learning tests, narrative tests, comprehension and production tests), even when they had not received any direct education from the parents, (2) a tendency to boost performance in metacognitive and metalinguistic tests (for instance in bilingual picture-word selection tasks, or in phoneme discrimination and non-words discrimination) when sardinian and italian were both involved in tasks. We arguably suggest that this "L3 competence" (= neither L1, nor L2 competence) clearly demonstrates that the community acts as a positive substitute of first language acquisition. Hence, we must strive for a gradual improvement of interaction between children without first l. acquisition and networks which within the community still use actively the LSU. This sociolinguistic-anthropologic project may help us to make up for the lack of a clear-cut and deep intervention in language politics, and in the end in the psycholinguistic domain. Best wishes to all of you for Christmas and New Year Bonas Pascas de Nadale e Salude e Trigu pro s'Annu Nou Eduardo Blasco Ferrer full-prof Linguistics, Psycho/Neurolinguistics Univ. Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From S.Bol at mmu.ac.uk Sun Dec 25 23:01:26 2005 From: S.Bol at mmu.ac.uk (Simone Bol) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2005 23:01:26 +0000 Subject: info-childes Digest - 12/25/05 (out of office) Message-ID: I'll be on annual leave till the 3rd of January 2006, so will not be able to reply to emails before that date. For urgent issues please contact the Professional Registration office on 0161-2474671. Kind regards, Simone Bol From bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov Sun Dec 25 23:09:56 2005 From: bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov (Bornstein, Marc (NIH/NICHD) [E]) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2005 18:09:56 -0500 Subject: Marc Bornstein is out of office. Message-ID: I am away from my office on a Travel Order until early January and will reply to your email when I return. If you require assistance, please contact Cheryl Varron, Laboratory Secretary, at 301-496-6832 or . Marc H. Bornstein From macw at mac.com Wed Dec 28 17:12:12 2005 From: macw at mac.com (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 12:12:12 -0500 Subject: Marie from Geneva Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I recently received a contribution to CHILDES of a corpus from Marie between ages 1;8 and 2;6. There are 17 files in which Marie is conversing with her parents at their home in Geneva. Unfortunately, I have lost track of who contributed this corpus. Can anyone, particularly including people working in Geneva, help me out on this? Many thanks. --Brian MacWhinney, CMU From eblasco at libero.it Thu Dec 29 09:01:24 2005 From: eblasco at libero.it (Eduardo Blasco Ferrer) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 10:01:24 +0100 Subject: cultural psychology and second minor language acquisition Message-ID: To Vince,Fred,Barbara, Margaret, Katie,Ann, Ginny, Aubrey and other habitués with second minor language acquisition I have read with great interest all contributions to the question raised by Vince about second "minor" language education/acquisition. Summing up all contributions, I would say that they concentrate on two main issues: (1) educational level (when to start with education at school; which materials to use in order to improve competence and to balance competition with english), (2) political support (official use in public, formal situations; corpus planning). Without dismissing out of hand the relevance of a political and educational intervention, I still believe that the cultural-psychological background of minor languages outside the USA represents a largely neglected topic. Just take into consideration the fact that a vast array of cultural and political circumstances may trigger very different outcomes with individual attachment to the "ethnic" language (I have not read that psychologically most important specification in any contribution) of the community. In rural communities, such as those in Sardinia, Provence, Malta or Friuli, children still hear the ethnic language in the neighbourhood and use it in plays, so that a "smooth" education in oral bilingualism (with first cognitive fields, narratives etc.) can be managed at school without necessarily awaiting that a pending standardization takes place; cultural "priming effect" acts as a powerful psychological argument to recognize and to acquire ethnical identity, and ensures an automathic involvement of the community in multiple interactions (which can also be guided by trained teachers at school). Let's also consider a somewhat different input, as it was Franco's repression in Spain for 40 years. Basque and Cathalan children of middle-class received a castilian (= spanish) education, whilst low-class or intellectually engaged families brought up their children with cathalan. I myself grew up in such a situation and became bilingual without support of schools or high educational policies. Cultural psychology can tell us much more about the inner motivations to be loyal to or to relinquish using ethnic languages than exclusive attention to social and educational politics. Working on both aspects may represent a fruitful line of research. You may find a lot of literature and useful information about romance minor languages in: Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, ed. by Gunter Holtus et al., Tubingen, Max Niemeyer, 1988-2002, 9 vols. E. Blasco Ferrer, Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, Berlin, E. Schmidt, 1996 E. Blasco Ferrer, Handbuch der italienischen Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, E. Schmidt, 1994 G. Brincat, Malta, una storia linguistica, Genova, Le Mani, 2003 M.H. Mira Mateus, As lìngua da Penìnsula Ibérica, Lisboa, Colibri, 2003. I. Badia i Capdevila, Diccionari de les lleng"ues d'Europa, Barcelona, Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2002 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gagarina at zas.gwz-berlin.de Thu Dec 29 19:26:53 2005 From: gagarina at zas.gwz-berlin.de (Natalia Gagarina) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 20:26:53 +0100 Subject: acquisition of anaphora: picture stories In-Reply-To: <43A981B1.8060802@zas.gwz-berlin.de> Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES Members, We're looking for a picture series for story-elicitation with young children. We're starting a new project on the acquisition and disambiguation of intersentential anaphora and would like to use these pictures (but not the famous frog-story) in our experiments. Thank you for the help, with New Year's Greetings, Natalia Gagarina From phyllis.schneider at ualberta.ca Thu Dec 29 19:59:13 2005 From: phyllis.schneider at ualberta.ca (Schneider, Phyllis) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:59:13 -0700 Subject: acquisition of anaphora: picture stories Message-ID: There are several sets of pictures in the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI). They were designed in part to look at introductions of characters and objects in the stories; they should also be appropriate for intersentential anaphora. The pictures are available (at no charge) at www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/enni. The pictures are copyrighted by the artist, so please contact me if you are considering making any changes to the pictures. ********************************************************************* Phyllis Schneider, PhD Professor Dept. of Speech Pathology and Audiology University of Alberta 2-70 Corbett Hall Edmonton, AB T6G 2G4 CANADA (780) 492-7474 Fax: (780) 492-9333 E-mail: phyllis.schneider at ualberta.ca http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/rehabmed/schneider.cfm ********************************************************************* -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of Natalia Gagarina Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2005 12:27 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: Re: acquisition of anaphora: picture stories Dear Info-CHILDES Members, We're looking for a picture series for story-elicitation with young children. We're starting a new project on the acquisition and disambiguation of intersentential anaphora and would like to use these pictures (but not the famous frog-story) in our experiments. Thank you for the help, with New Year's Greetings, Natalia Gagarina From susanna.bartsch at email.de Thu Dec 1 10:47:11 2005 From: susanna.bartsch at email.de (susanna.bartsch at email.de) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 11:47:11 +0100 Subject: Call for Papers - Workshop on ''Acquisition and impairments of inflectional morphology'' Message-ID: Call for papers Workshop on ''Acquisition and impairments of inflectional morphology'' We cordially invite abstracts for the above mentioned workshop which will be held during the 12th International Morphology Meeting in Budapest, May 25-28, 2006. Submission deadline for abstracts: Dec 15 05 In Humboldt's and Sapir's language typology, the languages of the world are classified according to their inflectional morphology: They distinguished isolating from analytical from synthetic languages; the latter can be inflectional, agglutinative, or polysynthetic. In language acquisition, the intensity or richness of inflection is a further important feature for the detection of the structure of the target language and the course of the acquisition process. Similarly, in language impairments, the distribution and severity of defects may depend on the structure of the inflectional morphology of the respective language. Against this typological background, we aim in our workshop to discuss findings and hypotheses concerning universal and language-specific factors playing a role in the acquisition and impairments of inflectional morphology. The workshop aims to contribute to suggestions towards the following general questions: 1) How does the morphological typology of the target language(s) influence the L1 acquisition process or the results of language impairments? 2) What are characteristic delays in the acquisition of inflectional morphology in impaired children (in dependence of the morphological typology of the input)? 3) Which conclusions about the structure of inflectional systems can be drawn from the study of child language acquisition and language impairments? We invite contributions from all theoretical backgrounds dealing with acquisition or impairments of inflectional morphology, especially if they take the typological variety of human languages into account. We particularly encourage studies comparing the morphological acquisition process in impaired and unimpaired children. Colleagues interested in participating in the workshop are invited to announce their participation as soon as possible and to send a one-page abstract (preferably pdf) by e-mail to both of the organizers, Wolfgang U. Dressler and Dagmar Bittner, by December 15th, 2005: wolfgang.dressler at univie.ac.at, dabitt at zas.gwz-berlin.de Sincerely, Wolfgang U. Dressler and Dagmar Bittner From p.monaghan at psych.york.ac.uk Thu Dec 1 10:52:48 2005 From: p.monaghan at psych.york.ac.uk (p.monaghan at psych.york.ac.uk) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 10:52:48 -0000 Subject: new word learning Message-ID: Hello, Gareth Gaskell and colleagues have looked at testing word learning by investigating cohort effects resulting from when the novel word is entered into the lexicon. This only works well if your novel words have late uniqueness points (like cathedruke interfering with cathedral): Gaskell, M. G., & Dumay, N. (2003). Lexical competition and the acquisition of novel words. Cognition, 89, 105-132. Padraic Monaghan > We are looking for a task or tasks that probe word learning. Ideally we would > be able to use the task (or variants of it) in both cognitively impaired and > intact kids and adults. > > We are *not* looking for episodic memory types of tasks such as > the AVLT or CVLT, in which the subjects have to remember a list of real words. > Rather we want to test learning of new words, ideally in a > (relatively) naturalistic context. > Note that fast mapping tasks seem to be good in principle, though in practice one would likely get ceiling effects for adults. > > Any ideas? > > Best, > > Michael Ullman From ioana_goga04 at yahoo.com Thu Dec 1 12:54:32 2005 From: ioana_goga04 at yahoo.com (Goga Ioana) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 04:54:32 -0800 Subject: Romanian contribution to CHILDES Message-ID: Hello everyone, I am wandering if there is anyone on this list, or if you know someone, who is Romanian native speaker (or at least understands Romanian) and knows CHAT and INCA-A. We are trying to contribute to CHILDES a Romanian corpus on the infant-caregiver interaction during the imitation of a seriation task. We would find helpful any feedback on the transcription of the audio files, and on the usage of the coding system INCA-A. We have the files transcribed, coded and linked to video, so it should not be very difficult to follow the action and to provide some feedback. Cheers, Ioana Goga www.coneural.org --------------------------------- Yahoo! Music Unlimited - Access over 1 million songs. Try it free. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov Sun Dec 4 23:03:52 2005 From: bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov (Bornstein, Marc (NIH/NICHD)) Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 18:03:52 -0500 Subject: Marc Bornstein is out of office. Message-ID: I am away from my office on a Travel Order until mid-December and will reply to your email when I return. If you require assistance, please contact Cheryl Varron, Laboratory Secretary, at 301-496-6832 or . Marc H. Bornstein From michael at georgetown.edu Mon Dec 5 18:29:02 2005 From: michael at georgetown.edu (Michael Ullman) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 13:29:02 -0500 Subject: summary: word learning tasks Message-ID: Hi, Thanks to everyone for their responses to my recent query on word learning tasks. The initial query and all responses are included just below. Best, Michael Ullman Initial query: >We are looking for a task or tasks that probe word learning. Ideally we would >be able to use the task (or variants of it) in both cognitively impaired and >intact kids and adults. > >We are *not* looking for episodic memory types of tasks such as >the AVLT or CVLT, in which the subjects have to remember a list of real words. >Rather we want to test learning of new words, ideally in a >(relatively) naturalistic context. >Note that fast mapping tasks seem to be good in principle, though >in practice one would likely get ceiling effects for adults. > >Any ideas? Responses: (1) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:30:49 -0600 From: "McGregor, Karla K" Hi, If you have a large enough set of novel words, you can keep the adults away from ceiling. You might try a "quick incidental learning paradigm," the variant on fast mapping that Mabel Rice has used in the past in which multiple new targets are embedded in a story script. You might also try multiple dependent variables, the children with cognitive impairments might demonstrate learning in recognition tasks only or in production tasks when given multiple retrieval cues; the children with normal development and the adults may learn well enough for production without the need of scaffolding. I'll be interested to see the other suggestions, Karla K. McGregor, Ph.D. Associate Professor Speech Pathology and Audiology University of Iowa 121c WJSHC Iowa City, IA 52242 phone 319-335-8724 fax 319-335-8851 (2) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:47:30 -0600 From: "Aleka A. Blackwell" Dear Michael, I am teaching a course this spring called "The Science of Words" and I plan to explore the question you pose below. I have reviewed some of the literature on lexical acquisition, and it seems Anglin's work seems most diverse in its methodology for testing word meaning knowledge. I understand from your message that you are interested in word learning, instead, especially since you refer to fast mapping. I am also in the process of thinking about ways to probe adjective learning (property concept word mapping vs. object concept word mapping), but I am not satisfied with the design I am using. Would you be so kind to forward the ideas you receive as a result of your posting. I would appreciate it. Best, Aleka Blackwell (3) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 11:41:46 -0800 From: Gedeon De?k Fast mapping is overrated. You tend to get shallow, transitory representations of new lexemes. for example-- Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 25, 318-323 ?Slow Mapping? in Children?s Learning of Semantic Relations Gedeon O. De?k (deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu) Department of Cognitive Science, 9500 Gilman Dr. La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 USA Jennifer Hughes Wagner Department of Psychology and Human Development, Box 512 GPC, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 372003 USA Problem is that as I'm sure you know, "word learning" is not one thing. If you're looking for learning novel phonological patterns, it's one thing; exact subcategorization frame is another, nuances of meaning is another; pragmatically appropriate usage yet another. We have a long-term project examining multiple measures of learning (comprehension, production, & generalization) of object words, over the first 5 ostensive exposures to a word (or other kinds of information), which shows SOME dissociation of these measures, though they're all significantly correlated. As far as "naturalistic," it's a very difficult order, and what counts will be quite different for older kids than for adults; populations with different disabilities that are associated with different cultural learning environments further complicates the picture (e.g., for a child who has a dedicated tutor during much of the school day, one-on-one ostensive learning from an unrelated adult might actually be more "natural" than for a typical 10-year-old, or adult. In short, no standardized test such as you're looking for exists, to my knowledge. Most of the experimental tests people have used don't do a very good job w/ regard to the constraints you've mentioned. That are a few older studies (e.g. Nelson & Bonvillian) that did a better job, but those tested infants/toddlers. Studies of vocab. learning in L2 students (often adults) are closer, but the ones I've seen have limited ecological validity, shallow testing of what's been learned, or both--in short, not valid, sensitive tests of individual differences. Best of luck! (4) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:17:14 -0500 From: Barbara Pearson Dear Michael, You might look at the DELV-NR (Seymour, Roeper, & de Villiers, 2005). There is a long section on Fast-mapping in the Semantics domain (and we have even more items from the pilot version, the Dialect Sensitive Language Test). And Valerie Johnson has even more in her dissertation (UMass, 2001, "Fast mapping verb meaning from argument structure.") There are fairly complex "complement" sentences as well as easier intransitives. When we tried it with children 4 to 12, it is one of the few areas we didn't get a ceiling effect, although I don't know how it would be for "intact adults." There's a scaled score for the children 4 to 9, but of course you can use it with older people. Let us all hear what you come up with. Cheers, Barbara Pearson Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. Project Manager, Research Assistant Dept. of Communication Disorders University of Massachusetts Amherst MA 01003 413.545.5023 fax: 545.0803 bpearson at comdis.umass.edu http://www.umass.edu/aae/ (5) Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:51:20 -0600 From: Margaret Fleck Does it matter what sorts of (unfamiliar) objects you use? E.g. does the (relative) performance of adults and children differ if you make them learn (say) -- unfamiliar animals -- unfamiliar abstract objects -- unfamiliar kitchen tools -- new Pokemon characters Can choice of domain be exploited to help keep the adults off-balance? Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois, Computer Science (6) Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 10:52:48 +0000 (GMT) From: p.monaghan at psych.york.ac.uk Hello, Gareth Gaskell and colleagues have looked at testing word learning by investigating cohort effects resulting from when the novel word is entered into the lexicon. This only works well if your novel words have late uniqueness points (like cathedruke interfering with cathedral): Gaskell, M. G., & Dumay, N. (2003). Lexical competition and the acquisition of novel words. Cognition, 89, 105-132. Padraic Monaghan (7) Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:30:02 -0500 (EST) From: Marnie Arkenberg Hi, I'm not sure if this will be helpful or not-- We taught children (normal-language 4-year-olds) 450 novel words (150 dogs, birds, and horses)over 3 months during free play sessions (2-3 per week for 45 minutes). To test their learning we assessed the number of items children could remember at the next session. This helped us get some learning rate information but we did not assess what children remembered after the study was over so we do not know what overall retention was. Children learned between 35% and 95% of the words when assessed during the following session, but I doubt that they retained that much. I'm currently putting together an experiment that will *hopefully* tap into what words children remember from story books. Please let me know if any of this sounds like what you are looking for and might be helpful. Cheers, Marnie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aschnepf at cisunix.unh.edu Mon Dec 5 23:03:58 2005 From: aschnepf at cisunix.unh.edu (Anne K Schnepf) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 18:03:58 -0500 Subject: phoneme acquisition Message-ID: Hi, I am looking for articles on the acquisition of phonemes for normally developing, monolingual children learning a languages other than English. Any thoughts? Thanks much, Anne Schnepf From htagerf at bu.edu Thu Dec 8 02:21:36 2005 From: htagerf at bu.edu (htagerf at bu.edu) Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 21:21:36 -0500 Subject: Opening for a Research Assistant Message-ID: Please bring this to the attention of all your bright qualified students who may be graduating this winter! Immediate opening for a Research Assistant We are looking for an energetic, experienced person to join our lab. Our main focus is on multi-disciplinary research programs investigating the essential characteristics of the cognitive/linguistic phenotypes that define different neurodevelopmental disorders, and the relationship between these phenotypic characteristics and brain structure and function. The RA will carry out diagnostic, developmental and experimental testing of infants and young children in a research program investigating early markers and development of children with autism or language impairment. Additional responsibilities include writing reports for the families, coding children's social and communicative behaviors, data entry and other research-related activities. The position is full-time with a minimum commitment of 2 years required. Competitive salary and full benefits. Requirements: Bachelors degree in Psychology, or related field; research/clinical experience with infants, young children, and children with disabilities; strong interest and motivation to work in the field of development/clinical psychology and neurodevelopmental disorders. For more information see: www.bu.edu/autism Lab of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston University School of Medicine (Director: Helen Tager-Flusberg Ph.D) Interested applicants should send a letter, resume, copy of transcript, and the names of 3 references to: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nbatman at hunter.cuny.edu Sat Dec 10 17:51:36 2005 From: nbatman at hunter.cuny.edu (Natalie Batmanian) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 12:51:36 -0500 Subject: indefinite nouns in discourse Message-ID: Dear Info Childes: I am looking for references on work in corpora analyses or experiments that shows adult and child preferences for definite animate nouns to be the subject in a sentence and correspondingly interpret an indefinite animate noun to be the direct object in the same sentence. Thanks in advance. Best, Natalie Batmanian -- Natalie Batmanian Post-doctoral Fellow Hunter College Psychology Department (212)773-5557/8 From aurelie.nardy at u-grenoble3.fr Mon Dec 12 13:23:05 2005 From: aurelie.nardy at u-grenoble3.fr (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Aur=E9lie?= NARDY) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 14:23:05 +0100 Subject: Rate of agreement for transcriptions Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES Members, I'm looking for references on the rate of agreement of transcriptors for the same transcription. Firstly, I would like to know how compute a rate of agreement and secondly, which rate value determines the reliability of a given transcription being transcribed by 2 transcriptors. Many thanks Aur?lie Aur?lie Nardy Universit? Stendhal Laboratoire Lidilem BP 25, 38040 Grenoble cedex 9 Tel (bureau) : 04 76 82 68 13 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov Mon Dec 12 20:38:51 2005 From: bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov (Bornstein, Marc (NIH/NICHD) [E]) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 15:38:51 -0500 Subject: info-childes Digest - 12/11/05 Message-ID: Hi Kelley, Is there some way to eliminate my out-of-office message form being sent around? Marc -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2005 6:00 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: info-childes Digest - 12/11/05 info-childes Digest - Sunday, December 11, 2005 Marc Bornstein is out of office. by "Bornstein, Marc \(NIH/NICHD\)" summary: word learning tasks by "Michael Ullman" phoneme acquisition by "Anne K Schnepf" Opening for a Research Assistant by indefinite nouns in discourse by "Natalie Batmanian" From deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu Tue Dec 13 08:10:15 2005 From: deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu (Gedeon De=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=E1k?=) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:10:15 -0800 Subject: Research Design -- drawing pictures or phtos ? In-Reply-To: <20051213055852.96048.qmail@web17210.mail.tpe.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Greetings-- The shape bias for count nouns is a highly context-dependent phenomenon. This is one line of evidence for the argument that constraint-based accounts can't adequately explain word learning (covered in G. De?k, 2000, Developmental Review, 20, 29-80). As one example of context-dependency, certain sentential contexts draw children's attention away from similarity of shape when generalizing novel count nouns, as shown in G. De?k, 2000, Journal of Cognition and Development, 1, 157-192. One reason SOME studies (not all) find an apparent shape bias is that most pictorial stimuli tend to artificially enhance similarity of shape (or a 2-dimensional projection thereof). This enhancement makes preschoolers seem more shape-biased, as shown by G. De?k & P. Bauer, 1996, Child Development, 67, 740-767. The point is not that object shape is unimportant--of course it IS--but that it is best thought of as one object regularity that can flexibly be attended-to in the service of certain kinds of responses or inferences, e.g. about possible word meanings. Children will learn to attend to shape in CERTAIN word-learning situations, if past inferences about words of the same type, in similar contexts, have pointed to shape as a diagnostic feature. This does not mean children represent object word meanings as shape-based. Of course, there are many other interesting relevant sources, including papers by Linda Smith, Susan Jones, Barbara Landau, Dedre Gentner, Susan Gelman, and others; references to many of these (through 2000) can be found in the papers cited above. Good luck-- Gedeon --- "UG, NCKU :)" wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES members, > > I'm now conduct a research in which normal hearing > and hearing-impaired children's cognition will be > tested respectively based on three constraints of > lexical learning (shape, whole object, and > taxonomic) by means of matching. > > When matching, the chidren have to pick one item > from the two to match the standard one. One of the > two items are shape-like as the standard one while > the other has certain semantic relationship as the > standard. Therefore, the following items is a set: > Butterfly-Hair bow-Tiger, in which butterfly is the > standard one. > > And my research question is, > In the lexical development for hearing-impaired > children in Taiwan, is the noun-category bias really > a noun-shape bias? > > And the problem I come up with now is which kind > of following material I sould use when conducting > such experiments -- drawing picture or real photo? > > The previous literatures I have read adapt drawing > pictures as materials. > And the current research is mainly based on: > > Poulin-Bubois, D., Klein, B. P., Graham, S. A., & > Frank, L. (1993). Is the noun-category bias a > noun-shape bias? In E. V. Clark (Ed.), The > proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual child > language research forum (pp. 221-226). Stanford: > Stanford Linguistics Association. > > Many thanks. > > Best, > Hsin-chin. > > Hsin-chin Wang > Graduate Student > College of Liberal Art > Foreign Language and Literature Department, NCKU, > Taiwan > eugenew45 at yahoo.com.tw > eugenew.languag at msa.hinet.net > > ___________________________________________________ > ???s?? Yahoo!?_???Y???q?T 7.0?A?K?O?????q?????A???I http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/ Gedeon O. Deak, Ph.D. Department of Cognitive Science 9500 Gilman Dr. University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 ph: (858) 822-3352 fax: (858) 534-1127 e: deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~deak From roberta at UDel.Edu Tue Dec 13 13:18:10 2005 From: roberta at UDel.Edu (Roberta Golinkoff) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 08:18:10 -0500 Subject: Research Design -- drawing pictures or phtos ? In-Reply-To: <20051213055852.96048.qmail@web17210.mail.tpe.yahoo.com> Message-ID: We have found [Liu, J., Golinkoff, R. M., & Sak, K. (2001). One cow does not an animal make!: Children can extend novel words at the superordinate level. Child Development, 72, 1674- 1694], as had researchers before us, that whether you use pictures or real objects really matters to young children on these forced-choice triad tasks. It depends on children's age as the younger they are, the more they need the richness and detail found in objects --> photos --> drawings in that order. Also see [Golinkoff, R. M., Shuff-Bailey, M., Olguin, R., & Ruan, W. (1995). Young children extend novel words at the basic level: Evidence for the principle of the categorical scope. Developmental Psychology, 31, 494-507.] for more stimulus ideas and ideas on what in the forced choice paradigm makes a difference for children showing taxonomic responses. Good luck! Roberta On Dec 13, 2005, at 12:58 AM, UG, NCKU :)) wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES members, > ? > I'm now conduct a research in which normal hearing and > hearing-impaired children's cognition will be tested respectively > based on three constraints of lexical learning (shape, whole object, > and taxonomic) by means of matching. > ? > When matching, the chidren have to pick one item from the two to match > the standard one. One of the two items are shape-like as the standard > one while the other has certain semantic relationship as the standard. > Therefore, the following items is a set: Butterfly-Hair bow-Tiger, in > which butterfly is the standard one. > ? > And my research question is, > In the?lexical development for hearing-impaired children in Taiwan, is > the noun-category bias really a noun-shape bias? > ? > And the problem I come up with now is which kind of following material > I sould use when conducting such experiments -- drawing picture or > real photo? > ? > The previous literatures I have read adapt drawing pictures as > materials. > And the current research is mainly based on: > ? > Poulin-Bubois, D., Klein, B. P., Graham, S. A., & Frank, L. (1993). Is > the noun-category bias a noun-shape bias? In E. V. Clark (Ed.), The > proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual child language research forum > (pp. 221-226). Stanford: Stanford Linguistics Association. > ?! > Many thanks. > ? > Best, > Hsin-chin. > ? > Hsin-chin Wang > Graduate Student > College of Liberal Art > Foreign Language and Literature Department, NCKU, Taiwan > eugenew45 at yahoo.com.tw > eugenew.languag at msa.hinet.net > > ___________________________________________________ ??? Yahoo!?????? > 7.0??????????? http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/ _____________________________________________________ Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph. D. H. Rodney Sharp Professor School of Education and Departments of Psychology and Linguistics University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 Office: 302-831-1634; Fax: 302-831-4110 Web page: http://udel.edu/~roberta/ Please check out our doctoral program at http://www.udel.edu/educ/graduate/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3738 bytes Desc: not available URL: From andrearo84 at hotmail.com Tue Dec 13 18:44:46 2005 From: andrearo84 at hotmail.com (Andrea Ruiz Ordosgoitti) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 14:44:46 -0400 Subject: I need information Message-ID: I am looking for information about the acquisition of interrogatives sentences in spanish or english. Thanks for help me. Andrea Ruiz/ Caracas- Venezuela. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Amor: busca tu ? naranja http://latam.msn.com/amor/ From htagerf at bu.edu Fri Dec 16 16:34:21 2005 From: htagerf at bu.edu (htagerf at bu.edu) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:34:21 -0500 Subject: Information about a quote Message-ID: Does anyone know the exact wording and especially the source for a quote from Liz Bates (I think) stating that "Language is a new car made up of old parts" Thanks for you help! Helen ______________________________________________ Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience ( www.bu.edu/autism ) Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L814 Boston MA 02118 Fax: 617-414-1301 Voice: 617-414-1312 Email: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbrea1 at tampabay.rr.com Fri Dec 16 16:58:15 2005 From: mbrea1 at tampabay.rr.com (Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:58:15 -0500 Subject: Information about a quote Message-ID: Bates, E. (2004). Explaining and interpreting deficits in language development across clinical groups: Where do we go from here? Brain and Language, 88, 248-253. "Language may be a new machine that nature has constructed out of old parts" p. 250 Maria Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn, M.S., CCC-SLP Doctoral Candidate Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Psychology and Communication Sciences and Disorders University of South Florida Tampa, FL Mbrea1 at tampabay.rr.com "Explore and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry." --Ralph Waldo Emerson ----- Original Message ----- From: htagerf at bu.edu To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Cc: sjrogers at ucdavis.edu Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 11:34 AM Subject: Information about a quote Does anyone know the exact wording and especially the source for a quote from Liz Bates (I think) stating that "Language is a new car made up of old parts" Thanks for you help! Helen ______________________________________________ Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience (www.bu.edu/autism) Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L814 Boston MA 02118 Fax: 617-414-1301 Voice: 617-414-1312 Email: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From htagerf at bu.edu Fri Dec 16 17:07:29 2005 From: htagerf at bu.edu (htagerf at bu.edu) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 12:07:29 -0500 Subject: Liz Bates' Quote Message-ID: Here are the responses I received - thanks to everyone! Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn, M.S., CCC-SLP: Bates, E. (2004). Explaining and interpreting deficits in language development across clinical groups: Where do we go from here? Brain and Language, 88, 248-253. "Language may be a new machine that nature has constructed out of old parts" p. 250 Elena Lieven: In Bates & MacWhinney 1989, The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, p.10 they say: "Language could be viewed as a new machine constructed entirely out of old parts" Erika Hoff: language is "a new machine built out of old parts" in "Bates, Thal, & Marchman (1991). Smbols and syntax: A darwinian approach ot language development. In N. A. Krasnegor, D. M. Rumbaugh, R. L. Schiefelbusch, & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Biological and behavioral determints of language development (pp. 29-66). Nillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. The quote is on p. 5. Ping Li: "the human capacity for language could be both innate and species-specific, and yet involve no mechanisms that evolved specifically and uniquely for language itself. Language could be viewed as a new machine constructed entirely out of old parts." (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989; see also Bates et al., 1979). Bates, E., Benigni, L., Bretherton, I., Camaioni, L., & Volterra, V. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in infancy. New York: Academic Press. Bates, E.& MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition model, In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds), The cross-linguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 3-73).Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ______________________________________________ Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience ( www.bu.edu/autism ) Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L814 Boston MA 02118 Fax: 617-414-1301 Voice: 617-414-1312 Email: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From DaleP at health.missouri.edu Fri Dec 16 17:20:22 2005 From: DaleP at health.missouri.edu (Dale, Philip S.) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:20:22 -0600 Subject: Information about a quote Message-ID: Another variation, from the 1979 book: "... this particular work of art is a collage, put together out of a series of old parts that developed quite independently. This does not make the achievement any less wonderful. But it does begin to make it understandable." (p. 1) Philip Dale -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 10:58 AM To: htagerf at bu.edu; info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Cc: sjrogers at ucdavis.edu Subject: Re: Information about a quote Bates, E. (2004). Explaining and interpreting deficits in language development across clinical groups: Where do we go from here? Brain and Language, 88, 248-253. "Language may be a new machine that nature has constructed out of old parts" p. 250 Maria Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn, M.S., CCC-SLP Doctoral Candidate Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Psychology and Communication Sciences and Disorders University of South Florida Tampa, FL Mbrea1 at tampabay.rr.com "Explore and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry." --Ralph Waldo Emerson ----- Original Message ----- From: htagerf at bu.edu To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Cc: sjrogers at ucdavis.edu Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 11:34 AM Subject: Information about a quote Does anyone know the exact wording and especially the source for a quote from Liz Bates (I think) stating that "Language is a new car made up of old parts" Thanks for you help! Helen ______________________________________________ Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience ( www.bu.edu/autism) Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L814 Boston MA 02118 Fax: 617-414-1301 Voice: 617-414-1312 Email: htagerf at bu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrearo84 at hotmail.com Fri Dec 16 18:55:39 2005 From: andrearo84 at hotmail.com (Andrea Ruiz Ordosgoitti) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 14:55:39 -0400 Subject: Necesito informaci=?iso-8859-1?Q?=F3n?= Message-ID: Hola, soy estudiante universitaria y necesito que ayuden a encontrar informaci?n acerca del proceso de adquisici?n de las oraciones interrogativas en el ingl?s o el espa?ol. Les agradecer?a todav?a m?s si dicha informaci?n est? en espa?ol ya que tengo poco dominio del idioma ingl?s. Much?simas gracias de antemano, Andrea Ruiz. _________________________________________________________________ Consigue aqu? las mejores y mas recientes ofertas de trabajo en Am?rica Latina y USA: http://latam.msn.com/empleos/ From pli at richmond.edu Fri Dec 16 20:56:17 2005 From: pli at richmond.edu (Ping Li) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:56:17 -0500 Subject: bilingualism and schizophrenia Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, I am writing to ask if you have any pointers/references for research on schizophrenic patients (mainly the thought-disordered patients) who speak two languages. I could not find much on this topic. Thanks, and Happy Holidays. Ping Li ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------ Ping Li, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science Graduate Program Coordinator Department of Psychology University of Richmond Richmond, VA 23173, USA Email: pli at richmond.edu http://www.richmond.edu/~pli/ http://cogsci.richmond.edu/ Bilingualism: Language and Cognition: http://cogsci.richmond.edu/bilingualism/bilingualism.