34.3333, Confs: Child Language Data as a Challenge to Language Acquisition Theories

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3333. Tue Nov 07 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3333, Confs: Child Language Data as a Challenge to Language Acquisition Theories

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Date: 07-Nov-2023
From: Natalia Gagarina [gagarina at leibniz-zas.de]
Subject: Child Language Data as a Challenge to Language Acquisition Theories


Child Language Data as a Challenge to Language Acquisition Theories
Short Title: CLADA-Challenge

Date: 08-Sep-2024 - 14-Sep-2024
Location: Poznan, Poland
Contact: Natalia Gagarina
Contact Email: gagarina at leibniz-zas.de

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     Sa (sax)
Language Family(ies): Slavic

Meeting Description:

The field of language development has long been a battleground for
competing theories and models. Recent research has emphasized the role
of Child-Directed Speech (CDS) and Child Speech (CS) relations,
leading to the proliferation of input-based models across various
linguistic domains such as morphology, semantics, syntax, and
discourse-pragmatics (e.g., Ashkenazi, Gillis and Ravid, 2020). These
models posit that the linguistic input provided by caregivers plays a
pivotal role in shaping a child's language development. For example,
the distributional properties of CDS make it more accessible to
children than ADS (Adult Directed Speech). CDS is fine-tuned to the
child; it is more regular, grammatically simpler and less diverse,
with fewer disfluencies, shorter and more grammatical utterances, and
with much scaffolding. CDS acts as a filter through which the most
frequent and meaningful contrasts emerge and might explain differences
in patterns of acquisition among children.
On the other hand, the concept of self-organization, which has been
first created for biology, neurology and cognitive science, but then
also adapted to linguistics (see Karpf, 1990; Dressler & Karpf, 1995;
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, 1998), has been defined by de Boer (2009) as the
emergence of order on a global scale through interactions on a local
scale. Autopoietic systems create themselves based on earlier stages
of development and interaction with their environment. For child
language acquisition, this applies to neurological development and
language input by the main caretakers, by siblings and later also by
peers of the children. This results in a successive decrease of
non-adult-like productions and leads to an increase in complexity as
well as modularization in the child’s grammar. Specifically, recent
findings show that children may go through Blind Alley Developments
(BADs; Čamber & Dressler 2023): ephemeral developments of young
children which they have to give up soon because of continuous
opposing parental input. BADs represent radical examples of
self-organisation by young children in acquiring one or more
language(s). More important, they provide a challenge to linguistic
theories.
Finally, going above the level of morpho-syntax to discourse and
narrative, the multidimensional model of early narrative acquisition
(Gagarina et al., 2019) implies the importance of self-organization on
this higher-order level. According to this model, children construct
narratives through a complex interplay of various interrelated levels,
including grammatical, cognitive, and pragmatic components. Children
naturally start to construct narrative structures from the factual
components towards the more complex inferred components. In this
process, self-organization involves dynamic interactions across
elements of a system.
Given these perspectives on language acquisition, the goal of this
workshop is to reconcile the tension between input-based and
self-organizing models by offering a more integrative viewpoint. We
invite contributions targeting the complex interplay between external
input and internal system changes through various methodological
approaches, including, but not limited to, corpus studies,
experimental elicitations, and computational cognitive modeling using
Dynamic Network Analysis. The overarching goal of the workshop is to
foster interdisciplinary dialogue, and as such, we encourage
submissions that utilize mixed-methods approaches. By doing so, we
hope to shed light on the multifaceted nature of early language
development, thereby enriching our understanding and opening new
theoretical approaches and empirical avenues for research. To study
the impact of language typology on acquisition we welcome
contributions on the language pairs including, but not restricted to
Germanic, Romance, Slavic and less studied languages.

The field of language development has long been a battleground for
competing theories and models. Recent research has emphasized the role
of Child-Directed Speech (CDS) and Child Speech (CS) relations,
leading to the proliferation of input-based models across various
linguistic domains such as morphology, semantics, syntax, and
discourse-pragmatics (e.g., Ashkenazi, Gillis and Ravid, 2020). These
models posit that the linguistic input provided by caregivers plays a
pivotal role in shaping a child's language development. For example,
the distributional properties of CDS make it more accessible to
children than ADS (Adult Directed Speech). CDS is fine-tuned to the
child; it is more regular, grammatically simpler and less diverse,
with fewer disfluencies, shorter and more grammatical utterances, and
with much scaffolding. CDS acts as a filter through which the most
frequent and meaningful contrasts emerge and might explain differences
in patterns of acquisition among children.
On the other hand, the concept of self-organization, which has been
first created for biology, neurology and cognitive science, but then
also adapted to linguistics (see Karpf, 1990; Dressler & Karpf, 1995;
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, 1998), has been defined by de Boer (2009) as the
emergence of order on a global scale through interactions on a local
scale. Autopoietic systems create themselves based on earlier stages
of development and interaction with their environment. For child
language acquisition, this applies to neurological development and
language input by the main caretakers, by siblings and later also by
peers of the children. This results in a successive decrease of
non-adult-like productions and leads to an increase in complexity as
well as modularization in the child’s grammar. Specifically, recent
findings show that children may go through Blind Alley Developments
(BADs; Čamber & Dressler 2023): ephemeral developments of young
children which they have to give up soon because of continuous
opposing parental input. BADs represent radical examples of
self-organisation by young children in acquiring one or more
language(s). More important, they provide a challenge to linguistic
theories.
Finally, going above the level of morpho-syntax to discourse and
narrative, the multidimensional model of early narrative acquisition
(Gagarina et al., 2019) implies the importance of self-organization on
this higher-order level. According to this model, children construct
narratives through a complex interplay of various interrelated levels,
including grammatical, cognitive, and pragmatic components. Children
naturally start to construct narrative structures from the factual
components towards the more complex inferred components. In this
process, self-organization involves dynamic interactions across
elements of a system.
Given these perspectives on language acquisition, the goal of this
workshop is to reconcile the tension between input-based and
self-organizing models by offering a more integrative viewpoint. We
invite contributions targeting the complex interplay between external
input and internal system changes through various methodological
approaches, including, but not limited to, corpus studies,
experimental elicitations, and computational cognitive modeling using
Dynamic Network Analysis. The overarching goal of the workshop is to
foster interdisciplinary dialogue, and as such, we encourage
submissions that utilize mixed-methods approaches. By doing so, we
hope to shed light on the multifaceted nature of early language
development, thereby enriching our understanding and opening new
theoretical approaches and empirical avenues for research. To study
the impact of language typology on acquisition we welcome
contributions on the language pairs including, but not restricted to
Germanic, Romance, Slavic and less studied languages.



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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3333
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