30.1451, Review: Language Acquisition; Linguistic Theories; Psycholinguistics: Hickmann, Veneziano, Jisa (2018)

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Subject: 30.1451, Review: Language Acquisition; Linguistic Theories; Psycholinguistics: Hickmann, Veneziano, Jisa (2018)

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Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2019 22:04:42
From: Ottavia Tordini [ottavia.tordini at gmail.com]
Subject: Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-1094.html

EDITOR: Maya  Hickmann
EDITOR: Edy  Veneziano
EDITOR: Harriet  Jisa
TITLE: Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition
SUBTITLE: Languages, contexts, and learners
SERIES TITLE: Trends in Language Acquisition Research 22
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Ottavia Tordini, Università di Pisa

SUMMARY

The book “Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition” edited by Maya
Hickmann, Edy Veneziano & Harriet Jisa (2018), presents a variegated range of
approaches (i.e. linguistic, psycholinguistic, multimodal, cognitive), which
try to portray the great variability encountered along different types of
language developmental processes. To pave the way for the following chapters,
the scholars introduce a preliminary distinction between exogenous and
endogenous factors of variation across speech, gestures and signs. The former
account for external influences, such as: linguistic and/or cultural
environment, socio-economic status, degrees and types of bilingualism
(simultaneous vs sequential), amount and quality of social interactions. On
the other hand, the latter concern subjects’ idiosyncratic features, namely:
gender, age, cognitive abilities (memory, conceptual development, etc.), as
well as attitude and motivation.

The volume is made up of several contributions and is organized in three
parts. Part I (from Chapter I to VII) encompasses various comparative
perspectives on universal vs variable (i.e. cross-linguistic) aspects of
language development. Its contributions place emphasis on non-linear
developmental patterns encountered in children acquiring a first language,
which exhibit some fluctuations and regression across the developmental span.
Ranging from the very first months of life to later childhood, the analyses
focus on general vs language-specific features of the target language(s) by
taking into account several domains: phonology (Chapter I by Marilyn Vihman &
Sophie Wauquier; Chapter II by Yvan Rose); prosody, morphosyntax and semantics
(Chapter III by Perrine Brusini, Alex de Carvalho, Isabelle Dautriche, Ariel
Gutman, Elodie Cauvet, Séverine Millotte, Pascal Amsili & Anne Christophe; Edy
Veneziano & Christophe Parisse), and discourse organization (Jean-Marc
Colletta, Ramona Kunene Nicolas & Michèle Guidetti).

Chapter I investigates the nature and the structure of developmental
phonological templates, i.e. idiosyncratic word patterns, showing that
existing resources are employed to face novel elements. Habitual and familiar
motoric sequences are constantly applied by the child as a cognitive response
to difficulties encountered in word perception, articulation and memory. The
scholars then raise the question whether such patterns can reflect universal
trends in early stages of acquisition, regardless of target language. Based on
a cross-linguistic comparison of early words in 15 languages, they provide
evidence of commonalities in templates used for the acquisition of certain
syllable structures (for instance, VC(:)V). At the same time, they ascribe
possible variation related to the child’s linguistic environment to universal
constraints in articulatory patterns.  

In Chapter II, Rose explores the fundamental role of abstract categories (both
segmental and prosodic features) in phonological acquisition. As basis for
this assumption, the author takes on an emergentist approach, according to
which abstract categories are not innately available, but gradually emerge
during the child’s lexical development. Based on the radical version of
Templatic Phonology (Firth, 1957), Rose conducts an experimental analysis on a
Dutch-learning child, to describe her development of various clusters with
consonantal onsets. In the subject’s phonological behavior emerged an early
idiosyncratic phase accountable for through a holistic approach. In a
subsequent phase, however, abstraction was evident: for this reason, the
author states that formal models of phonological representation are more
suitable to describe later developmental stages. 

In Chapter III, Brusini et al. explain the interaction between phonological
phrases and function words in bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition
through the creation of a syntactic skeleton. The first are characterized by
units with final lengthening and strengthening of the initial phoneme, while
the latter are easily-recognizable grammatical items (i.e. articles, pronouns,
etc.) made up of extremely frequent syllables. Through various experiments,
the scholars demonstrate that 18-month-old children exploit prosodic units of
phonological phrases to perform syntactic analyses, and simultaneously make
use of function words to detect categories of nouns and verbs, as well as
their plausible meanings. Moreover, the authors create a successful Naïve
Bayes model on a small vocabulary to probabilistically categorize prosodic
phrases. Through this procedure, they confirm that prosodic units can be
recognized even with very little initial knowledge, as happens in children. 

