17.1633, Calls: Cognitive Science/Germany;Applied Ling/Germany

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-1633. Tue May 30 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.1633, Calls: Cognitive Science/Germany;Applied Ling/Germany

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1)
Date: 29-May-2006
From: Susanna Bartsch < bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de >
Subject: Lexical Bootstrapping in Child Language Acquisition and Child Conceptual Development 

2)
Date: 29-May-2006
From: Baris Kabak < Baris.Kabak at uni-konstanz.de >
Subject: Prosodic Domains: Universals and Deviations 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 16:41:35
From: Susanna Bartsch < bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de >
Subject: Lexical Bootstrapping in Child Language Acquisition and Child Conceptual Development 
 


Full Title: Lexical Bootstrapping in Child Language Acquisition and Child Conceptual Development 

Date: 05-Oct-2006 - 07-Oct-2006
Location: Munich, Germany 
Contact Person: Susanna Bartsch
Meeting Email: bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science 

Call Deadline: 30-May-2006 

Meeting Description:

Lexical Bootstrapping in Child Language Acquisition and Child Conceptual Development

Theme session
To be held at the 
Second International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 
Munich, 5-7 October 2006

For our special paper session, we would like to invite researchers interested in an exploratory discussion about lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development, and willing to present their own studies as contributions to this discussion. 

Dear all,

Please find below the third and final call for papers for our theme session on lexical bootstrapping in early language and conceptual development.

DEADLINE: May 31, 2006

With best wishes,
Susanna

Third and Final Call for Papers

LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING IN CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND CHILD CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

Theme session
To be held at the
SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE GERMAN COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION,
Munich, 5-7 October 2006

PLEASE NOTE:
- CLARIFICATION ABOUT CONTENTS OF SUBMITTED ABSTRACTS
- POSSIBILITY OF PUBLICATION

Apart from some few exceptions (Brown 1958, Nelson 1973), the research on child lexical development did not receive much attention from students of child language in the 1960s and 1970s. In opposition to some statements found in the more recent literature (Rothweiler & Meibauer 1999), this fact is not really surprising when one considers the very influential role then played by formal linguistics with its primacy of syntactic structures and the view of lexicon and semantics as something rather epiphenomenal. From the 1980s on, this state of affairs has changed dramatically.

For one thing, over the last 25 years or so, there has been more and more interest in topics related to child lexical acquisition. Over these several years, the research has issued many relevant theoretical insights resp. assumptions, and methodologies about lexical development, such as the view of individual differences in early vocabulary composition in terms of a continuum between referential and expressive style (Nelson 1973) and the holophrastic nature of early words (Nelson 1985), the differentiation between expressive and receptive vocabulary, as well as the use of correlational methods (Bates et al. 1988), or the role of domain-general cognitive skills of categorisation and theory of mind (Tomasello 2003), amongst several others.

Secondly and most importantly, this body of research (much of which has been done within functionalist-cognitivist frameworks) seems to allow for the formulation of general assumptions concerning child language development in general, as well as the interplay between language and conceptual development. Thus, especially studies focussing on within- and cross-domain developmental correlations seem to provide evidence for a Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis (Dale et al. 2000, Dionne et al. 2003), i.e., the assumption that early lexical development, as mapping of words to referents or their conceptualisations, and even to whole propositions, is not only prior to, but also pre-requisite for the emergence of morpho-syntactic constructions (which, incidentally, are not fundamentally different from words, in that they are equally form-meaning pairs). The lexical bootstrapping hypothesis presupposes an early stage in lexical development characterized by the learning of archilexemes, a term originally proposed by Zemb (1978), as grammarless lexemes composed of form and concept only, here understood as the means by which the child begins to cognize and categorize the world. Such assumption on the fundamental role of early lexical acquisition for later language development as a whole challenges the view about the primacy of syntax over lexicon and semantics that has been postulated in these 50 years of formal linguistics.

For our special paper session, we would like to invite researchers interested in an exploratory discussion about lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development, and willing to present their own studies as contributions to this discussion.

Empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions dealing with aspects of word learning in the one-word phase (and perhaps also before) that might predict diverse aspects of later language and conceptual development of typically developing and impaired children may focus on one or more of the following questions and topics (evidently, other suggestions are equally welcome):

- How can measures of, and assumptions on, early lexical development (vocabulary size, vocabulary composition, vocabulary growth rate, vocabulary style, vocabulary spurt, critical mass, others?) be correlated to measures of later grammatical emergence and development (emergence and proportion of multi-word utterances, Mean Length of Utterance, development of inflectional paradigms and use of function words, realisation of argument constructions, others?) How reliable are such correlations?