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------- From macw at mac.com Fri Dec 16 22:16:36 2005 From: macw at mac.com (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 17:16:36 -0500 Subject: Liz Bates' Quote In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Helen et al., By the time Liz and I wrote the introductory chapter for our 1989 book, she had been using this particular phrasing for years in her inimitably articulate way. The idea is fundamental to Darwin, but the source that she and I thought was the clearest on this was Werner and Kaplan's Symbol Formation from 1960. By the way, the final shape of phrasing she adopted can itself be viewed metalinguistically as a new machine out of many old parts :) --Brian MacWhinney On Dec 16, 2005, at 12:07 PM, htagerf at bu.edu wrote: > Here are the responses I received - thanks to everyone! > > > Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn, M.S., CCC-SLP: > Bates, E. (2004). Explaining and interpreting deficits in language > development across clinical groups: Where do we go from here? Brain > and Language, 88, 248-253. > > "Language may be a new machine that nature has constructed out of > old parts" p. 250 > > Elena Lieven: > > In Bates & MacWhinney 1989, The Crosslinguistic Study of Language > > Acquisition, p.10 they say: > > "Language could be viewed as a new machine constructed entirely out of > > old parts" > > Erika Hoff: > language is "a new machine built out of old parts" in "Bates, Thal, > & Marchman (1991). Smbols and syntax: A darwinian approach ot > language development. In N. A. Krasnegor, D. M. Rumbaugh, R. L. > Schiefelbusch, & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Biological and > behavioral determints of language development (pp. 29-66). > Nillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. The quote is on p. 5. > Ping Li: > > "the human capacity for language could be both innate and species- > specific, and yet involve no mechanisms that evolved specifically > and uniquely for language itself. Language could be viewed as a new > machine constructed entirely out of old parts." (Bates & > MacWhinney, 1989; see also Bates et al., 1979). > > Bates, E., Benigni, L., Bretherton, I., Camaioni, L., & Volterra, > V. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in > infancy. New York: Academic Press. > > Bates, E.& MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition > model, In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds), The cross-linguistic > study of sentence processing (pp. 3-73).Cambridge University Press, > Cambridge. > > > ______________________________________________ > Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD > Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology > Director, Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience (www.bu.edu/autism) > Boston University School of Medicine > 715 Albany Street L814 > Boston MA 02118 > > Fax: 617-414-1301 > Voice: 617-414-1312 > Email: htagerf at bu.edu > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk Fri Dec 16 23:30:29 2005 From: r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk (Robin Campbell) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 23:30:29 +0000 Subject: Liz Bates' Quote In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I recall this as Werner's Law: 'New forms first carry out old functions; New functions are first carried out by old forms'. I think Dan Slobin may have referred to it in that way sometime in the 60s. However, I'm sure that Werner got it from Ernst Mayr. Now, where is that reference . . . - Robin Campbell On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Helen et al., > By the time Liz and I wrote the introductory chapter for our > 1989 book, she had been using this particular phrasing for years in > her inimitably articulate way. > The idea is fundamental to Darwin, but the source that she and > I thought was the clearest on this was Werner and Kaplan's Symbol > Formation from 1960. > By the way, the final shape of phrasing she adopted can itself > be viewed metalinguistically as a new machine out of many old parts :) > > --Brian MacWhinney -- The University of Stirling is a university established in Scotland by charter at Stirling, FK9 4LA. Privileged/Confidential Information may be contained in this message. If you are not the addressee indicated in this message (or responsible for delivery of the message to such person), you may not disclose, copy or deliver this message to anyone and any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful. In such case, you should destroy this message and kindly notify the sender by reply email. Please advise immediately if you or your employer do not consent to Internet email for messages of this kind. From aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk Sat Dec 17 01:51:27 2005 From: aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk (aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 01:51:27 +0000 Subject: Information about a quote In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range, etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the eight or so language universals, structure dependency, endo-centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude cannibalism? And: Why? Aubrey Nunes PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., 52, Bonham Road, London SW2 5HG 0207 652 1347 From macw at mac.com Sat Dec 17 21:18:38 2005 From: macw at mac.com (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 16:18:38 -0500 Subject: Information about a quote In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Aubrey, Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that does not arise from old parts? Without concrete examples of this, I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude cannibalism. Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in mind. Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful idea" that arises in the usual way in one evolutionary configuration, but then spreads like wildfire because of the adaptive advantage it provides. Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right? --Brian MacWhinney On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: > Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in > the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in > Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language > improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range, > etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary > Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the > eight or so language universals, structure dependency, endo- > centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human > divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what > order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude > cannibalism? And: Why? > > Aubrey Nunes > PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT > Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., > 52, Bonham Road, > London SW2 5HG > 0207 652 1347 > > > From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Sat Dec 17 20:52:49 2005 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 20:52:49 +0000 Subject: bilingualism and schizophrenia In-Reply-To: <673F1CB7-6E76-11DA-BE91-0011246FEB0E@richmond.edu> Message-ID: An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From aurelie.nardy at u-grenoble3.fr Mon Dec 19 13:00:22 2005 From: aurelie.nardy at u-grenoble3.fr (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Aur=E9lie?= NARDY) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 14:00:22 +0100 Subject: Rate of agreement for transcriptions Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, Many thanks to all who responded to my request concerning the rate of agreement for transcriptions. Two main points emerge: percentage of agreement and Cohen?s Kappa (a statistical test allowing to assess the agreement between two or more observant of (?) the same phenomenon, fore more information, see http://kappa.chez-alice.fr/) I put below the initial query, the references that I received and then I give some replies. Dear Info-CHILDES Members, I'm looking for references on the rate of agreement of transcriptors for the same transcription. Firstly, I would like to know how compute a rate of agreement and secondly, which rate value determines the reliability of a given transcription being transcribed by 2 transcriptors. Many thanks Aur?lie References: Roberts, F., Robinson, J.D., (2004), Interobserver agreement on first-stage conversation analytic transcription, Human Communication research, Vol.30, n?3. Yoon, Tae-Jin / Chavarria, Sandra / Cole, Jennifer / Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark (2004): "Intertranscriber reliability of prosodic labeling on telephone conversation using toBI", In INTERSPEECH-2004, 2729-2732. Pye, C., Wilcox, K. A., Siren, K. A. (1988). Refining transcriptions:The significance of transcriber "errors." Journal of Child Language.Vol 15(1), 17-37. Gut, U. & Bayerl, P. S. (2004): Measuring the Reliability f Manual Annotations of Speech orpora. Proceedings of Seech Prosody 2004, Nara, 565-568. Shriberg, L. D., & Lof, G. L. (1991). Reliability studies in broad and narrow phonetic transcription. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 5, 225279. Kent, R. D. (1996). Hearing and believing: some limits to the auditory-perceptual assessment of speech and voice disorders. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 5(3), 7-23. A bout Cohen's Kappa:(by Julian Lloyd). The two main methods for assessing inter-transcriber reliability are percentage agreement and Cohen's kappa. Regarding percentage agreement, the type of study you are carrying out will obviously determine your level of analysis (e.g., word-by-word, phoneme-by-phoneme, utterance segmentation, etc).You assess reliability for a sample of your data, say 20%. Taking words as an example, you would calculate the number of times that the two transcribers agree and disagree on words. Percentage agreement is then calculated as follows: PA = 100 x number of agreements / number of agreements + number of disagreements A limitation of percentage agreements is that they do not make any corrections for chance (i.e., the transcriber guessing). Cohen's (1960) kappa is a reliability index that does correct for chance. k = (Po - Pe) / (1 - Pe) Po = proportion of observed agreements Pe = proportion of agreements that would be expected by chance You're looking for a result greater than 0.7. About the methodology: (by Diane Pesco) CALCULATING RELIABILITY FOR WORD-WORD AGREEMENT: Transcriber 2 transcribes segment of pre-established length Transcriber 1 & 2 comparison: On the "original" transcript 1: underline words that are discrepant (that is, a word is marked in transcriber 2's file but it is not the same word that transcriber 1 transcribed) circle words that transcriber 2 did not transcribe/omitted draw a circle to indicate words that transcriber 1 omitted AND pencil in word (this way single printout can be used to review video & reach consensus as necessary) count all the words in transcriber 1 printout + all circles with penciled words to obtain total # words total at bottom of each page to ensure accuracy in counting calculate disagreement (then derive agreement) by dividing # discrepant + # omissions (both those of transcriber 1 and 2) by total # words About the methodology: (by Gisela Szagun) I think different researchers have approached this problem differently. In our research we started with a training of transcribers. First, transcribers are introduced into the transcription rules (i.e. spelling of contractions etc.). We made our own rules for German. Then they do a transcript which is checked by an experienced transcriber. Then all the transcribers (we had up to 7) meet and discuss problems. Then they all do the same transcript and transcriptions are compared and differences discussed. If things are moderately okay after this training, we work in pairs of transcribers. Each member of the pair has their transcript checked by the other member who has the transcript and listens to the tape. If the person checking hear something different they make a comment. You can also have both transcribers do 100 utterances independently, actually transcribing them. In our big study (more than 400 2-hour recordings) we obtained agreement in this way on 7.3 % of the speech samples. We simply calculated percentage agreement, i.e. the number of utterances agreeing and those which don't. Agreement should be 90 %. We obtained between 96 % and 100 % . To my knowledge there is no conventional standard for agreement, like for instance we have in statistical analyses of observer reliabilities. Many thanks also to Elena Lieven, Ulrike Gut, Eve V. Clark, Joe Stemberger and Christelle Dodane for their replies. Kind regards. Aur?lie Aur?lie Nardy Universit? Stendhal Laboratoire Lidilem BP 25, 38040 Grenoble cedex 9 Tel (bureau) : 04 76 82 68 13 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aschnepf at cisunix.unh.edu Mon Dec 19 13:39:28 2005 From: aschnepf at cisunix.unh.edu (Anne K Schnepf) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:39:28 -0500 Subject: Summary: phoneme acquisition Message-ID: Hello, Thanks everyone for giving me so many responses and references. By request, all responses and the initial query are listed below. Many thanks, Anne Schnepf Initial Query: Hi, I am looking for articles on the acquisition of phonemes for normally developing, monolingual children learning languages other than English. Any thoughts? Thanks much, Anne Schnepf Responses: Quoting Jean Pierre Chevrot : > > Two papers about acquisition of phonemes inventory in French > > AICART DE FALCO, S. et VION, M. (1987). La mise en place du syst?me > phonologique du fran?ais chez les enfants entre 3 et 6 ans, ?tude de la > production, Cahiers de psychologie Cognitive, 7 (3), 247-266. > VINTER, S. (2001). Les habilet?s phonologiques chez l'enfant de deux > ans, Glossa, 77, 4-19. > > > Jean-Pierre Chevrot Quoting Leah Fabiano : > Hello Anne, > > I saw your request on the Childes list and wanted to send > you some references that I have for Spanish phoneme > acquisition (monolinguals): > > Acevedo, 1993 > Fantini, 1984 > Jimenez, 1987 > Linares, 1981 > Melgar, 1976 > Anderson & Smith, 1987 > de la Fuente, 1985 > > You can also look for a compilation of these studies in > Bedore (1999). > > I hope this helps! > > Leah > > Leah Fabiano, M.S., CCC-SLP > Temple University Quoting Annick De Houwer : > See > The Acquisition of Dutch, editors Steven Gillis and Annick De Houwer, 1998, > Amsterdam: John Benjamins > > Best regards, > > > Annick De Houwer Quoting "Gerrits E (NP)" : > Dear Anne, > Here are some references. > > French: > Bogliotti, C. (2003). Relation between categorical perception of speech > and reading acquisition. Proceedings of ICPhS, Barcelona, 885 - 888. > > Plaza, M., and Rigoard, M-T. (2001). Phoneme discrimination and phoneme > identification in French language-impaired and normally-developing > children. > Clinical linguistics and phonetics 15:57-61. > > Dutch: > Clement, C.J., and Wijnen, F. (1994). Acquisition of vowel contrasts in > Dutch. journal of speech and hearing research 37:83-89. > > Gerrits, P.A.M. (2001). The categorisation of speech sounds by adults > and children, Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University. > > Kuijpers, C.T.L. (1996). Perception of the voicing contrast by Dutch > children and adults. Journal of phonetics 24:367-382. > > Other: > Oller, D.K., and Eilers, R.E. (1983). Speech identification in Spanish- > and English-learning 2-year-olds. Journal of speech and hearing research > 26:50-53. > > dr. Ellen Gerrits > Speech and language pathologist > > Maastricht University, Brain & Behaviour Institute Quoting Marilyn Vihman : > > If you go to my website, Anne, you will find my list of publications, > which include studies of French, Estonian, Welsh, Finnish...I don't > work on the 'acquisition of phonemes' though, if you are expecting a > specific order. Instead, I see phonology emerging out of whole-word > forms. A number of my recent papers are in pdf form on the website. > They might be helpful. > > -marilyn > -- Quoting "Erkelens, M.A." : > Dear Anne, > > Paula Fikkert has written a lot about the acquisition of Dutch > phonology. You may want to check her website for references: > http://www.fikkert.com/. > > Kind regards, > Marian Erkelens. Quoting Ruth Berman : > You should contact Sharynne McLeod > > She is now completing editing of a handbook of speech acquisition for > dozens of different languages > Sincerely > Ruth Berman Quoting Barbara Zurer Pearson : > Dear Anne, > > We are doing an article on the acquisition of phonemes > (and clusters) in typically developing African American > children. I don't think that's what you're looking for, > although there are some differences based on the differences > in the target dialect. > > I'm writing to ask you share what you find. (You might > check Barton & Macken 1980 or so for Spanish acquisition. > I'm sure there's more: I just haven't been watching out > for it.) > > Barbara Quoting Krisztina Zajd?t;zajdo at hotmail.com>: > Dear Anne, > > I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the acquisition of vowels in > Hungarian-speaking monolingual > children. Would you be interested in a copy? > > Best wishes, > > Krisztina Zajdo Quoting Tania.Zamuner at mpi.nl: > Dear Anne, > > For the acquisition of Dutch, you could look at Mieke Beers dissertation. > > Beers, M. (1995) The Phonology of Normally developing and Language > Impaired Children. PhD Dissertation. University of Amsterdam. > > > Tania Zamuner From pli at richmond.edu Mon Dec 19 17:32:00 2005 From: pli at richmond.edu (Ping Li) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 12:32:00 -0500 Subject: Summary: Bilingualism and Schizophrenia Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, Many thanks to the following colleagues who responded to my inquiry regarding research in schizophrenia and bilingualism: Jose Centeno, Ann Dowker, Roberta Golinkoff, Loraine Obler, Tomasina Oh Sim. Generally, it seems, this is not a very well examined topic. Perhaps there aren't too many schizophrenic bilingual patients? (note that none of these articles seems to deal specifically with thought-disordered patients). 1: De Zulueta FI, Gene-Cos N, Grachev S. Differential psychotic symptomatology in polyglot patients: Case reports and their implications. Br J Med Psychol. 2001 Sep;74 Part 3:277-292. 2: Wang JH, Morales O, Hsu LK. Auditory hallucinations in bilingual immigrants. J Nerv Ment Dis. 1998 Aug;186(8):501-3. PMID: 9717869 3: de Zulueta FI. The implications of bilingualism in the study and treatment of psychiatric disorders: a review. Psychol Med. 1984 Aug;14(3):541-57. 4: Grand S, Marcos LR, Freedman N, Barroso F. Relation of psychopathology and bilingualism to kinesic aspects of interview behavior in schizophrenia. J Abnorm Psychol. 1977 Oct;86(5):492-500. 5: Alpert M. Evaluation of psychopathology in bilinguals. Psychopharmacol Bull. 1975 Oct;11(4):60-1. Two other sources might also contain discussions of schizophrenic bilinguals. 6. Fabbro, F. (1999). The neurolinguistics of bilingualism: An introduction. East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press (I checked the book and there was a discussion of a hallucinative-paranoid schizophrenic patient who spoke Russian and Turkmenian). 7. Hyltenstam, K., & Stroud, C. (1989). Bilingualism in Alzheimer's dementia: Two case studies. In K. Hyltenstam & L. K. Obler, Bilingualism acorss the lifespan: Aspects of acquisition, maturity, and loss. Cambridge U. Press. Happy Holidays. Ping Li ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------ Ping Li, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science Graduate Program Coordinator Department of Psychology University of Richmond Richmond, VA 23173, USA Email: pli at richmond.edu http://www.richmond.edu/~pli/ http://cogsci.richmond.edu/ Bilingualism: Language and Cognition: http://cogsci.richmond.edu/bilingualism/bilingualism.