Relatedly, Veneziano and Parisse (Chapter IV) conduct an analysis on
French-speaking children (from 2 to 4 years of age) based on pointing choices,
to assess how and to what extent they could retrieve the function of
category-specific grammatical morphemes. Their purpose is to evaluate their
abilities to use these morphemes for nouns and verbs (defined articles and
third person subject clitic pronouns, respectively) to infer the meaning of
homophonous words that commonly are either nouns or verbs, or of nonce words
produced in noun or verb syntactic contexts. Group results show that, beyond
chance, children chose the picture of an object when the homophonous or nonce
word was in a noun context, and the picture of a person performing an action
when these were in a verb context. Individual results were also presented,
showing that some 2- and 3-year-old children performed successfully in the
whole set of items: inter-subject variation was revealed to be a relevant
factor in this comprehension task. 

Still within the domain of morphosyntax and semantics, Choi (Chapter V)
explores language-specific development of motion expressions in 2 children
speaking Korean, compared to previous data on children acquiring French and
English. While Korean and French are verb-framed languages expressing Path of
motion in the verb root, English is a satellite-framed language which
conversely expresses Manner in the verb root (Talmy, 1985). However, since
Korean singularly admits serial verb constructions (SVCs) which allow Path and
Manner verbs to co-occur within the clause, Korean children express more
information in single clauses than the French children. Namely, they show a
higher utterance density since early stages of acquisition. The scholar
consequently identifies inter-type variation (Korean and French vs English),
but also intra-type variation between Korean and French, which accounts for a
significant cross-linguistic variability. 

On the other hand, in the last two chapters of Part I, the interplay between
speech and co-verbal gestures is investigated. In Chapter VI, Özyürek provides
an ample literature review of recent studies on cross-linguistic variation in
children’s multimodal utterances. These results suggest that not only speech
patterns, but also gestures are notably language-specific since early
acquisition, and that they are reciprocally coordinated and both influence
children’s developmental trajectories. The scholar points out the gradual
interaction between these two modalities, which however is fully achieved only
during later development. In Chapter VII, Colletta et al. present a
comparative study on speech and gestures produced in narratives by two groups
including children and adults: one group speaking Zulu, a pro-drop Bantu
language, the other speaking French, a non-pro-drop Romance language. Rather
than cross-linguistic types of variation, the authors identify significant
cross-cultural differences between the two groups. The fact that Zulu
informants conveyed more details in their narratives in both modalities (i.e.
more representational gestures), while French expressed more verbal comments
and pragmatic gestures (i.e. discursive gestures and anaphora), suggest that
the former rely on their culturally-specific oral tradition, whereas the
latter rely on a literate tradition.

Part II of this volume (from Chapter VIII to XIII) is devoted to describing
the variation in input and contexts during acquisition. Specifically, Chapter
VIII (Eve V. Clark) focuses on the multiplicity of conversational partners as
a relevant factor in the expansion of children’s communicative skills; Chapter
IX (Sophie Kern & Christophe dos Santos) accounts for the impact of input
features in early lexical development; Chapters XI (Anne Salazar Orvig, Haydée
Marcos, Julien Heurdier & Christine da Silva), XII (Marzena Watoreck) and XIII
(Josie Bernicot, Antonine Goumi, Alain Bert-Erboul & Olga Volckaert-Legrier)
explore the variability in discourse types and registers, while Chapter X
(Dominique Bassano & Paul van Geert) investigates the bidirectional
input-output relationship between child-directed speech and language
development.

