Conceptual Salience and Early Child Morphology

[elena tribushinina]

Second call for papers for the workshop 
Conceptual Salience and Early Child Morphology 
 
When: February 11-12, 2012
Where: Vienna
Deadline for abstract submission: September 15, 2011
Notification of acceptance: October 25, 2011
 
Workshop description
There are different ways in which conceptual salience may influence the acquisition of morphology. For example, one of the reasons that nouns are acquired faster than adjectives is that the prototypical referents of nouns (i.e. objects) are more salient and more easily accessible to a child than relatively abstract properties denoted by adjectives. Some concepts, such as agentivity, causality, possession and number, are so salient that children may attempt to express them even before they have started acquiring the morphological form associated with that particular meaning.
 
On the other hand, children are from early on highly sensitive to the distributional properties of the linguistic input addressed to them. Whereas high token frequency leads to entrenchment and storage as “chunk“, type frequency and morphotactic transparency play an important role in the recognition of analogies and the extraction of regularities between morphological patterns. Consequently, the acquisition of morphology may also influence the formation of concepts and determine which concepts would become more salient than others.
 
Moreover, languages may differ with respect to which specific concepts are expressed morphologically. Accordingly, a number of cross-linguistic investigations demonstrate that children’s attention is channeled towards different aspects of a situation depending on which portions of the conceptual space are grammaticized in the target language.
 
We invite contributions exploring this complex relationship between the conceptual development of a child and the acquisition of morphology using a variety of state-of-the-art methods of psycholinguistic research. A special focus of the workshop will be on cross-linguistic comparisons.
 
This workshop is part of the 15th International Morphology Meeting held in Vienna on February 9-12, 2012. 
Conference URL: http://www.wu.ac.at/inst/roman/imm15/index.html
 
Confirmed invited speakers
P.M. Bertinetto (Pisa), W.U. Dressler (Vienna), D. Ravid (Tel Aviv), U. Stephany (Cologne)
 
Abstract submission
Abstracts (max. 500 words) in MS Word should be sent to e.tribushinina at uu.nl by September 15, 2011. 
 
More information
For further information please contact the convenors: Sabine Laaha (sabine.laaha at oeaw.ac.at) or Elena Tribushinina (e.tribushinina at uu.nl). 		 	   		  

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