- How can the study of early lexical development shed light on the issue of individual variance and developmental language disorders? Can aspects of early word learning (expressive vs. referential style, dissimilar timing of vocabulary development, peculiarities in vocabulary composition, peculiarities in the conceptual mapping, others?) provide criteria for a differentiation between mere individual variance and developmental disorder, as well as for a differentiation between transient and persistent disorders? Can such aspects be used in the context of early diagnosis of such disorders?

- Which cognitive processes underlie word learning as both word-to-concept mapping and categorization task? Are there constraints and principles at play? What is the nature of such constraints--are they domain (=language) specific or domain general? How are they related to later language and conceptual development?

- Does a notion of lexical bootstrapping in language acquisition preclude other bootstrapping mechanisms in the stages before the emergence of grammar, such as prosodic, semantic, syntactic bootstrapping, or can interplay amongst these types of bootstrapping mechanisms be assumed?

- Related to the last question, how does the child construct her mental lexicon? How is it structured--is this structure modular or network-like or anything else? Which processes of reorganisation are at work along development?

- Can early words (at least partially) be seen as holophrases in that they (at least partially) refer to whole propositions? Which developmental change(s) takes place in the transition from holophrastic one-word utterances to multi-word utterances?

- Which evidences can be drawn from studies of word learning in children with cognitive developmental disorders (Down Syndrome, Williams Syndrome, others?), as well as in blind and deaf children?

- Which insights can be drawn from research based on (i) corpora analyses; (ii) computer learning simulations; (iii) neural activation in experimental situations, such as categorisation tasks; (iv) lexical/conceptual processing in adults with and without language disorders (e.g. aphasia)?

- Which similarities, differences or peculiarities can be observed when comparing mono- and multilingual word learning, as well as comparing monolingual and cross-linguistic studies?

Depending on the number of contributions, the special session will take place at one or two days of the conference.

The theme session will be framed by a paper introducing the topic of lexical bootstrapping in child language and conceptual development and, again depending on the number of contributions, one or two discussion rounds.

BEFORE SENDING IT, MAKE SURE PLEASE THAT YOUR ABSTRACT:

- indicates EXPLICITLY how and to which extent YOUR STUDY IS RELATED TO THE HYPOTHESIS OF LEXICAL BOOTSTRAPPING in child language and conceptual development. Does your study support or refute the lexical bootstrapping hypothesis? If yes, how and to which extent? If not, why not?

- is detailed, i.e., it is about 1000 WORDS LONG, not including list of references, tables, diagrams, etc.;

- indicates explicitly and in detail the EMPIRICAL BASIS of your study; this holds also for theoretical works, i.e., theoretical work might rely, for instance, on empirical studies of other researchers, but please NOT SOLELY
ON INTROSPECTIVE METHODS;

- contains a LIST OF THE REFERENCES mentioned.

DEADLINE EXTENSION
The deadline for abstract submission was extended to 31 May 2006. Participants will be notified of the acceptance of their papers by 1 July 2006. Participants should send us an updated abstract of their papers by 21 September 2006.

Please send your abstracts exclusively as email attachments (doc- or rtf-files) to:

Susanna Bartsch                 Dagmar Bittner
bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de       dabitt at zas.gwz-berlin.de

The conference languages are German and English.

The organizers are preparing a PROPOSAL FOR PUBLICATION of the presented papers in the series COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH (CLR) (Mouton de Gruyter) edited by Dirk Geeraerts, John Taylor, and René Dirven.

REFERENCES

Bates, E., Bretherton, I., & Snyder, L. 1988. From First Words to Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Brown, R. 1958. Words and things. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Dale, P. S., Dionne, G., Eley, T. C., & Plomin, R. 2000. Lexical and grammatical development: A behavioural genetic perspective. Journal of Child Language, 27/3, 619-642.

Dionne, G., Dale, P. S., Boivin, M., & Plomin R. 2003. Genetic evidence for bidirectional effects of early lexical and grammatical development. Child Development, 74, 394-412.

Hoey, M. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London & New York: Routledge.

Marchman, V. A. & Bates, E. 1994. Continuity in lexical and morphological development: A test of the critical mass. Journal of Child Language, 21/2, 339-366.

Nelson, K. 1973. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Chicago: Univ. Press.

Nelson, K. 1985. Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning. Developmental psychology series. Orlando: Academic Press.

Pinker, S. 1984. Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Rothweiler, M. & Meibauer, J. (eds.) 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb: Ein Überblick. In: Meibauer, J., & Rothweiler, M. (eds.). 1999. Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb. UTB für Wissenschaft;Mittlere Reihe, 2039. Tübingen: Francke.

Rescorla, L., Mirak, J., & Singh, L. 2000. Vocabulary growth in late talkers: Lexical development from 2;0 to 3;0. Journal of Child Language, 27, 293-311.