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------- From mjwilcox at asu.edu Tue Dec 20 01:05:35 2005 From: mjwilcox at asu.edu (Jeanne Wilcox) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:05:35 -0700 Subject: Doctoral Fellowships in Child Language Message-ID: Are You Considering a Ph.D. with an Emphasis in Child Language? The Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University is recruiting a cohort of six new doctoral students to begin study in Fall, 2006 Full Tuition Remission * Student Stipend Private Office Space * Excellent Lab Facilities Great Colleagues * Great Mentors * Great Location Travel Allowance Possible Areas of Emphasis: Bilingual Language Intervention * Cross-Linguistic First Language Acquisition Early Intervention (Infants and Toddlers) * Early Literacy * Language Impairment Phonological Acquisition * Vocabulary Acquisition Arizona State University is one of the premier metropolitan public research universities in the nation. ASU is research-driven but focused on learning-teaching is carried out in a context that encourages the creation of new knowledge. ASU maintains a tradition of academic excellence and has become an important global center for innovative interdisciplinary teaching and research. The Department of Speech and Hearing Science is in the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It is home to 40 faculty and staff that support its mission to educate undergraduate students in the scientific field of human communication; to train graduate students to provide clinical services in speech-language pathology and audiology; to provide community service; and to conduct research and train future educators and scientists. Together with outstanding faculty from other related departments including Early Childhood Education, Special Education, Family Studies, and Nursing, our faculty provides interdisciplinary depth in early childhood and school age training. Doctoral students are encouraged to develop an individualized program of study and research with the goal of becoming our next generation of faculty researchers. Each student will have a primary mentor with funded research in the area of child language. Child language faculty include Drs. Shelley Gray, David Ingram, Laida Restrepo, and Jeanne Wilcox. For more information please contact any of the following faculty: Shelley Gray (shelley.gray at asu.edu), Laida Restrepo (Laida.Restrepo at asu.edu ), Jeanne Wilcox (mjwilcox at asu.edu ) and visit our SHS Department website at http://www.asu.edu/clas/shs/ ============================================ M. Jeanne Wilcox, Ph.D. Director, Infant Child Research Programs Professor, Department of Speech & Hearing Science PO Box 871908 Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-1908 Voice: 480-965-9397 FAX: 480-965-0965 e-mail: mjwilcox at asu.edu http://icrp.asu.edu (Infant Child Research Programs) http://www.asu.edu/clas/shs (Speech & Hearing Science http://tnt.asu.edu (Tots N Tech Research Institute) From aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk Tue Dec 20 04:22:14 2005 From: aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk (aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 04:22:14 +0000 Subject: Information about a quote Message-ID: Dear Brian You're right in guessing that I wasn't invoking divinity. My metaphors were festive season ones. But in order to extend the idea of new parts from old to phenomena like binding, endocentricity, structure dependency, I think that the old has to be both identifiable and such as to help explain why things are the way they are. I just don't see how this can be done so as to account for the main outlines of these theories and various others. Take endocentricity and its most outward appearance with edgemost maximal projections. In human perception generally there seems to be a default expectation of symmetry. In single-family dwellings built in Britain for the last 150 years, a double-fronted layout is rare. But in a British child's picture of a house, I have yet to see the normal terraced layout with the front door on one side. The same preference for symmetry seems to be attested in metaphor - with the centre favoured over the edges. In both syntax and phonology, a symmetrical layout would be easy to define, with words and sentences built strictly from the middle. But whatever the number of cases where this might be appropriate, it seems to me that they are so few in number, and that the preponderance of asymmetry and directionality in headedness, Wh movement, syllable structure, and more, should be treated as highly significant. I make no guesses as to the likely triggering or rate of spread of linguistic change. These seem to me to be some of the most fascinating questions in linguistics. But from the extreme case of the school for the deaf in Nicaragua, where an entirely new language is said to have emerged in a single childhood, it seems to me that linguistic theory must be at least capable of accounting for change at the wildfire end of the scale rather than the glacial. I certainly wasn't assuming that the speed of change might provide a way of telling whether a given phenomenon was a case of new from old or speculating as to how this might be done. None of the cases are simple. Obviously the argument needs to be in detail. I was allowing that there might be a number of cases of new from old, and listed some cases where this seems to me most plausible. I was suggesting only that the new from old model may not be the only one, and that some changes may have been just by the odd roll of the genetic dice - to get back to the festive season, Aubrey Nunes On 17 Dec 2005, at 21:18, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Aubrey, > > Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that does > not arise from old parts? Without concrete examples of this, > I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude > cannibalism. Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing > Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in mind. > Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful idea" that > arises in the usual way in one evolutionary configuration, but then > spreads like wildfire because of the adaptive advantage it provides. > Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like > glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right? > > --Brian MacWhinney > > On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: > >> Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in the >> restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in >> Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language >> improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range, >> etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary >> Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the >> eight or so language universals, structure dependency, >> endo-centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human >> divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what >> order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude >> cannibalism? And: Why? >> >> Aubrey Nunes >> PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT >> Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., >> 52, Bonham Road, >> London SW2 5HG >> 0207 652 1347 >> >> >> > > > From pcnorton at yahoo.com Tue Dec 20 05:31:23 2005 From: pcnorton at yahoo.com (Pam Norton) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:31:23 -0800 Subject: Post-docs in Sociolinguistics? In-Reply-To: <68801.20544@mail.talkbank.org> Message-ID: Hello all, I am a doctoral candidate with a master's in communicative disorders and finishing up my doctoral program within the next year in Special Ed (focus on atypical psycholinguistics). I would love to get more experience on the linguistics end. (The Joint European Masters Clinical Linguistics is interesting but is master's level.) I am looking to get more experience in qualitative, ethnographic research, especially in sociolinguistics. I have looked for post-docs in sociolinguistics but apparently don't know where to look. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks, Pam Norton, M.S., CCC-SLP ABD, Joint Doctoral Program in Special Ed University of Berkeley with San Francisco State P.S. Thanks for everyone's assistance so far with fantastic references on AAE in children and dialect awareness (for those who remember me). I WILL compile them and send them in soon. Your advice regarding research equipment has been invaluable and right on. [My research is on whether school speech pathologists are able to distinguish language difference (AAE) from language disorder.] It's going along fine, I've collected language samples from 4 of the 10 children I need and am so grateful for all your advice regarding research equipment (got the Powerbook G4, am using IMovies and it's great!). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cnarayan at umich.edu Tue Dec 20 13:26:44 2005 From: cnarayan at umich.edu (cnarayan at umich.edu) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:26:44 -0500 Subject: Post-docs in Sociolinguistics? In-Reply-To: <20051220053123.15396.qmail@web81405.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Post-docs in sociolinguistics may be more difficult to find than post-docs in more psycholinguistic fields (i.e., speech perception, sentence processing, etc.). You can search for these on LinguistList under Jobs. You may want to also look at NIH training fellowships and propose a site for your training. Michigan has an excellent socio program as does Penn, though they are probably theoretically opposed. ================================ chandan r. narayan dept. of linguistics university of michigan -------------------------------- cnarayan at umich.edu www-personal.umich.edu/~cnarayan ================================ From lise.menn at colorado.edu Tue Dec 20 17:05:18 2005 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 10:05:18 -0700 Subject: Information about a quote In-Reply-To: <3a5e0eaa8fcf81095751bcf5a0b3d3ee@pigeonpostbox.co.uk> Message-ID: small note: temporal and spatial symmetry should not be casually equated. For spatial symmetry we can look back and forth from one side to another; evolution-wide, being able to find the middle of a gap automatically is very useful for getting thru narrow places with minimal bruising. Temporal symmetry, with our fast-fading auditory memories, is much less obvious, and that's the kind one would need for structures. the ability to consciously remember auditory sequences is temporally asymmetrical, for sure - what 's your telephone number backwards? And unconscious temporal processing is probably similarly limited - mirror image rules are rare indeed. We don't have that particular kind of computational ability built in. Lise On Dec 19, 2005, at 9:22 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: > Dear Brian > > You're right in guessing that I wasn't invoking divinity. My > metaphors were festive season ones. But in order to extend the idea > of new parts from old to phenomena like binding, endocentricity, > structure dependency, I think that the old has to be both > identifiable and such as to help explain why things are the way > they are. I just don't see how this can be done so as to account > for the main outlines of these theories and various others. Take > endocentricity and its most outward appearance with edgemost > maximal projections. In human perception generally there seems to > be a default expectation of symmetry. In single-family dwellings > built in Britain for the last 150 years, a double-fronted layout is > rare. But in a British child's picture of a house, I have yet to > see the normal terraced layout with the front door on one side. The > same preference for symmetry seems to be attested in metaphor - > with the centre favoured over the edges. > > In both syntax and phonology, a symmetrical layout would be easy to > define, with words and sentences built strictly from the middle. > But whatever the number of cases where this might be appropriate, > it seems to me that they are so few in number, and that the > preponderance of asymmetry and directionality in headedness, Wh > movement, syllable structure, and more, should be treated as highly > significant. > > I make no guesses as to the likely triggering or rate of spread of > linguistic change. These seem to me to be some of the most > fascinating questions in linguistics. But from the extreme case of > the school for the deaf in Nicaragua, where an entirely new > language is said to have emerged in a single childhood, it seems to > me that linguistic theory must be at least capable of accounting > for change at the wildfire end of the scale rather than the glacial. > > I certainly wasn't assuming that the speed of change might provide > a way of telling whether a given phenomenon was a case of new from > old or speculating as to how this might be done. None of the cases > are simple. Obviously the argument needs to be in detail. I was > allowing that there might be a number of cases of new from old, and > listed some cases where this seems to me most plausible. I was > suggesting only that the new from old model may not be the only > one, and that some changes may have been just by the odd roll of > the genetic dice - to get back to the festive season, > > Aubrey Nunes > > On 17 Dec 2005, at 21:18, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > >> Dear Aubrey, >> >> Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that >> does not arise from old parts? Without concrete examples of this, >> I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude >> cannibalism. Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing >> Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in >> mind. Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful >> idea" that arises in the usual way in one evolutionary >> configuration, but then spreads like wildfire because of the >> adaptive advantage it provides. >> Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like >> glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right? >> >> --Brian MacWhinney >> >> On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: >> >>> Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in >>> the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not >>> in Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language >>> improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, >>> range, etc,, but roughly once in every million years the >>> evolutionary Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This >>> gives us the eight or so language universals, structure >>> dependency, endo-centricity, binding principles, etc., since the >>> point of human divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to >>> me, are: in what order of things did the canny marketing prevail >>> over the crude cannibalism? And: Why? >>> >>> Aubrey Nunes >>> PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT >>> Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., >>> 52, Bonham Road, >>> London SW2 5HG >>> 0207 652 1347 >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> > > Lise Menn Office: 303-492-1609 Linguistics Dept. Fax: 303-413-0017 295 UCB Hellems 293 University of Colorado Boulder CO 80309-0295 Professor of Linguistics, University of Colorado, University of Hunan Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics] Office Hours Fall'05: Tues 2-3:30, Thurs 11-12 Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf Japanese version of "Shirley Says" http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/kinen9.htm Academy of Aphasia http://www.academyofaphasia.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ann at hawaii.edu Tue Dec 20 21:20:39 2005 From: ann at hawaii.edu (Ann Peters) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 11:20:39 -1000 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) Message-ID: Colleagues, I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about this than I do. Please respond directly to him. thanks ann **************************** Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus Graduate Chair http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ Department of Linguistics University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu 1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann/ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 From: Vince Dumond To: ann at hawaii.edu Subject: Second language acquisition Good Morning My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School in northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email in a paper you wrote (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/topics/filler.pdf) while doing research on second language acquisition. In three years our community will have a new school and I want to start planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first language until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end product being a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first language will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 years of school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. The English teachers who come to this community see children who perform poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English teachers insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the mother tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so the children can have a higher achievement score in English upon graduation. Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the first language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? Planning for this important step is crucial. Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. Many thanks Vince Vince Dumond Principal, JR Nakogee School Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. P0L 1A0 Phone: (705) 997-2114 Fax: (705) 997-1259 From genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca Tue Dec 20 22:43:18 2005 From: genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca (Fred Genesee) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 17:43:18 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Vince: Ann Peters posted your message on a listserv that I belong to and I thought I would email you because I have worked for some time with immersion/bilingual programs for both majority and indigenous language groups in Canada (primarily) but also in the U.S. There is good reason to be concerned that Cree-speaking students will not develop full competence in Cree unless they start early. This is a problem not because the students themselves lack the ability to acquire Cree and then English, but because English is so prominent that it is difficult to reinforce indigenous languages in school and outside school if English is the primary language of instruction in school. Students from minority language backgrounds who are "immersed" or "submersed" in the majority language at the outset of schooling often do not maintain or develop the language to high levels of competence because the majority language displaces the home language because it has such high prestige and currency in the larger community. We have found in our research on French immersion for Enlgish-speaking students that they are less enthuasiastic about French once English is used for instruction. And, perhaps of more direct relevance to your situation, research in the U.S shows that students who speak minority languages, such as Spanish, at home are drawn inexorably toward Enlgish as they get older and as English becomes more prominent in their lives. Thus, from a language survival point of view, using Cree initially as the primary language of instruction is probably most advisable. Research in the U.S. shows that minority Spanish-speaking students in Spanish-English programs from Kindergarten onward outperform other minority Spanish speaking students in English-only programs on both English language, home language, and academic achievement tests. Part of the success of these bilingual programs is linked to their use of coherent and integrated curriculum from K to upper grades and part of their success is related to high expectations with respect to attainment in both languages and in academic domains as well. I can send you copies of reviews of this research, if you are interested. There are a number of indigenous groups that have opted for immersion in the indigenous language during the pre-school and primary school grades -- with some success. For example, we have early total Mohawk immersion programs in the Montreal area that do that and there are total immersion programs in Hawaiian (where Ann lives) that provide total insturction in Hawaiin for all of elementary school. The students in these programs come to school already speaking English and usually do not speak thenindigeneous language. At some point, you might find it useful to contact people in those schools to share experiences. I could help you with contact information. At the same time, of course, you want to ensure that your children acquire full competence in English. There are several program models that you could think about for doing this. One would be early partial immersion in Cree and English, starting in K -- in this program, both Cree and English are used for instructional purposes; another model is delayed immersion in English which starts off in the home language and then includes the majority language starting in the middle elementary grades; and yet another model is late immersion starting in late elementary or middle school (this latter option could also include some English language instruction prior to immersion so that the students acquire basic skills in English). The ultimate success of these various options depends, of course, on the quality of your curriculum and the intsruction the students get. The option you choose would depend to some extent on how much English and Cree the children hear and use outside school and the resources (instructional, materials, and curricular) you have at your disposal. The success of such programs in promoting competence in two languages and in academic subjects is critically dependent on the quality of the curriculum, the instructional material, and the professional competence of the instructors. Like any school program, these things matter in immersion/bilingual programs as well. I can send you information about a book on Dual Language Instruction that I co-authored with colleagues that was written as a guide for developing bilingual programs that you might find useful. I will send it separately. Let me know if I can be of futher assistance. Fred Genesee At 11:20 AM 20/12/2005 -1000, you wrote: >Colleagues, >I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about >this than I do. Please respond directly to him. >thanks >ann > >**************************** >Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus >Graduate Chair http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ >Department of Linguistics >University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu >1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 >Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 >http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann/ > >---------- Forwarded message ---------- >Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 >From: Vince Dumond >To: ann at hawaii.edu >Subject: Second language acquisition > >Good Morning > >My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School in >northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email in a >paper you wrote (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/topics/filler.pdf) while doing >research on second language acquisition. > >In three years our community will have a new school and I want to start >planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and >kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. > >Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first language >until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end product being >a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? > >The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. > >There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first language >will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 years of >school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. > >The English teachers who come to this community see children who perform >poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English teachers >insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the mother >tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so the >children can have a higher achievement score in English upon graduation. >Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. > >Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the first >language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? > >Planning for this important step is crucial. > >Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. > >Many thanks > >Vince > > >Vince Dumond >Principal, JR Nakogee School >Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. >P0L 1A0 >Phone: (705) 997-2114 >Fax: (705) 997-1259 > > > > Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 From macw at mac.com Wed Dec 21 00:43:19 2005 From: macw at mac.com (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:43:19 -0500 Subject: new ideas Message-ID: Dear Aubrey, Right, there is certainly a big emphasis this time of year on marketing. That hadn't occurred to me. I much agree with your line of thinking that foregrounds principles such as spatial symmetry, embedding, and recursion as precursors to similar functions in language. We all perceive the salience of symmetry in houses and drawings. But, like Lise, I would argue that symmetry cannot apply directly to language on the sentential level, since judgments of symmetry require the copresence of all pieces and language evolves through a rapidly fading temporal medium. Lise's example of saying your phone number backwards was lovely. There may be some symmetry effects at the level of the word and syllable, since those units are perceptually copresent. There could also be some symmetry effects on the discourse or rhetorical levels, but those would be probably backed up by long-term training in rhetorical form. In regards to the speed of evolutionary change, my remarks about glacial change applied not to historical change or creolization, as in the case of the emergence of Nicaraguan sign language, but to the emergence of traits in the species. When I think of language evolution, I am thinking about that, not about linguistic diachrony. Having said this, I remain curious what evidence there is for "truly new" evolutionary ideas. Are you suggesting that binding and structural dependency are evolutionary new ideas? Let us focus first on binding, which is a clear phenomenon and which you mention in your message. I have become convinced that binding constraints emerge not from c-command but from pragmatic factors derived from perspective- switching (see my chapter in Pecher and Zwaan, 2005, "Ground Cognition). In this account, the child learns the binding principles by figuring out the cues to perspective switching. If we believe that the binding phenomena arise directly from c-command than that starts indeed to look like very much like a new evolutionary idea. But if binding is expressing perspective switching and flow, then it seems to be more closely pinned to cognitive developments that have emerged over millions of years in the context of shared social action. In that case, this is not a truly new idea, but an old function expressed by new forms, as Liz, Werner, Mayr, and Darwin would say. Structural dependency is another matter. Children are clearly able to process structures with linked grammatical relations built up through recursion. But is recursion itself a new idea or an old idea with new clothing? We see the core of recursion in the child's early learning and processing of item-based patterns. One can see precursors of item-based processing in the motor world, but the shift of item-based slot filling to language does seem rather remarkable. Is it a truly new idea in evolutionary terms? As you know, that is at the core of much recent argumentation and I would say that the jury is still very much out on that one. Perhaps some other readers have ideas about that. --Brian MacWhinney On Dec 19, 2005, at 9:08 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: Dear Brian You're right in guessing that I wasn't invoking divinity. My metaphors were festive season ones. But in order to extend the idea of new parts from old to phenomena like binding, endocentricity, structure dependency, I think that the old has to be both identifiable and such as to help explain why things are the way they are. I just don't see how this can be done so as to account for the main outlines of these theories and various others. Take endocentricity and its most outward appearance with edgemost maximal projections. In human perception generally there seems to be a default expectation of symmetry. In single-family dwellings built in Britain for the last 150 years, a double-fronted layout is rare. But in a child's picture of a house, I have yet to see the normal terraced layout with the front door on one side. The same preference for symmetry seems to be attested in metaphor - with the centre favoured over the edges. In both syntax and phonology, a symmetrical layout would be easy to define, with words and sentences built strictly from the middle. But whatever the number of cases where this might be appropriate, it seems to me that they are so few in number, and that the preponderance of asymmetry and directionality in headedness, Wh movement, syllable structure, and more, should be treated as highly significant. I make no guesses as to the likely triggering or rate of spread of linguistic change. These seem to me to be some of the most fascinating questions in linguistics. But from the extreme case of the school for the deaf in Nicaragua, where an entirely new language is said to have emerged in a single childhood, it seems to me that linguistic theory must be at least capable of accounting for change at the wildfire end of the scale rather than the glacial. I certainly wasn't assuming that the speed of change might provide a way of telling whether a given phenomenon was a case of new from old or speculating as to how this might be done. None of the cases are simple. Obviously the argument needs to be in detail. I was allowing that there might be a number of cases of new from old, and listed some cases where this seems to me most plausible. I was suggesting only that the new from old model may not be the only one, and that some changes may have been just by the odd roll of the genetic dice - to get back to the festive season, Aubrey On 17 Dec 2005, at 21:18, Brian MacWhinney wrote: Dear Aubrey, Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that does not arise from old parts? Without concrete examples of this, I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude cannibalism. Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in mind. Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful idea" that arises in the usual way in one evolutionary configuration, but then spreads like wildfire because of the adaptive advantage it provides. Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right? --Brian MacWhinney On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote: Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range, etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the eight or so language universals, structure dependency, endo- centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude cannibalism? And: Why? Aubrey Nunes PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd., 52, Bonham Road, London SW2 5HG 0207 652 1347 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From v.c.gathercole at bangor.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 01:26:07 2005 From: v.c.gathercole at bangor.ac.uk (V.M.Gathercole) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:26:07 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I would like to second what Fred Genesee has said about immersion in the minority language before the majority language. I have had considerable experience, both in research and in living in the communities, with the Spanish-English bilingual situation in Miami and the Welsh-English bilingual situation in North Wales. In both cases, the minority language--not the majority language--is the one that is at risk of not being learned fully if it is not established firmly in the early years. North Wales is a particularly telling case in this regard. Although almost all Welsh-speaking adults are fully bilingual, the educational system requires that all students begin school with total immersion in Welsh. That includes the children who come from English-only homes. Most children have at least three full years of schooling in Welsh, and usually more, before they have any choice of instruction in English. The end result is striking. Children who come from Welsh-speaking homes end up fully fluent in BOTH Welsh and English. Children who come from English-speaking homes end up either fairly or fully fluent in Welsh and fully fluent in English. What is clear from work we've been doing here is that no children are at risk of not learning English fully. That includes the children who come from Welsh-only homes who do most of their schooling in Welsh. The majority language is so dominant that children cannot help but learn it. If the educational system started with instruction in English, in all likelihood, the Welsh language would gradually diminish, as it was doing during most of the 20th century. It was in the 1970s that the educational policy changed, and this has had the effect of bolstering the Welsh language in the community. In the last census, the use of Welsh went up for the first time in decades throughout Wales. If you'd like copies of any of the work we have been doing on Welsh--e.g., we recently completed a study of language transmission from parents to children throughout Wales that confirms what I've said above--I'd be happy to send you copies. You might also wish to consult work by Colin Baker, who has been intimately involved with the Welsh bilingual education policy. In the case of the Cree children, I think it is clear from both the Miami bilinguals' use of Spanish and Welsh bilinguals' use of Welsh that if the use of Cree is to be maintained in their community, it must be solidly established in the children's early years. The English will be acquired whatever strategy is taken. Best of luck in convincing the school system of this. Ginny Gathercole Quoting Ann Peters : > Colleagues, > I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about > this than I do. Please respond directly to him. > thanks > ann > > **************************** > Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus > Graduate Chair http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ > Department of Linguistics > University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu > 1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 > Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 > http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann/ > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 > From: Vince Dumond > To: ann at hawaii.edu > Subject: Second language acquisition > > Good Morning > > My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School in > northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email in a > paper you wrote (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/topics/filler.pdf) while doing > research on second language acquisition. > > In three years our community will have a new school and I want to start > planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and > kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. > > Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first language > until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end product being > a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? > > The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. > > There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first language > will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 years of > school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. > > The English teachers who come to this community see children who perform > poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English teachers > insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the mother > tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so the > children can have a higher achievement score in English upon graduation. > Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. > > Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the first > language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? > > Planning for this important step is crucial. > > Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. > > Many thanks > > Vince > > > Vince Dumond > Principal, JR Nakogee School > Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. > P0L 1A0 > Phone: (705) 997-2114 > Fax: (705) 997-1259 > > > > -- This mail sent through http://webmail.bangor.ac.uk From aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk Wed Dec 21 08:58:30 2005 From: aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk (aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:58:30 +0000 Subject: Language acquisition (Second or first) In-Reply-To: <000b01c605d7$383a4c10$230a0a0a@Nakogee.local> Message-ID: Dear Vince, Seconding what Ginny said, from my small experience of efforts to preserve all three Celtic languages stjll living in the British Isles, it seems to me that the critical objective is to ensure that they pass the 'Courting Test' . I mean by this that the minority language is the instinctive language of choice for chatting other people up, proposing marriage, and so on. The emotional signal is then as strong as can be. As long as this happens, the language has some chance of survival for another generation. Against the enormous cultural pressures of the majority language, it seems to me that everything should be done to raise the status of the minority language to one of full equivalence. One way is by its use as the sole-language in education, ideally from primary onwards, but otherwise for as long as possible. Even if parents go out of their way to minimise children's exposure to the majority language, children still learn it. I can, if you wish, put you in touch with a young adult who has been through this slightly unusual and rather extreme experience and is now an adult campaigner for G, the minority language concerned. The only unusual feature of the English of this particular L1 speaker of G, who only needed to use English from the age of eleven, is that the accentual traces of G are very noticeably light. This hardly seems like a disadvantage. For the sake of the Courting Test, there are other key issues such as the use of the minority language on public display and in the media, by the movers and shakers of the community in public, by the recognition of the language in official contexts, but these I imagine are beyond your control. Good luck Aubrey Nunes. From a.karmiloff at ich.ucl.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 12:13:40 2005 From: a.karmiloff at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:13:40 +0000 Subject: touch Message-ID: 1. Can anyone point me to work on touch discriminations in infants? I thought someone must have used something like habituation to see if babies can discriminate different surface textures. 2. Can anyone point me to work on biochemical changes in the baby when touch is used on their skin? 3. Quite different: does anyone have a picture of a baby asleep in an EEG net? I need this for a talk to a lay audience. Happy holidays and thanks in anticipation, Annette From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 13:06:21 2005 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:06:21 +0000 Subject: touch In-Reply-To: Message-ID: An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 13:31:29 2005 From: k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk (Katie Alcock) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:31:29 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition In-Reply-To: <1135128367.43a8af2f943ca@webmail.bangor.ac.uk> Message-ID: Does anyone have any information on studies where the minority language is the language of instruction for all of compulsory schooling (e.g. to 16 or 18), which I am informed is the current situation in the Basque country, where all public schooling is apparently in Basque, although most families speak exclusively Spanish or speak both languages. Likewise does anyone have any information on literacy at secondary and higher education levels in the non-instructed language, where all primary and secondary education is in the minority language? Is there any effect on performance at these higher levels if the transition to the majority language is made in the teens, and if there hasn't been very much formal literacy instruction in the majority language? It strikes me that most of the current programmes involve only a few years of primary education; however I know adults whose schooling has mainly been in a language other than the language of the community (for example, where instruction has been in Kiswahili and English while all day-to-day communication takes place in another African language), who have trouble with literacy materials in their home language, despite the fact that they are more fluent in speaking it. I realise that this is a slightly different situation, as there are rarely many literacy materials actually available in the home language, and broadcast media are often in the language(s) of instruction, but families rarely have a TV and everyone speaks all of the time outside school in the home language, including adolescent children, and adults would never use the language(s) of instruction in their day-to-day communication. So I'm wondering if there is any data on the parallel situation in a more literate society. Katie Alcock Katie Alcock, DPhil Lecturer Department of Psychology University of Lancaster Fylde College Lancaster LA1 4YF Tel 01524 593833 Fax 01524 593744 Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html From pss116 at bangor.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 13:42:34 2005 From: pss116 at bangor.ac.uk (Ginny Mueller Gathercole) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:42:34 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition Message-ID: Dear Vince, In response to your message to me, OK, first, here is a zip file of the whole report we submitted to the Welsh Language Board. The summary chapter is probably the most useful to you, although the "meat" of the study is in Chapter 4, on the verbal questionnaire we gave parents. Just to clarify--The study was on parents' transmission practices with regard to Welsh, so it isn't directly related to your question about education. But the findings of our study are directly relevant in the following way: 1) It is clear that parents (and teachers, of course, although we did not interview or test teachers in this study) use the language that they are most comfortable and most fluent in for speaking to their children. If they grew up speaking Welsh, they will speak Welsh to their children. 2) People become fully fluent in the language if adults are speaking Welsh to them as children. When there is only partial input in the language (I mean in terms of time of exposure to Welsh), there is a slight delay in development in Welsh, although children in all groups tend to 'catch up' for most structures. 3) However, it is not clear that all groups 'catch up' with regard to complex structures, which take everyone longer to learn. It may be that the children who were not hearing as much Welsh on a daily basis do not fully acquire such complex structures. This can ultimately have knock-on effects for the survival of the language. 