Among the numerous aspects of variation in young children’s exposure to
language, Chapter VIII chooses to explore and quantify children’s
conversational interactions. The author focuses on the variation of common
ground according to the interlocutor children interact with, claiming that
exposure and interactions vary according to whether interlocutors are male or
female, use a certain dialect, and are familiar with the child’s daily
routines. Also, she demonstrates that children interacting with more expert
adult speakers would improve in speed of processing, communicative skills and
early vocabulary acquisition. Providing data on the amount of child-adult
interaction in words/hour by social class, Clark observes that children who
extend their interaction to a larger number of different adults are exposed to
a certain amount of unfamiliar words, and are earlier to gain experience in
recognizing familiar words from different speakers.

Chapter IX investigates the role of word frequency (WF) and neighbourhood
density (ND) in lexical development of 462 French-speaking children between 16
and 30 months. The authors collected French data through the Inventaire
Français du Développement. A multiple regression analysis reveals that ND and
WF together predict 45% of the variance in vocabulary size, and 64.6% of the
variance in nouns. For predicates, however, the analysis reveals no
correlation between the size of predicate vocabulary with either of the two
variables. Results hence comply with the Emergentist Coalition Model
(Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2000), as children employ a range of cues for word
learning which can vary over time and according to the grammatical nature of
the learned words.

Chapter X proposes a dynamic comparison between child speech and
child-directed speech (CDS), focusing on the acquisition of nominal
determiners of three monolingual children between one and three years old. Raw
tokens’ percentages show explosions in determiner use in the three children,
yet with variations in timing and amplitude. However, no correspondence is
found in CDS, which instead presents fluctuations. Data smoothed and
normalized through a dynamic modeling (an extension of the Scaffolding Model)
indicate corresponding changing patterns in child speech and CDS. Accordingly,
a reciprocal influence is found between input and output: adaptation is hence
understood as a mutual process that facilitates learning.

Chapter XI considers from a dialogic perspective the role of activities and
speech genres in toddlers’ acquisition of referring expressions (specifically,
3rd person clitic pronoun (3rdPP)). The authors analyze a corpus of 25
dialogues of French speaking toddlers in various activities. General Linear
Mixed Effect Regressions indicate that the use of referring expressions is not
uniform across activities and genres. Everyday activities increase the use of
nouns and strong demonstrative pronouns, but have an opposite effect on 3rdPP;
games with toys increase the use of strong demonstrative pronouns, do not
affect the use of 3rdPP, and have a negative effect on nouns; iconic material
involves a more frequent use of clitic demonstratives and, to a lesser extent,
of 3rdPP.  On the other hand, speech genres have a stronger impact on clitic
forms. Coherently with usage-based perspectives, it is hence argued that nouns
and strong demonstrative pronouns are less dependent on original sequences and
can be used in a more generalized manner with respect to emergent clitics. 

Based on a functionalist approach, Watorek (Chapter XII) instead explores the
role of communicative task and text types in the development of discourse
competence. The database consists of spatial descriptions and film retellings,
as orally produced by French children (aged 4, 7, and 10), compared to a
control group of adult French speakers. Results demonstrate that young
children strive to build up multidimensional spatial description. Indeed, this
poses more cognitive challenges compared to the linear production of
retellings/narratives, which are instead chronologically structured. 

The purpose of Chapter XIII is to examine the hybrid nature of the texting
register, which – differently from traditional writing – is not the outcome of
explicit academic instruction. The authors conduct analyses on a one-year
longitudinal corpus (2009-2010) of text messages produced by 19 French teens
aged 11–12 years, with no previous texting experience. Results show that both
“textism” (i.e. a change in the orthographic form from the traditional
writing) and the absence of opening/closing in texts increase over time,
suggesting that the texting register develops in natural situations through
daily interactions, similarly to spoken language.

Finally, Part III of this volume (from Chapter XIV to Chapter XX) accounts for
the variation regarding types of acquisition and types of learners, i.e.
monolinguals, simultaneous bilinguals, adults L2 learners and speakers with
different types of impairment. In detail, Chapters XIV (Brian MacWhinney) and
XV (Michèle Kail, Maria Kihlstedt & Philippe Bonnet) explore cognitive
processes in both children and adult bilinguals; Chapter XVI (Aliyah
Morgenstern, Marion Blondel, Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel, Sandra Benazzo,
Dominique Boutet, Angelika Kochan & Fanny Limousin) and XVII (Marie-Anne
Salladre, Camille Schoder & Maya Hickmann) show results of multimodal analyses
describing the acquisition of spoken and sign language in children; Chapter
XVIII (Helen Tager-Flusberg), XIX (Judy Reilly, Josie Bernicot, Lara Polse,
Thierry Olive, Joel Uze, Beverly Wulfeck, Lucie Broc, Monik Favart and Mark
Appelbaum) and XX (Virginie Dardier & Maud Champagne-Lavau) focus instead on
the multifaceted dimensions of acquisition with Language Impairment and
Autistic Spectrum Disorder.

