[Lingtyp] CALL FOR PAPERS - SLE2017 Workshop on "First language acquisition in the languages of the world: differences and similarities"

Mon Oct 17 17:35:58 UTC 2016

— — — Apologies for cross-posting. — — — 

CALL FOR PAPERS

WORKSHOP ON:
First language acquisition in the languages of the world: differences and similarities

50th Annual Meeting of Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE2017)
Date: 10 - 13 September 2017
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
http://sle2017.eu <http://sle2017.eu/>

CONVENORS:
Damián E. Blasi (damian.blasi at uzh.ch <mailto:damian.blasi at uzh.ch>)
Jekaterina Mažara (jekaterina.mazara at uzh.ch <mailto:jekaterina.mazara at uzh.ch>)
Sabine Stoll (sabine.stoll at uzh.ch <mailto:sabine.stoll at uzh.ch>)

CALL DEADLINE
20th November 2016 for preliminary abstract (300 words, excluding references)

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The workshop outlined below is planned as a part of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), which will take place in Zürich, 10-13 September 2017.

We invite submissions of preliminary abstracts (max. 300 words, excluding references) for 20 minute presentations. Please send your abstracts to Prof. Dr. Sabine Stoll (sabine.stoll at uzh.ch <mailto:sabine.stoll at uzh.ch>) by November 20, 2016.
Please note that, should the workshop be accepted, you will be invited to submit your full abstracts by January 15, 2017. The full abstracts will undergo the general SLE reviewing process and will be reviewed by members of the scientific committee of the SLE as well as the workshop convenors. At that stage, other prospective authors may also submit their abstracts to this workshop.

important dates:
20 November 2016 — Call deadline (submission of 300 word abstract to the workshop organizers)
25 November 2016 — Notification of acceptance by the workshop organizers and submission of workshop proposal
25 December 2016 — Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals from SLE organisers to workshop organisers
15 January 2017 —  Submission of abstracts for general review
31 March 2017 — Notification of paper acceptance 

***

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:

Children face a myriad of challenges when learning their first language(s), ranging from extracting meaningful units out of a noisy speech stream, attaching labels to changing referents and mastering the quirks of syntax and morphology inherent to the over 7000 languages spoken in the world today. A fundamental question in first language acquisition is whether the resources and the strategies used by children learning language are shared across languages, or whether they are language-specific.

General properties of the input seem to be uniformly available for all children regardless of their target language. For instance, other things being equal, more frequent linguistic units will feature in children’s repertoire earlier (Ambridge et al. 2015). The conditional frequency of the arrangement of units - i.e., which elements follow or precede others - for word segmentation (Pelucchi, Hay & Saffran 2009) as well as the distributional properties of linguistic units (Hills 2013) seem to have a similarly broad scope. In addition to the statistical properties of the input, species-wide behaviors, like the tendency to interpret pointing gestures as a communicative act, the drive towards cooperative communication (Tomasello 2009) and innate perceptual biases (e.g. towards syllabic well-formedness, Johnson et al. 2003) constitute the best generalizations in the field of first language acquisition.

In addition to these general strategies, individual languages might provide easier or more salient pathways to the acquisition of specific features. Word order cues, for instance, might be more reliable (and hence more useful) for specific tasks in some languages than in others, for instance when determining agency (Bates et al. 1984, Chan, Lieven and Tomasello 2009) or when learning properties of objects (Ramscar et al. 2010). Affixation preference (Gervain and Erra 2012) and stress allocation (Tyler and Cutler 2009) might bias the attention towards one particular word edge.

This divide is, however, discussable. A considerable amount of the research aimed at capturing universal learning strategies has been conducted in standard European languages (and most saliently, English) and some of the mechanisms that are deemed to be language-specific might be artifacts stemming from the lack of a comparative perspective on first language acquisition and data sparsity.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together specialists on first language acquisition that conduct research either on:

1) the acquisition of language specific features (such as grammatical categories or morphological complexity) in relation to general acquisition strategies.

2) languages underrepresented in the literature, which could help understand the limits and the plasticity of language-independent learning mechanisms as well as expanding the list of language-specific strategies or

3) comparative settings, contrasting the same or similar phenomena in a range of languages. 

References

Bates, E., MacWhinney, B. Caselli, C., Devescovi, A. Natale, F. & Venza, V. (1984). A cross-linguistic study of the development of sentence interpretation strategies. Child Development 55. 341–354.

Ambridge, B., Kidd, E., Rowland, C. F., & Theakston, A. L. (2015). The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 42(02), 239-273.

Chan, A., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Children's understanding of the agent-patient relations in the transitive construction: Cross-linguistic comparisons between Cantonese, German, and English. Cognitive Linguistics, 20(2), 267-300.

Dressler, W. (2012). On the acquisition of inflectional morphology: Introduction. Morphology, 22. 1-8. 

Gervain, J., & Erra, R. G. (2012). The statistical signature of morphosyntax: A study of Hungarian and Italian infant-directed speech. Cognition, 125(2), 263-287.

Hills, T. (2013). The company that words keep: comparing the statistical structure of child-versus adult-directed

language. Journal of Child Language, 40(03), 586-604.
Johnson, E. K., Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2003). Lexical viability constraints on speech segmentation

by infants. Cognitive Psychology, 46(1), 65-97.

Pelucchi, B., Hay, J. F., & Saffran, J. R. (2009). Statistical learning in a natural language by 8-month-old infants. Child Development, 80(3), 674-685.

Ramscar, M., Yarlett, D., Dye, M., Denny, K., and Thorpe, K. (2010). The effects of feature-label-order and their implications for symbolic learning. Cognitive Science, 6(34), 909-957.

Stoll, S., Mazara, J. &, Bickel, B .  (in press).  The acquisition of polysynthetic verb forms in Chintang. In Fortescue, M., Mithun, M., and Evans, N. (Eds.) Handbook of Polysynthesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tyler, M. D., & Cutler, A. (2009). Cross-language differences in cue use for speech segmentation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126(1), 367-376.

Tomasello, M. (2009). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Harvard University Press.
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