4) EVERYONE learns English fully. This is clear from the adults we tested as well as from the children. The dominance of English is such that, as I said before, children cannot help but learn it. 5) One other factor that I think is highly relevant is that speaking a language to FRIENDS as children is very important to the ultimate attainment in that language (and perhaps to affect towards the language). We found this to be true for both the adults we tested and the children. 6) It is worth commenting on the Welsh bilingual situation versus the Miami situation. In Miami, you can find adults whose command of English is not perfect. This is not true in Wales. In Miami, there is a constant influx of new immigrants who bring a good source of 'native' Spanish--which is good in that it means children can hear Spanish being spoken by fully fluent speakers, but whose command of English is limited. As children may be hearing these limited English speakers as part of their input for English, this can affect those children's ultimate attainment of English. In Wales, this is not a factor. There is not a large pool of Welsh speakers whose command of English is limited. This means that virtually all of the English that children are hearing here is highly fluent. I assume that the Cree situation would be more similar to Wales in this regard than to Miami. This means that the children in the community should have little problem acquiring English as fully fluent speakers. (In fact, I would put money on it if I had the opportunity to bet on it!) I am also attaching some work we've done on children's acquisition of Welsh here. We've made it our practice to divide children according to the language(s) spoken in the home. And our consistent finding (which is parallel with our findings in Miami) is that attainment in the minority (and majority) language is directly related to the amount of exposure in the language. Finally, in both the Miami and Wales case, we have found that children TEND to speak English on the playgrounds, etc., especially if they know the other child comes from an English background (even if that child knows Welsh). If children are attending schools that use English as the medium of instruction, this means the minority language is going to be pushed even more into the background, and the prediction is that it will eventually die. Oh, and one other thing--One reason why the Welsh language policy for education has been so successful is because EVERYONE goes to school through the medium of Welsh. This means that all children become fairly competent in Welsh, not just the kids coming from Welsh-speaking families. This is important for a few reasons: (1) it means that people can speak Welsh in everyday conversations without feeling they might be 'excluding' someone; (2) it means that attitudes towards Welsh are quite positive--it's not an "us" versus "them" situation, as it tends to be, unfortunately, in Miami. This latter point is just as important for the speakers of the minority language (I mean children who come from Welsh-language homes) as it is for those coming from English-speaking homes: it means that they do not have to struggle with issues of identity (e.g., do I want to be more like "them"--which might mean giving up my home language) as much as some groups might in other contexts (e.g., in the Miami context). (3) It helps ultimately to ensure the survival of the language. Oh, I must also mention literacy. The educational establishment is going to be concerned about literacy issues. One thing you can mention is that in the Miami study (in the Oller & Eilers 2002 volume, Multilingual Matters), the one area in which knowledge in one language carried over to knowledge in the other was in reading and literacy skills. Thus, learning reading and literacy in one language does not necessarily prejudice those skills in the other language; in fact, they promote those skills in the other language. Well, I hope that is all of some help. If you should need further comments, do not hesitate to ask. Best wishes, Ginny P.S. I think I'll copy this to the CHILDES info exchange, in case anyone has any further comments on these issues. -- Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, Ph.D. Professor Ysgol Seicoleg School of Psychology Prifysgol Cymru, Bangor University of Wales, Bangor Adeilad Brigantia The Brigantia Building Ffordd Penrallt Penrallt Road Bangor LL57 2AS Bangor LL57 2AS Cymru Wales | /\ | / \/\ Tel: 44 (0)1248 382624 | /\/ \ \ Fax: 44 (0)1248 382599 | / ======\=\ | B A N G O R From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 13:51:03 2005 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:51:03 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition In-Reply-To: Message-ID: An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca Wed Dec 21 15:24:21 2005 From: genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca (Fred Genesee) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:24:21 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There are immersion type programs in Hawaii and in the Mohawk community outside Montreal that use the minority language for extensive instruction throughout elementary and into secondary school. I am not sure I recall exactly how it works in either program but my recollection is that they provide up to 80% instruction in Hawaiian and in Mohawk throughout the elementary grades and perhaps up to 50% in the secondary grades. These programs could provide information about teh students' literacy skills at the secondary level in the societal language and in the indigenous language. Both of these programs are in societies that are highly literate, but, as you point out, even in these cases finding appropriate materials is difficult since these languages have traditionally not be used in their written forms (although Hawaiians had an extremely high rate of literacy before the monarchy was overthrown in 1899). My own research and experience with any type of immersion program for students who speak Enlgish at home and live in predominantly English communities has been that these students acquire English language skills, including literacy, to the same level as comparable studnets in all-English programs regardless of the amount of exposure to English in school. This seems to be true whethere the students are from a majority or minority culture group -- as long as they speak English at home. In short, there is often no correlation between how much exposure students have to Enlgish in school and their proficiency in English (even in literacy) in English dominant societies. In contrast, there is usually a link between the amount of exposure to the minority language and attainment in that language -- not surprising given the overall lack of exposure to the minoirty langauge in the community at large. To be more specific, we did evaluations of a total immersion porgram in Mohawk for Mohawk background children who spoke English at home and found that even total immersion in Mohawk during the primary grades did not hamper their English language development. These programs have since expanded and provided lots of exposure to Mohawk throughout elementary and secondary school. The same pattern has been documented even in the case of Spanish-English bilingual programs for Enlgish language learners in the U.S. who speak Spanish predominantly outside of school and have extensive exposure to Spanish in the home. These students acquire the same or higher levels of proficiency in English as similar Spanish speaking students in all English programs. At the same time, the students in the Spanish programs achieve higher levels of oral language and literacy skills in Spanish. Thus, this appears to be a fairly robust finding in bilingual programs and has been found in Canada and the U.S. and for minority language as well as majority language sutdnets. I can send references to these findings if you are interested. Fred At 01:31 PM 21/12/2005 +0000, Katie Alcock wrote: >Does anyone have any information on studies where the minority language is >the language of instruction for all of compulsory schooling (e.g. to 16 or >18), which I am informed is the current situation in the Basque country, >where all public schooling is apparently in Basque, although most families >speak exclusively Spanish or speak both languages. > >Likewise does anyone have any information on literacy at secondary and >higher education levels in the non-instructed language, where all primary >and secondary education is in the minority language? Is there any effect on >performance at these higher levels if the transition to the majority >language is made in the teens, and if there hasn't been very much formal >literacy instruction in the majority language? > >It strikes me that most of the current programmes involve only a few years >of primary education; however I know adults whose schooling has mainly been >in a language other than the language of the community (for example, where >instruction has been in Kiswahili and English while all day-to-day >communication takes place in another African language), who have trouble >with literacy materials in their home language, despite the fact that they >are more fluent in speaking it. > >I realise that this is a slightly different situation, as there are rarely >many literacy materials actually available in the home language, and >broadcast media are often in the language(s) of instruction, but families >rarely have a TV and everyone speaks all of the time outside school in the >home language, including adolescent children, and adults would never use the >language(s) of instruction in their day-to-day communication. So I'm >wondering if there is any data on the parallel situation in a more literate >society. > > >Katie Alcock > > >Katie Alcock, DPhil >Lecturer >Department of Psychology >University of Lancaster >Fylde College >Lancaster LA1 4YF >Tel 01524 593833 >Fax 01524 593744 >Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html > > Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 From mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu Wed Dec 21 15:59:57 2005 From: mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu (Margaret Fleck) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 09:59:57 -0600 Subject: new ideas In-Reply-To: <72B38A58-673F-4373-AD38-3C309783C8EC@mac.com> Message-ID: Brian MacWhinney wrote: > I much agree with your line of thinking that foregrounds principles > such as spatial symmetry, embedding, and recursion as precursors to > similar functions in language. We all perceive the salience of > symmetry in houses and drawings. But, like Lise, I would argue that > symmetry cannot apply directly to language on the sentential level, > since judgments of symmetry require the copresence of all pieces and > language evolves through a rapidly fading temporal medium. Lise's > example of saying your phone number backwards was lovely. There may be > some symmetry effects at the level of the word and syllable, since > those units are perceptually copresent. There could also be some > symmetry effects on the discourse or rhetorical levels, but those would > be probably backed up by long-term training in rhetorical form. The mathematical term "symmetry" covers a wide range of type of self-similarity. A better one to look for in a moving temporal medium would be translational symmetry, better known as repetition of a pattern in the same order (rather than reflected). *THAT* is quite salient in language and in related domains such as music and poetry. Margaret (Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois) From k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 16:06:55 2005 From: k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk (Katie Alcock) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 16:06:55 +0000 Subject: Second language acquisition In-Reply-To: <4.1.20051221101155.014ea598@ego.psych.mcgill.ca> Message-ID: That's very interesting, has anyone looked at transitions to higher education as well? This would apply to the Basque Country situation, but not really to the Kenyan situation, as children don't get literacy materials in their home language. Children's spoken fluency is never compromised in their home language, in fact their spoken English and/or Kiswahili is often a lot poorer, and although most adults CAN read in their home language, they really prefer not to as they do not feel comfortable doing so. It strikes me also that where we are talking about "minority" or "majority" languages, the minority or majority language almost always has the same status on the world language stage as it does in the communities in question: English is a majority language worldwide, as well as locally, and has a tendency to overcome Hawaiian, Mohawk, Cree, Welsh, and Spanish in the US. Spanish is also a majority language worldwide and has a tendency to dominate over Basque and Catalan. However, the situations I've come across are where the majority language locally (the one I know most about is Kigiriama, spoken by about 300,000 first language speakers) is not a player on the world language stage. I wonder if there is any research on situations where the local majority language is in a minority globally? Perhaps in parts of South America where the local majority language is not yet Spanish/Portuguese? Katie Alcock Katie Alcock, DPhil Lecturer Department of Psychology University of Lancaster Fylde College Lancaster LA1 4YF Tel 01524 593833 Fax 01524 593744 Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html > From: Fred Genesee > Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:24:21 -0500 > To: Katie Alcock , > > Subject: Re: Second language acquisition > > There are immersion type programs in Hawaii and in the Mohawk community > outside Montreal that use the minority language for extensive instruction > throughout elementary and into secondary school. I am not sure I recall > exactly how it works in either program but my recollection is that they > provide up to 80% instruction in Hawaiian and in Mohawk throughout the > elementary grades and perhaps up to 50% in the secondary grades. These > programs could provide information about teh students' literacy skills at > the secondary level in the societal language and in the indigenous > language. Both of these programs are in societies that are highly > literate, but, as you point out, even in these cases finding appropriate > materials is difficult since these languages have traditionally not be used > in their written forms (although Hawaiians had an extremely high rate of > literacy before the monarchy was overthrown in 1899). > > My own research and experience with any type of immersion program for > students who speak Enlgish at home and live in predominantly English > communities has been that these students acquire English language skills, > including literacy, to the same level as comparable studnets in all-English > programs regardless of the amount of exposure to English in school. This > seems to be true whethere the students are from a majority or minority > culture group -- as long as they speak English at home. In short, there is > often no correlation between how much exposure students have to Enlgish in > school and their proficiency in English (even in literacy) in English > dominant societies. In contrast, there is usually a link between the amount > of exposure to the minority language and attainment in that language -- not > surprising given the overall lack of exposure to the minoirty langauge in > the community at large. > > To be more specific, we did evaluations of a total immersion porgram in > Mohawk for Mohawk background children who spoke English at home and found > that even total immersion in Mohawk during the primary grades did not > hamper their English language development. These programs have since > expanded and provided lots of exposure to Mohawk throughout elementary and > secondary school. > > The same pattern has been documented even in the case of Spanish-English > bilingual programs for Enlgish language learners in the U.S. who speak > Spanish predominantly outside of school and have extensive exposure to > Spanish in the home. These students acquire the same or higher levels of > proficiency in English as similar Spanish speaking students in all English > programs. At the same time, the students in the Spanish programs achieve > higher levels of oral language and literacy skills in Spanish. > > Thus, this appears to be a fairly robust finding in bilingual programs and > has been found in Canada and the U.S. and for minority language as well as > majority language sutdnets. I can send references to these findings if you > are interested. > > Fred > > > At 01:31 PM 21/12/2005 +0000, Katie Alcock wrote: >> Does anyone have any information on studies where the minority language is >> the language of instruction for all of compulsory schooling (e.g. to 16 or >> 18), which I am informed is the current situation in the Basque country, >> where all public schooling is apparently in Basque, although most families >> speak exclusively Spanish or speak both languages. >> >> Likewise does anyone have any information on literacy at secondary and >> higher education levels in the non-instructed language, where all primary >> and secondary education is in the minority language? Is there any effect on >> performance at these higher levels if the transition to the majority >> language is made in the teens, and if there hasn't been very much formal >> literacy instruction in the majority language? >> >> It strikes me that most of the current programmes involve only a few years >> of primary education; however I know adults whose schooling has mainly been >> in a language other than the language of the community (for example, where >> instruction has been in Kiswahili and English while all day-to-day >> communication takes place in another African language), who have trouble >> with literacy materials in their home language, despite the fact that they >> are more fluent in speaking it. >> >> I realise that this is a slightly different situation, as there are rarely >> many literacy materials actually available in the home language, and >> broadcast media are often in the language(s) of instruction, but families >> rarely have a TV and everyone speaks all of the time outside school in the >> home language, including adolescent children, and adults would never use the >> language(s) of instruction in their day-to-day communication. So I'm >> wondering if there is any data on the parallel situation in a more literate >> society. >> >> >> Katie Alcock >> >> >> Katie Alcock, DPhil >> Lecturer >> Department of Psychology >> University of Lancaster >> Fylde College >> Lancaster LA1 4YF >> Tel 01524 593833 >> Fax 01524 593744 >> Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html >> >> > > Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 > McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 > 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave > Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 > From m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk Wed Dec 21 16:18:52 2005 From: m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk (M.M.Vihman) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 16:18:52 GMT Subject: I am away until Jan 6. Message-ID: Dear all, I will be away until Jan 6; please be patient! Happy New Year! Regards Marilyn From bpearson at comdis.umass.edu Wed Dec 21 18:51:33 2005 From: bpearson at comdis.umass.edu (Barbara Pearson) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:51:33 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: <1135128367.43a8af2f943ca@webmail.bangor.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dear All, I have only two small comments to add to the excellent commentary already provided on this topic. 1. I think a good part of the animus against minority language programs in the U.S. is directed against programs that delay the introduction of English till 2nd and 3rd grade. Even someone like Rosalie Porter, who spearheaded the English-only referendum in Massachusetts, will say that two-way programs (L1 and L2 together) were not the target of her campaign (although they, too, got effectively crippled by it-- but that is another question). With that in mind, I take a different perspective on the results that have been reported. I think the research shows that children learn both languages equally if they are presented equally. As Ginny Gathercole has pointed out, the poorly developed Spanish of even the children who had Spanish and English at school in Miami was not so much a function of the presence of the part- time English in their school, as of the overwhelming presence of English in their homes and communities. Their Spanish was improved by the time they spent in Spanish in school, and probably would have improved more with a greater percentage of the day in Spanish, (the minority language). I don't know the political situation in the James Bay Coast, but one may need to compromise with those English-teaching outsiders. If that happens, it may be comforting to look at the other side of the research coin--that learning to read in two languages at once is not confusing and may even be facilitating. (You might get the Oller & Eilers, 2002, on the Miami study for support of that.) You could end up including a little English from Kindergarten without completely compromising the program, if you are careful to safeguard the status of Cree in the children's minds. I think we've been saying that if English (or any language) is the majority language, more school time in it does not seem to be necessary; but if English is the minority language in the children's lives, more time in English will help it--as long as their L1 is supported as well. One needs to evaluate what the balance of power of the languages is in their community. 