Zemb, J. M. 1978. Vergleichende Grammatik Französisch Deutsch: Comparaison de deux systèmes. Mannheim et al.: Bibliographisches Institut.

Tomasello, M. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Susanna Bartsch
Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZaS)
Centre for General Linguistics, Typology, and Universals Research
Jägerstr. 10-11
10117 Berlin
Germany


	
-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 16:41:43
From: Baris Kabak < Baris.Kabak at uni-konstanz.de >
Subject: Prosodic Domains: Universals and Deviations 

	

Full Title: Prosodic Domains: Universals and Deviations 

Date: 28-Jan-2007 - 02-Feb-2007
Location: Siegen, Germany 
Contact Person: Baris Kabak
Meeting Email: Baris.Kabak at uni-konstanz.de
Web Site: http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/dgfs2007/index.htm 

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Aug-2006 

Meeting Description:

This workshop, co-organized by Janet Grijzenhout and Baris Kabak (University of Konstanz), will investigate the nature of morphosyntax-phonology mapping and the principles that govern the prosodization of morphological elements, with special attention to cross-linguistic variation. It will take place at the University of Siegen, Germany as part of the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS). 

Phonology Workshop (Arbeitsgruppe 12) at the 
29th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS)

PROSODIC DOMAINS: UNIVERSALS AND DEVIATIONS

University of Siegen, Germany
February 28th - March 2nd, 2007
 
Organizers:
Janet Grijzenhout
Baris Kabak
(University of Konstanz)
 
Workshop description:

Systematic phonological alternations often seem to be bound to a particular phonological domain. The theory of Prosodic Phonology (e.g. Selkirk 1980, 1986; Nespor & Vogel 1986; Hayes 1989) holds that speech is hierarchically organized into constituents that are not necessarily isomorphic to syntactic constituents. Previous literature has largely dealt with how morphological elements can be organized into the prosodic structure. It has been reported that within individual languages as well as cross-linguistically, there can be systematic differences in the prosodization of function words. For instance, Selkirk (1984) states that the principles of syntax-phonology mapping are blind to the presence of functional categories. Closer examination reveals that not only function words, but also various other morphological elements - e.g. suffixes and clitics - may vary with respect to the way they are prosodized. Moreover, within one syntactic category, elements may belong to different prosodic categories (e.g. the German preposition statt 'instead of' seems to function as a prosodic word, whereas in 'in' does not form a prosodic word of its own). Furthermore, morphological elements may behave as part of a prosodic domain x with respect to a (set of) phonological process(es) while they may seem to belong to another domain in the context of other processes (e.g., Turkish instrumental suffix -lA, which undergoes vowel harmony but fails to receive word-level right-most default stress). Also, the rules posited for morphology-phonology mapping seem to be based on circular logic: a syntactic category may determine the onset of a particular prosodic domain in which, for example, stress assignment takes place, but at the same time presence or absence of primary stress suggests the inclusion or exclusion of a particular element from that very same domain. Apart from various issues concerning phrasing algorithms and syntax-phonology mapping, the precise nature of the prosodic hierarchy and its various components have also been controversial. While, for instance, several researchers questioned the necessity of the Clitic Group (e.g., Zec 1988; Booij 1988; Peperkamp 1997), others argue that the theory predicts even less structure than is attested across the languages of the world (e.g., recent work by Balthasar Bickel and colleagues at the University of Leipzig). 

In this workshop, we are specifically interested in the nature of the morphosyntax-phonology mapping and the principles that govern the prosodization of morphological elements, with special attention to cross-linguistic variation. In this respect, the following issues will be addressed: (i) how much of mapping rules is given by universal grammar versus language-specific principles?, (ii) do morphological elements bear any (lexical) information with respect to their morphophonological categorization (cf. Inkelas 1989) and how should that information be represented?, (iii) is there a set of universal prosodic domains and are all of the domains suggested in the literature necessary?

We invite linguists who work on prosodic phonology and phonology-morphosyntax interface from all perspectives and methodologies including those working in the fields of typology, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and language modeling. General theoretical discussions and analyses of language-specific issues are equally welcome.

Talks will be 20 minutes each, with 10 minutes of discussion.
 
Abstract submission procedure:
 
Please send an anonymous abstract of max. 500 words, as a text file or Word file, to prosodicdomains at uni-konstanz.de

Workshop webpage: http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/dgfs2007/index.htm

Deadline for submitting abstracts: August 1st, 2006
 
Notification of acceptance will be sent by email after September 15th, 2006.
 
For further enquiries please contact:
 
Janet Grijzenhout or Baris Kabak 
Department of Linguistics
University of Konstanz
Fach D180
 
Janet.Grijzenhout at uni-konstanz.de
Baris.Kabak at uni-konstanz.de
 



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