Call for Papers Lexical Acquisition GCLA Conference

[bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de]

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 

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 (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 notion of lexical bootstrapping 
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. 

Please send only detailed abstracts (2 pages), in which you make clear how 
your study is related to the topic of lexical bootstrapping in child 
language and conceptual development. 

The deadline for abstract submission is 15 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 investigating the possibility of, after review, 
publishing the presented papers in a compilation on lexical bootstrapping in 
child language and conceptual development. 


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 Sprcherwerb: 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