2. The second comment is a reaction/ realization of the power of literacy in all this. We are not talking just about waiting until children are 10, but waiting until they've had time to master reading and begin writing in the L1. We had a rule of thumb that among our college students it was rare for someone who had had basic literacy training in a language not to prefer to speak that language when presented with the opportunity (at college). (I think 2nd grade was my cut-off, but I didn't have enough data to contrast one grade or another.) By contrast, students who had not had literacy training in a language (i.e. 98% of most Spanish-background children born in Miami) generally preferred the other language, the one in which they had learned to read and had read extensively. I used to joke that the speed of light is that much faster than the speed of sound, but I'm wondering now if that isn't more than a metaphor, whether there is something more to the modality (or whether it's just the *added* modality, not that it's visual). Meanwhile, I'd like Ginny's references too! Best, Barbara Pearson On Dec 20, 2005, at 8:26 PM, V.M.Gathercole wrote: > I would like to second what Fred Genesee has said about immersion in > the > minority language before the majority language. I have had > considerable > experience, both in research and in living in the communities, with the > Spanish-English bilingual situation in Miami and the Welsh-English > bilingual > situation in North Wales. In both cases, the minority language--not > the > majority language--is the one that is at risk of not being learned > fully if it > is not established firmly in the early years. North Wales is a > particularly > telling case in this regard. Although almost all Welsh-speaking > adults are > fully bilingual, the educational system requires that all students > begin school > with total immersion in Welsh. That includes the children who come > from > English-only homes. Most children have at least three full years of > schooling > in Welsh, and usually more, before they have any choice of instruction > in > English. The end result is striking. Children who come from > Welsh-speaking > homes end up fully fluent in BOTH Welsh and English. Children who > come from > English-speaking homes end up either fairly or fully fluent in Welsh > and fully > fluent in English. > > What is clear from work we've been doing here is that no children are > at risk of > not learning English fully. That includes the children who come from > Welsh-only homes who do most of their schooling in Welsh. The majority > language is so dominant that children cannot help but learn it. > > If the educational system started with instruction in English, in all > likelihood, the Welsh language would gradually diminish, as it was > doing during > most of the 20th century. It was in the 1970s that the educational > policy > changed, and this has had the effect of bolstering the Welsh language > in the > community. In the last census, the use of Welsh went up for the first > time in > decades throughout Wales. > > If you'd like copies of any of the work we have been doing on > Welsh--e.g., we > recently completed a study of language transmission from parents to > children > throughout Wales that confirms what I've said above--I'd be happy to > send you > copies. You might also wish to consult work by Colin Baker, who has > been > intimately involved with the Welsh bilingual education policy. > > In the case of the Cree children, I think it is clear from both the > Miami > bilinguals' use of Spanish and Welsh bilinguals' use of Welsh that if > the use > of Cree is to be maintained in their community, it must be solidly > established > in the children's early years. The English will be acquired whatever > strategy > is taken. > > Best of luck in convincing the school system of this. > > Ginny Gathercole > > > Quoting Ann Peters : > >> Colleagues, >> I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about >> this than I do. Please respond directly to him. >> thanks >> ann >> >> **************************** >> Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus >> Graduate Chair http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ >> Department of Linguistics >> University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu >> 1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 >> Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 >> http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann/ >> >> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- >> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 >> From: Vince Dumond >> To: ann at hawaii.edu >> Subject: Second language acquisition >> >> Good Morning >> >> My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School >> in >> northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email >> in a >> paper you wrote (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/topics/filler.pdf) while >> doing >> research on second language acquisition. >> >> In three years our community will have a new school and I want to >> start >> planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and >> kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. >> >> Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first >> language >> until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end >> product being >> a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? >> >> The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. >> >> There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first >> language >> will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 >> years of >> school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. >> >> The English teachers who come to this community see children who >> perform >> poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English >> teachers >> insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the >> mother >> tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so >> the >> children can have a higher achievement score in English upon >> graduation. >> Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. >> >> Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the >> first >> language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? >> >> Planning for this important step is crucial. >> >> Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. >> >> Many thanks >> >> Vince >> >> >> Vince Dumond >> Principal, JR Nakogee School >> Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. >> P0L 1A0 >> Phone: (705) 997-2114 >> Fax: (705) 997-1259 >> >> >> >> > > > > > -- > This mail sent through http://webmail.bangor.ac.uk > > ***************************************** Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. Project Manager, Research Assistant Dept. of Communication Disorders University of Massachusetts Amherst MA 01003 413.545.5023 fax: 545.0803 bpearson at comdis.umass.edu http://www.umass.edu/aae/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 9055 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu Wed Dec 21 21:16:53 2005 From: mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu (Margaret Fleck) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:16:53 -0600 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: <788d70c341dc4905e72c4adcf80e55d2@comdis.umass.edu> Message-ID: Barbara Pearson wrote: > 1. I think a good part of the animus against minority language > programs in the U.S. is directed against programs that delay > the introduction of English till 2nd and 3rd grade. It's also important to realize that bad schools can make almost any approach perform badly. California, one of the big battlegrounds on this topic, has a range of issues with the quality of its public schools, which could easily have sabotaged the actual performance of its bilingual programs, helping lead to their unpopularity. Another source of variation would be availability of materials in the minority language. If I can believe the numbers I just found on the internet, there are maybe 31 million Spanish speakers in the US alone, about 500,000 Welsh speakers, but the total Cree population is barely enough to support a small high school. In addition to the basic textbooks, a switched-on school kid is going to need -- popular cultural materials (e.g. Pokemon and Harry Potter books and movies) -- library and classroom enrichment materials (e.g. books on spiders, medieval knights, digital photography) which is a big feature even in my son's first grade class -- textbooks and off-site courses for advanced subjects (e.g. calculus, computer programming), and non-academic subjects (e.g. music, car repair, driver's ed) -- internet resources All this stuff is readily available in Spanish. A lot can probably be found in Welsh. I really wonder how much is going to be available in, say, Cree. Worrying about sufficient exposure to L2 may be a moot point if decent-quality L1 instruction requires significant use of L2 resources anyhow. Margaret (Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois) From genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca Wed Dec 21 23:02:04 2005 From: genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca (Fred Genesee) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 18:02:04 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: <788d70c341dc4905e72c4adcf80e55d2@comdis.umass.edu> Message-ID: I might add to all this that I,along with colleagues from thte U.S. (Kathryn Lindholm-Leary, Bill Saunders, and Donna Christian) did a review of research on the oral language, literacy and academic development of English language learners in the U.S., and this will appear in print in January (Cambridge University Press). The goal of this review was to discern what research has to say about these domains of development in the case of minority language learners in the U.S. IN Chapter 5 of this volume Kathryn reviews research that evaluated alternative educational programs for English language learners and compares the results of these programs with one another with respect to, among other things, literacy. Aside from the interesting finding that initial literacy instruction in the students' L1 did not hamper them from acquiring literacy skills in English (and to the contrary sometimes produces better results that instruction in only English), she also found that programs that provide consistent, integrated, and high quality instruction across grade levels, regardless of language of instruction, are more effective than programs in which there is a lack of such consistency -- not surprising, but a point that is often lost in the heat of debate about whether to use ELLs' native language or not. In Chapter 3, we look at the more psycholinguistic side of L2 reading acquisition. IN addition, Diane August and Tim Shanahan chaired a panel of experts who carried out an exhaustive review of research on literacy development in K-12 students who are learning to read a second language -- the panel was called the National Literacy Panel. While the focus was on minority language students in the U.S., there is also a lot of coverage on L2 literacy development in other countries and in majority as well as minority language learners. The results of that review are going to be published by Lawrence Erlbaum sometime in 2006. This volume is exhaustive in its coverage and should be of interest to researchers interested in L2 reading acquisition and instruction. Katie asked if there are other bilingual programs with students' whose L1 is a majority language locally, but a minority globally. Donna Christian and I edited a book called Bilingual Education (TESOL, 2001) that includes a number of case studies of such situations: trilingual programs for Ladin-speaking students in Northern Italy; bilingual schools in Hungarian and Slovak for Hungarian students in Slovakia; and Maori immersion porgrams in New Zealand. It can be tricky defining what is minority -- for example, even in Quebec, French which is clearly a majority language in the province (80% of Quebecers are monlingual speakers of FRench), it nevertheless has many hallmarks of a minority language and needs some of the same kinds of protections of even more "minority languages". Two things that seem pretty clear when talking about bilingual education for minority language learners, almost however minority is defined; one is that such students acquire the majority language well, especially if the majority language is of global significance -- like English; and the other is that quality of curriculum and instruction also matter. Fred At 01:51 PM 21/12/2005 -0500, Barbara Pearson wrote: > > Dear All, > > I have only two small comments to add to the excellent > commentary already provided on this topic. > > 1. I think a good part of the animus against minority language > programs in the U.S. is directed against programs that delay > the introduction of English till 2nd and 3rd grade. Even someone > like Rosalie Porter, who spearheaded the English-only > referendum in Massachusetts, will say that two-way programs > (L1 and L2 together) were not the target of her campaign > (although they, too, got effectively crippled by it-- > but that is another question). > > With that in mind, I take a different perspective on the > results that have been reported. I think the research shows > that children learn both languages equally if they are presented > equally. As Ginny Gathercole has pointed out, the poorly developed > Spanish of even the children who had Spanish and English at > school in Miami was not so much a function of the presence of the part- > time English in their school, as of the overwhelming presence > of English in their homes and communities. Their Spanish was > improved by the time they spent in Spanish in school, and probably > would have improved more with a greater percentage of the day > in Spanish, (the minority language). > > I don't know the political situation in the James Bay Coast, but one may > need to compromise with those English-teaching outsiders. If that > happens, it may be comforting to look at the other side of > the research coin--that learning to read in two languages at once > is not confusing and may even be facilitating. (You might > get the Oller & Eilers, 2002, on the Miami study for support of that.) > You could end up including a little English from Kindergarten without > completely compromising the program, if you are careful > to safeguard the status of Cree in the children's minds. > > I think we've been saying that if English (or any language) is the > majority language, more school time in it does not seem to be > necessary; but if English is the minority language in the children's > lives, more time in English will help it--as long as their L1 is > supported as well. One needs to evaluate what the balance of > power of the languages is in their community. > > 2. The second comment is a reaction/ realization of the power > of literacy in all this. We are not talking just about waiting until > children are 10, but waiting until they've had time to master reading > and begin writing in the L1. We had a rule of thumb that among our > college students it was rare for someone who had had > basic literacy training in a language not to prefer to speak > that language when presented with the opportunity (at college). > (I think 2nd grade was my cut-off, but I didn't have enough data to > contrast one grade or another.) By contrast, students who had not had > literacy training in a language (i.e. 98% of most Spanish-background > children born in Miami) generally preferred the other > language, the one in which they had learned to read and had > read extensively. I used to joke that the speed of light is > that much faster than the speed of sound, but I'm wondering > now if that isn't more than a metaphor, whether there is something > more to the modality (or whether it's just the *added* modality, > not that it's visual). > > Meanwhile, I'd like Ginny's references too! > > Best, > Barbara Pearson > > On Dec 20, 2005, at 8:26 PM, V.M.Gathercole wrote: > >> >> I would like to second what Fred Genesee has said about immersion in the >> minority language before the majority language. I have had considerable >> experience, both in research and in living in the communities, with the >> Spanish-English bilingual situation in Miami and the Welsh-English bilingual >> >> situation in North Wales. In both cases, the minority language--not the >> majority language--is the one that is at risk of not being learned fully if >> it >> is not established firmly in the early years. North Wales is a particularly >> >> telling case in this regard. Although almost all Welsh-speaking adults are >> fully bilingual, the educational system requires that all students begin >> school >> with total immersion in Welsh. That includes the children who come from >> English-only homes. Most children have at least three full years of >> schooling >> in Welsh, and usually more, before they have any choice of instruction in >> English. The end result is striking. Children who come from Welsh-speaking >> >> homes end up fully fluent in BOTH Welsh and English. Children who come from >> >> English-speaking homes end up either fairly or fully fluent in Welsh and >> fully >> fluent in English. >> >> What is clear from work we've been doing here is that no children are at >> risk of >> not learning English fully. That includes the children who come from >> Welsh-only homes who do most of their schooling in Welsh. The majority >> language is so dominant that children cannot help but learn it. >> >> If the educational system started with instruction in English, in all >> likelihood, the Welsh language would gradually diminish, as it was doing >> during >> most of the 20th century. It was in the 1970s that the educational policy >> changed, and this has had the effect of bolstering the Welsh language in the >> >> community. In the last census, the use of Welsh went up for the first time >> in >> decades throughout Wales. >> >> If you'd like copies of any of the work we have been doing on Welsh--e.g., >> we >> recently completed a study of language transmission from parents to children >> >> throughout Wales that confirms what I've said above--I'd be happy to send >> you >> copies. You might also wish to consult work by Colin Baker, who has been >> intimately involved with the Welsh bilingual education policy. >> >> In the case of the Cree children, I think it is clear from both the Miami >> bilinguals' use of Spanish and Welsh bilinguals' use of Welsh that if the >> use >> of Cree is to be maintained in their community, it must be solidly >> established >> in the children's early years. The English will be acquired whatever >> strategy >> is taken. >> >> Best of luck in convincing the school system of this. >> >> Ginny Gathercole >> >> >> Quoting Ann Peters : >> >>> >>> Colleagues, >>> I just received this query and I think some of youknow much more about >>> this than I do. Please respond directly to him. >>> thanks >>> ann >>> >>> **************************** >>> Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor Emeritus >>> Graduate Chair >>> http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/ >>> Department of Linguistics >>> University of Hawai`i email: ann at hawaii.edu >>> 1890 East West Road, Rm 569 phone: 808 956-3241 >>> Honolulu, HI 96822 fax: 808 956-9166 >>> >>> http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/facu >>> lty/ann/ >>> >>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- >>> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:35:54 -0500 >>> From: Vince Dumond >>> To: ann at hawaii.edu >>> Subject: Second language acquisition >>> >>> Good Morning >>> >>> My name is Vince Dumond. I am the principal of a First Nation School in >>> northern Ontario, Canada, on the James Bay Coast. I found your email in a >>> paper you wrote >>> (http://childes.psy.cmu.ed >>> u/topics/filler.pdf) while doing >>> research on second language acquisition. >>> >>> In three years our community will have a new school and I want to start >>> planning now for a seamless integration of day care, head start and >>> kindergarten, all with highly qualified teachers. >>> >>> Do you know of research which supports solid foundation in first language >>> until age 9, then immersion in the second language and the end product >>> being >>> a high achievement in both first and second languages by age 14? >>> >>> The aboriginal language is Cree and the second language is English. >>> >>> There is a fear among the elders, in this community, that the first >>> language >>> will be lost if children are not immersed in Cree for the first 3 years of >>> school. There are qualified Cree teachers who can do so. >>> >>> The English teachers who come to this community see children who perform >>> poorly in language scores in both Cree and English. The English teachers >>> insist that the children be immersed in English first and learn the mother >>> tongue, Cree, 40 minutes a day at school and also learn it at home so the >>> children can have a higher achievement score in English upon graduation. >>> Cree is not spoken outside of this isolated area. >>> >>> Can you help me find research which supports the acquisition of the first >>> language as the well documented route to proceed in program planning? >>> >>> Planning for this important step is crucial. >>> >>> Please fee free to forward this email to the appropriate researcher. >>> >>> Many thanks >>> >>> Vince >>> >>> >>> Vince Dumond >>> Principal, JR Nakogee School >>> Attawapiskat, Ontario, Canada. >>> P0L 1A0 >>> Phone: (705) 997-2114 >>> Fax: (705) 997-1259 >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> This mail sent through >> http://webmail.bangor.ac.uk >> > > > ***************************************** > Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. > Project Manager, Research Assistant > Dept. of Communication Disorders > University of Massachusetts > Amherst MA 01003 > > 413.545.5023 > fax: 545.0803 > > bpearson at comdis.umass.edu > http://www.umass.edu/aae/ Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 From genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca Wed Dec 21 23:21:35 2005 From: genesee at ego.psych.mcgill.ca (Fred Genesee) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 18:21:35 -0500 Subject: Second language acquisition (fwd) In-Reply-To: <43A9C645.1060600@cs.