load and children's language processing

[Lois Bloom]

For reports of an in-depth, longitudinal study (9 to about 28 months) of the
interactive effects of cognitive and affective processing load for language,
object play, and emotional expression, see, for example:

Bloom, L. (1993). The transition from infancy to language: Acquiring the
power of expression. New York: Cambridge University.

Bloom, L. & Tinker, E. (2001). The intentionality model and language
acquisition: Engagement, effort, and the essential tension. Monographs of
the Society for Research in Child Development, 66 (4, Serial No. 267).

Bloom, L. (2003). The Integration of Expression into the Stream of Everyday
Activity.  In I. Stockman, Ed., Movement and action in learning and
development. Elsevier.

Lois Bloom



Lois Bloom
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Easton, Connecticut 06612


203-261-46222
fax: 203-261-4689

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian MacWhinney" <macw at mac.com>
To: <info-childes at mail.talkbank.org>
Cc: <julie at audiospeech.ubc.ca>
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 5:48 PM
Subject: load and children's language processing


> Dear Info-CHILDES,
>     Julie Lewis from UBC asked me whether I could point her to some
> studies of the effects of processing load on language processing in
> children and I was surprised to admit to myself that I could not think of
> a consistent attempt to examine this issue.  Specifically, in the
> framework of the theory of automaticity espoused by Schneider and Shiffrin
> (1977) increases in processing load created by the imposition of a dual
> task (saying "kestral-kestral",  tapping your foot, counting back from 100
> by threes, etc.) are supposed to have various interesting interactions
> with non-automatic tasks, but little impact on automated tasks.  There is,
> of course, the Gathercole and Baddeley work on phonological interference
> in list memory, but this hardly gets to the level of sentence memory or
> processing.  Moreover, only a small fraction of that work is with
> children.  Gupta. MacWhinney, and Feldman did some work with children with
> focal lesions, and Evans did parallel work with SLI, but never really
> focusing on dual tasks. Instead, most of this work uses work memory
> capacity as an individual differences measure.  Liz Bates and Arturo
> Hernandez did a nice study with load and adult bilinguals, but that is
> back into the adult literature.  Maybe people have just found that kids
> cannot handle dual tasks.
>    It would seem that processing load studies would be an excellent way of
> tapping into issues in the study of SLI and perhaps Dorothy Bishop did
> some of this, but I can't think of the study.
>   So, can any of you out there help us out with references or ideas.   If
> these studies have not been done, either with normals or SLI, maybe it is
> time to do them.
>
> --Brian MacWhinney
>
>