Chapter XIV presents the Unified Competition Model (UCM), an inclusive model
of both first and second language learning which stems from the Competition
Model developed by MacWhinney & Bates (1989). UCM posits that: a) first and
second language learning is based upon a common set of socio-cognitive
processes; b) that, rather than by the closure of a critical-period window,
they are differentiated by the four risk factors of entrenchment, transfer,
overanalysis, and isolation. Entrenchment is a neural process that develops
from birth onwards through a persistent use of L1. Transfer results from the
predominant influence of L1 during the initial phase of L2 learning.
Overanalysis indicates the tendency of adult learners to grasp the general
meaning of utterances, while neglecting function words and grammatical
markers. Isolation can arise as we get older, due to an increasing difficulty
for L1 mature communities to become integrated within L2 groups. Antidotes to
these four risk factors are found in the processes of resonance, decoupling,
chunking, and participation that are available to both L1 and L2 learners.

Still within the Competition Model (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), in Chapter XV
Kail et al. investigate on-line sentence processing in a cross-linguistic
perspective, by presenting developmental data on 41 French/Swedish bilinguals.
They focus on word order configurations and inflectional morphology to
identify whether on-line processing procedures are language-related or driven
by more general factors. Based on online grammaticality judgments, the authors
demonstrate the similarity in weight of each “cue cost” component between
simultaneous French/Swedish bilinguals and their monolingual counterparts –
although bilinguals were slower and less accurate. Overall, the scholars
suggest a separate independent development in bilingual first language
acquisition.

Chapter XVI is devoted to analyzing variation in acquisition through a
longitudinal multimodal analysis of negation in the productions of five
children aged 0-3 (monolingual French, monolingual English, monolingual French
Sign Language (LFS), bilingual French/LSF, bilingual French/Italian)
interacting with caretakers. A quantitative evaluation of both visual-gestural
and auditory-vocal modalities shows that negative constructions are conveyed
through these multi-semiotic means by all the children, regardless of the
language(s) and/or hearing impairment. Nonetheless, each child follows a
different pattern. Overall, results suggest that children tend at the
beginning to perform non-conventional body movements to express rejection or
avoidance, and later become more involved with conventional gestures (along
with spoken productions for non-signing subjects).

Salladre et al. explore in Chapter XVII visuo-spatial modality and iconicity
in sign language, by focusing on how deaf children aged 5–10 and adults
producing LSF describe motion events with variable Paths and Manners. Analyses
show that children produce dense utterances encoding both Path and Manner from
five years on, by means of various iconic structures. Nonetheless, the authors
note that discrepancies arise with age regarding the expression of event types
(downward, upward, across), and that the semantic density increases with age
when expressing two perspectives (observer and character), similarly to the
encoding of relevant locative information. Globally, iconicity appears to
change form depending on the structure used to express motion components,
rather than on age during development.

Chapter XVIII explores the developmental origins laying behind the
multifaceted phenomenon of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The paper provides
either literature review about the earliest behavioral and neural predictors
of language in ASD, focusing on infants at risk due to the presence of
disorders within the family, and both recent and current research on such
predictors in young children. From these observations, it emerges that
investigating nonverbal cognitive ability and the developing of gestural
communication can be understood as longitudinal predictors for language
outcomes in ASD.

