27.4169, Calls: Cog Sci, Gen Ling, Lang Acquisition, Psycholing/Switzerland

Mon Oct 17 19:04:09 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4169. Mon Oct 17 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4169, Calls: Cog Sci, Gen Ling, Lang Acquisition, Psycholing/Switzerland

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Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2016 15:03:55
From: Jekaterina Mazara [jekaterina.mazara at uzh.ch]
Subject: First Language Acquisition in the Languages of the World: Differences and Similarities

Full Title: First Language Acquisition in the Languages of the World: Differences and Similarities 

Date: 10-Sep-2017 - 13-Sep-2017
Location: Zurich, Switzerland 
Contact Person: Sabine Stoll
Meeting Email: sabine.stoll at uzh.ch

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; General Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 20-Nov-2016 

Meeting Description:

This session is planned as a workshop at the 50th Annual Meeting of the
Societas Linguistica Europea (SLE), which will take place in Zürich, 10-13
September 2017.

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 available to all children
regardless of the target language. For instance, other things being equal,
more frequent linguistic units will feature in children’s repertoire earlier
(Ambridge et al. 2015). 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 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 and innate perceptual biases
constitute the best generalizations in the field of first language
acquisition. 

In addition to these general strategies, individual languages might provide
more salient pathways to the acquisition of specific features. Word order
cues, for instance, might be more reliable for specific tasks in some
languages than in others, e.g. when determining agency or when learning
properties of objects. 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, debatable. 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 artefacts stemming
from the lack of a comparative perspective on first language acquisition and
data sparsity. 

References:

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.
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. 
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. 
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.

Call for Papers:

At this stage, we accept submissions of preliminary abstracts (max. 300 words,
excluding references) for 20 minute presentations related to the following
topics:

1) The acquisition of language specific features (such as grammatical
categories or morphological complexity) in relation to general acquisition
strategies.
2) Languages under-represented 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.

Please send your preliminary abstracts to the email address below by 20
November 2016. For the preliminary abstract, you should include your contact
information (name, affiliation and email address) with your submission.

If the workshop proposal is accepted, we will invite prospective participants
to submit full abstracts to the SLE's general call for papers by 15 January
2017. At that point, other prospective authors may also submit their abstracts
to the workshop. All abstracts submitted in January 2017 will be reviewed
individually by the SLE's scientific committee as well as the workshop
organizers. 

Important Dates:

20 November 2016: Deadline for submission 300 word abstracts to the workshop
organizers (submission contact: Prof. Dr. Sabine Stoll, sabine.stoll at uzh.ch)
25 November 2016: Notification of initial acceptance by the workshop
organizers and submission of the workshop proposal to the SLE 
25 December 2016: Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals from SLE
organizers to workshop organizers
15 January 2017: Submission of full abstracts
31 March 2017: Notification of paper acceptance 
10-13 September 2017: SLE conference

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