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: Margaret's point about quality materials is certainly true; bad education will result in weak outcomes no matter what language is used and no matter how much it is used. However, I would not want to underestimate the ambition and competence of indigenous groups to create curricula and materials in their native language -- the Hawaiian and Mohawk communities have done remarkable work in this regard although it has been extremely demanding and time-consuming. The Inuit in Northern Quebec have likewise created early heritage language programs in Inuktitut and had to create their own materials, train Inuktitut-speaking teachers, etc. The task is complicated further by the fact that these languages do not always lend themselves easily to modern day mathematical and scientific concepts. In Hawaii, they had to create a lexicography (??) committee to create terms for concepts, processes, and entities that did not already have a word in Hawaiian. My experience with immersion programs for students who are learning a heritage language, like Mohawk or Hawaiian, versus immersion for students learning a non-heritage language (like anglophone students learning French in Canada) is that the former demonstrate a level of involvement and commitment that can be truly remarkable; likewise for the teachers and administrators in heritage language programs. Arguably, this reflects the fact that they are learning and recovering a part of who they are; whereas students who are learning an L2 that is not part of their cultural heritage have a different configuration of attitudes and motivation ... Fred At 03:16 PM 21/12/2005 -0600, Margaret Fleck wrote: >Barbara Pearson wrote: > >> 1. I think a good part of the animus against minority language >> programs in the U.S. is directed against programs that delay >> the introduction of English till 2nd and 3rd grade. > >It's also important to realize that bad schools can make almost >any approach perform badly. California, one of the big >battlegrounds on this topic, has a range of issues with the >quality of its public schools, which could easily have sabotaged >the actual performance of its bilingual programs, helping lead >to their unpopularity. > >Another source of variation would be availability of materials in >the minority language. If I can believe the numbers I just >found on the internet, there are maybe 31 million Spanish speakers >in the US alone, about 500,000 Welsh speakers, but the total Cree >population is barely enough to support a small high school. In addition >to the basic textbooks, a switched-on school kid is going to need > > -- popular cultural materials (e.g. Pokemon and Harry Potter > books and movies) > -- library and classroom enrichment materials (e.g. books on > spiders, medieval knights, digital photography) which is > a big feature even in my son's first grade class > -- textbooks and off-site courses for advanced subjects (e.g. > calculus, computer programming), and non-academic subjects > (e.g. music, car repair, driver's ed) > -- internet resources > >All this stuff is readily available in Spanish. A lot can probably >be found in Welsh. I really wonder how much is going to be available >in, say, Cree. Worrying about sufficient exposure to L2 may be >a moot point if decent-quality L1 instruction requires significant >use of L2 resources anyhow. > >Margaret > (Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois) > > > > > Psychology Department Phone: 1-514-398-6022 McGill University Fax: 1-514-398-4896 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave Montreal QC Canada H3A 1B1 From jordan.zlatev at ling.lu.se Thu Dec 22 09:40:28 2005 From: jordan.zlatev at ling.lu.se (Jordan Zlatev) Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:40:28 +0100 Subject: Second Call for Language, Culture & Mind Conference - Paris 2006 Message-ID: SECOND CALL FOR LANGUAGE CULTURE AND MIND CONFERENCE (LCM 2) INTEGRATING PERSPECTIVES AND METHODOLOGIES IN THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE PARIS 17-20 JULY 2006 The second `Language Culture and Mind' Conference (LCM 2) will be held in Paris in July 2006, following the successful first LCM conference in Portsmouth in 2004. The goals of LCM conferences are to contribute to situating the study of language in a contemporary interdisciplinary dialogue, and to promote a better integration of cognitive and cultural perspectives in empirical and theoretical studies of language. The second edition will be held at the ?cole Nationale Sup?rieure des T?l?communications (ENST), 46 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris France. Further information concerning the organization, accommodation and fees will be provided as soon as available at the site of the conference: http://www.lcm2006.net? PROVISIONAL TIMETABLE Deadline for submissions:? January 15 (for further detail see underneath) Notification to authors by March 30, 2006 Pre-registration by April 15, 2006 PRESENTATION Human natural languages are biologically based, cognitively motivated, affectively rich, socially shared, grammatically organized symbolic systems. They provide the principal semiotic means for the complexity and diversity of human cultural life. As has long been recognized, no single discipline or methodology is sufficient to capture all the dimensions of this complex and multifaceted phenomenon, which lies at the heart of what it is to be human. In the recent past, perception and cognition have been the basis of general unifying models of language and language activity. However, a genuine integrative perspective should also involve such essential modalities of human action as: empathy, mimesis, intersubjectivity, normativity, agentivity and narrativity. Significant theoretical, methodological and empirical advancements in the relevant disciplines now provide a realistic basis for such a broadened perspective. This conference will articulate and discuss approaches to human natural language and to diverse genres of language activity which aim to integrate its cultural, social, cognitive and bodily foundations. We call for contributions from scholars and scientists in anthropology, biology, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, semiotics, semantics, discourse analysis, cognitive and neuroscience, who wish both to impart their insights and findings, and learn from other disciplines. Preference will be given to submissions which emphasize interdisciplinarity, the interaction between culture, mind and language, and/or multi-methodological approaches in language sciences. Topics include but are not limited to the relation between language and: - biological and cultural co-evolution? - comparative study of communication systems, whether animal or artificial - cognitive and cultural schematization? - emergence in ontogeny and phylogeny? - multi-modal communication - normativity? - thought, emotion and consciousness - perception and categorization - empathy and intersubjectivity - imitation and mimesis - symbolic activity - discourse genres in language evolution and ontogeny - sign, text and literacy Further information about LCM 2 will be presented at http://www.lcm2006.net. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Caroline David (Universit? de Montpellier) Jean-Louis Dessalles (?cole Nationale Sup?rieure des T?l?communications, Paris) Jean Lass?gue (CNRS, Paris) Victor Rosenthal (Inserm-EHESS, Paris) Chris Sinha (University of Portsmouth) Yves-Marie Visetti (CNRS, Paris) Joerg Zinken (University of Portsmouth) Jordan Zlatev (Lund University) SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE (current composition) Iraide Ibarretxe Antunano (University of Zaragoza) Jocelyn Benoist (Universit? de Paris 1) Raphael Berthele (Universit? de Fribourg, Switzerland) Per Aage Brandt, (Case Western Reserve University) Peer F. Bundg?rd (Aarhus?Universitet) Seana Coulson, (Department of Cognitive Science, UCSD) Jules Davidoff (Goldsmith's, University of London) Jean-Pierre Durafour (University of Tubingen) Michel de Fornel (EHESS, Paris) Vyvyan Evans, (University of Sussex, Grande-Bretagne) Dirk Geeraerts, (Department of Linguistics, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgique) Clarisse Herrenschmidt (CNRS-Laboratoire Anthropologie Sociale, Paris) Chris Knight (University of Edinburgh) Bernard Laks (Universit? de Paris 10-Nanterre) Sandra Laugier (Universit? d'Amiens) Maarten Lemmens, (Universit? Lille III) Lorenza Mondada (Universit? Lyon II) Fran?ois Nemo (Universit? Orl?ans) Domenico Parisi (CNR, Roma) David Piotrowski (CREA, Paris) St?phane Robert (CNRS, Paris) Fran?ois Rastier (CNRS-Modico, Paris) Lucien Scubla (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris) G?ran Sonesson (Lund, Semiotics) John Stewart (Universit? de Technologie de Compi?gne) Frederik Stjernfelt (University of Copenhagen) Wolfgang Wildgen (University of Bremen) SUBMISSIONS Submissions are solicited either for oral presentations or for poster sessions. They will be reviewed by members of the International Scientific Committee. Oral presentations should last 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes discussion). All submissions should follow the abstract guidelines below. Submissions should be in English. Abstracts should not exceed 1200 words (about two A4 pages), single-spaced, font size 12 pt or larger, with 2.5 cm margins on all sides. Any diagrams and references must fit on this two page submission. Head material (at the top of the first page): - Title of the paper, - Author name(s), - Author affiliation(s) in brief (1 line), - Email address of principal author - Type of submission (oral presentation, poster) Abstracts should be emailed to submission at lcm2006.net as an ATTACHMENT (i.e. not included in the message) preferably as a MS Word document, but in PDF or postscript format if it is necessary to include a diagram or figure. Abstracts should be submitted by January 15, 2006. Notification of acceptance by March 30, 2006. All abstracts will be reviewed by members of the International Scientific Committee. *************************************************** Jordan Zlatev, Associate Professor Department of Linguistics Center for Languages and Literature Lund University Box 201 221 00 Lund, Sweden email: jordan.zlatev at ling.lu.se http://www.ling.lu.se/persons/JordanZlatev.html *************************************************** From eblasco at libero.it Fri Dec 23 10:49:56 2005 From: eblasco at libero.it (Eduardo Blasco Ferrer) Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2005 11:49:56 +0100 Subject: second minor language Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I have been working since 20 years as linguist and psycholinguist with all minority( = lesser used) languages LSU) in the Romance field, particularly with Sardinian (last book 2005: Methods and Techniques with Learning and Teaching Sardinian, Cagliari, Della Torre, dellatorre at tiscali.it ). I can tell you that I still agree with the formulaic sentence of Claude Levi-Strauss: minority languages disappear more rapidly than radioactive particles. If there is no concrete support from administrations (in obligatory learning at school, if possible before 6; in public use etc.), no corpus and status planning (Einar Haugen), no Authority in language (both Milroy), the decay will be unescapable (J. Vendryes: a language does not die by itself, it is a prolonged lost of interest, of passion which leads to its decay). In some recent experiments conducted by a team I lead we have noticed (1) a fairly good competence in the LSL when kids of 4-6 were administered some psycholinguistic tests (auditory verbal learning tests, narrative tests, comprehension and production tests), even when they had not received any direct education from the parents, (2) a tendency to boost performance in metacognitive and metalinguistic tests (for instance in bilingual picture-word selection tasks, or in phoneme discrimination and non-words discrimination) when sardinian and italian were both involved in tasks. We arguably suggest that this "L3 competence" (= neither L1, nor L2 competence) clearly demonstrates that the community acts as a positive substitute of first language acquisition. Hence, we must strive for a gradual improvement of interaction between children without first l. acquisition and networks which within the community still use actively the LSU. This sociolinguistic-anthropologic project may help us to make up for the lack of a clear-cut and deep intervention in language politics, and in the end in the psycholinguistic domain. Best wishes to all of you for Christmas and New Year Bonas Pascas de Nadale e Salude e Trigu pro s'Annu Nou Eduardo Blasco Ferrer full-prof Linguistics, Psycho/Neurolinguistics Univ. Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From S.Bol at mmu.ac.uk Sun Dec 25 23:01:26 2005 From: S.Bol at mmu.ac.uk (Simone Bol) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2005 23:01:26 +0000 Subject: info-childes Digest - 12/25/05 (out of office) Message-ID: I'll be on annual leave till the 3rd of January 2006, so will not be able to reply to emails before that date. For urgent issues please contact the Professional Registration office on 0161-2474671. Kind regards, Simone Bol From bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov Sun Dec 25 23:09:56 2005 From: bornstem at cfr.nichd.nih.gov (Bornstein, Marc (NIH/NICHD) [E]) Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2005 18:09:56 -0500 Subject: Marc Bornstein is out of office. Message-ID: I am away from my office on a Travel Order until early January and will reply to your email when I return. If you require assistance, please contact Cheryl Varron, Laboratory Secretary, at 301-496-6832 or . Marc H. Bornstein From macw at mac.com Wed Dec 28 17:12:12 2005 From: macw at mac.com (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 12:12:12 -0500 Subject: Marie from Geneva Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I recently received a contribution to CHILDES of a corpus from Marie between ages 1;8 and 2;6. There are 17 files in which Marie is conversing with her parents at their home in Geneva. Unfortunately, I have lost track of who contributed this corpus. Can anyone, particularly including people working in Geneva, help me out on this? Many thanks. --Brian MacWhinney, CMU From eblasco at libero.it Thu Dec 29 09:01:24 2005 From: eblasco at libero.it (Eduardo Blasco Ferrer) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 10:01:24 +0100 Subject: cultural psychology and second minor language acquisition Message-ID: To Vince,Fred,Barbara, Margaret, Katie,Ann, Ginny, Aubrey and other habitu?s with second minor language acquisition I have read with great interest all contributions to the question raised by Vince about second "minor" language education/acquisition. Summing up all contributions, I would say that they concentrate on two main issues: (1) educational level (when to start with education at school; which materials to use in order to improve competence and to balance competition with english), (2) political support (official use in public, formal situations; corpus planning). Without dismissing out of hand the relevance of a political and educational intervention, I still believe that the cultural-psychological background of minor languages outside the USA represents a largely neglected topic. Just take into consideration the fact that a vast array of cultural and political circumstances may trigger very different outcomes with individual attachment to the "ethnic" language (I have not read that psychologically most important specification in any contribution) of the community. In rural communities, such as those in Sardinia, Provence, Malta or Friuli, children still hear the ethnic language in the neighbourhood and use it in plays, so that a "smooth" education in oral bilingualism (with first cognitive fields, narratives etc.) can be managed at school without necessarily awaiting that a pending standardization takes place; cultural "priming effect" acts as a powerful psychological argument to recognize and to acquire ethnical identity, and ensures an automathic involvement of the community in multiple interactions (which can also be guided by trained teachers at school). Let's also consider a somewhat different input, as it was Franco's repression in Spain for 40 years. Basque and Cathalan children of middle-class received a castilian (= spanish) education, whilst low-class or intellectually engaged families brought up their children with cathalan. I myself grew up in such a situation and became bilingual without support of schools or high educational policies. Cultural psychology can tell us much more about the inner motivations to be loyal to or to relinquish using ethnic languages than exclusive attention to social and educational politics. Working on both aspects may represent a fruitful line of research. You may find a lot of literature and useful information about romance minor languages in: Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, ed. by Gunter Holtus et al., Tubingen, Max Niemeyer, 1988-2002, 9 vols. E. Blasco Ferrer, Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, Berlin, E. Schmidt, 1996 E. Blasco Ferrer, Handbuch der italienischen Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, E. Schmidt, 1994 G. Brincat, Malta, una storia linguistica, Genova, Le Mani, 2003 M.H. Mira Mateus, As l?ngua da Pen?nsula Ib?rica, Lisboa, Colibri, 2003. I. Badia i Capdevila, Diccionari de les lleng"ues d'Europa, Barcelona, Enciclop?dia Catalana, 2002 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gagarina at zas.gwz-berlin.de Thu Dec 29 19:26:53 2005 From: gagarina at zas.gwz-berlin.de (Natalia Gagarina) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 20:26:53 +0100 Subject: acquisition of anaphora: picture stories In-Reply-To: <43A981B1.8060802@zas.gwz-berlin.de> Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES Members, We're looking for a picture series for story-elicitation with young children. We're starting a new project on the acquisition and disambiguation of intersentential anaphora and would like to use these pictures (but not the famous frog-story) in our experiments. Thank you for the help, with New Year's Greetings, Natalia Gagarina From phyllis.schneider at ualberta.ca Thu Dec 29 19:59:13 2005 From: phyllis.schneider at ualberta.ca (Schneider, Phyllis) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:59:13 -0700 Subject: acquisition of anaphora: picture stories Message-ID: There are several sets of pictures in the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI). They were designed in part to look at introductions of characters and objects in the stories; they should also be appropriate for intersentential anaphora. The pictures are available (at no charge) at www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/enni. The pictures are copyrighted by the artist, so please contact me if you are considering making any changes to the pictures. ********************************************************************* Phyllis Schneider, PhD Professor Dept. of Speech Pathology and Audiology University of Alberta 2-70 Corbett Hall Edmonton, AB T6G 2G4 CANADA (780) 492-7474 Fax: (780) 492-9333 E-mail: phyllis.schneider at ualberta.ca http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/rehabmed/schneider.cfm ********************************************************************* -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of Natalia Gagarina Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2005 12:27 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: Re: acquisition of anaphora: picture stories Dear Info-CHILDES Members, We're looking for a picture series for story-elicitation with young children. We're starting a new project on the acquisition and disambiguation of intersentential anaphora and would like to use these pictures (but not the famous frog-story) in our experiments. Thank you for the help, with New Year's Greetings, Natalia Gagarina