Chapter XIX illustrates a follow-up of a previous study (Relly, Bernicot,
Olive, Favart, Wulfeck & Appelbaum, 2014) that explored written narratives
from children with LI (language impairment) and their typically developing
peers (TD) in French and English, by adding up analyses of their spoken
narrative performances. Their task is to handle with two different modalities
(spoken vs written language) and with two typologically-different languages
(French and English) to obtain a wider and more in-depth comprehension of LI
phenomena. Statistical analyses show that subjects with LI tend to produce
less spoken language than TD subjects, but no statistical difference was found
between the length of written text across the French-speaking groups. However,
written productions of children with LI exhibit more morphological errors than
those of their TD counterparts, especially in French, which is notably rich in
inflections. Concerning syntax, TD children and children with LI show
sensitivity to cultural-specific patterns. In conclusion, the authors
demonstrate that structural, multimodal and pragmatic factors all contribute
to the definition of the LI phenotype. Ultimately, the last Chapter of this
volume addresses problems concerning the comprehension of “nonliteral
language” (specifically, of indirect requests) among children and adolescents
with acquired brain damages, with respect to adults with the same impairment.
The authors describe similarities and differences in pragmatic and
metapragmatic difficulties across people with right-hemisphere damage (RHD)
and people with traumatic brain injury (TBI), and generally observe that much
research is still needed to assess whether brain injuries can give an insight
into the general pragmatic aspects involved in language acquisition. 

EVALUATION

The main concern of this dense collection of papers is to demonstrate that
sources of variation surfacing during language acquisition should not be
minimized or neglected in favor of universal and linear developmental
patterns. Rather, all the authors suggest that research into language
acquisition should incorporate factors triggering variation for a fuller and
more subtle understanding of language processing. In my opinion, the task of
providing insight into such a complex panorama has been accomplished, first,
because we have benefited from a clearly defined and homogeneous structure of
chapters and paragraphs, and, second, because the plain language employed by
most authors, as well as the simple graphs, help the reader to understand the
main content. Overall, we believe that the contents are coherent with each
other, and that the book can be of great benefit for young researchers who
approach the scope of variation in language acquisition: the book is
undeniably up-to-date, and several suggestions for further research are
provided (see e.g. for instance, Chapter XVI). 

Nonetheless, we observe that Chapters IV, VIII, IX, XI, XII, XII, XV, XVI all
deal with French-speaking subjects and are mostly written by French authors –
or by authors working in French institutions. Although the reader can find
some cross-linguistic comparisons with other languages, he cannot avoid noting
a sort of privileged focus on French among the contributions – whose total
number is visibly conspicuous. Moreover, we would like to point out that the
contributors have mainly concentrated on morphology, morphosyntax, lexicon and
pragmatics, substantially neglecting a broad range of phenomena involving
phonetic variation in first and second language acquisition (only Chapters I
and II have dealt with phonology). In my opinion, one or two contributions
should have addressed the problems concerning this specific domain.

In conclusion, however, I believe that such limitations do not invalidate the
high quality of the papers, and that this collection undoubtedly represents a
significant and up-to-date point of reference for young scholars, as it opens
up to a wide gamut of possibilities of exploring variation in acquisition from
multiple perspectives.

REFERENCES

Bates, Elizabeth & MacWhinney, Brian. 1989. Functionalism and the Competition
Model. In MacWhinney, Brian & Bates, Elizabeth (eds.). The crosslinguistic
study of sentence processing. New York: Cambridge University Press. 3-73.

Firth, John Rupert. 1957. Sounds and prosodies. Papers in Linguistics,
1934-1951. 121-138. 

Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy, Michnick Golinkoff, Roberta & Hollich, George. 2000. An
emergentist coalition model for word learning. Becoming a word learner: A
debate on lexical acquisition. 136-164.

Relly, Judy S., Bernicot, Josie, Olive, Thierry, Favart, Monik, Wulfeck,
Barbara & Appelbaum, Mark. 2014. Written Narratives from French and English
speaking children with language impairment. In Arfé, Barbara, Dockrell, Julie
& Berninger, Virginia (eds.). Writing development and instruction in children
with hearing, speech and oral language difficulties. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. 176-187.

Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical
forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.). Language typology and syntactic description,
vol. III: Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 57-149.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a third-year PhD student in Phonetics at the Department of Philology,
Literature and Linguistic, University of Pisa, Italy.

My topic of research is the maintenance of native speech features (both
consonants and vowels) of Italian and dialects as heritage languages in
Australia. Within my PhD project, I have gained expertise in Italian
linguistics, Italian Dialectology, Language Contact, as well as in first,
second and third Language Acquisition, to which I aim to apply quantitative
experimental methods to assess variation at phonetic level.





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