Semantics in Language Acquisition

Semantics in Language Acquisition PDF

Author: Kristen Syrett

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2018-08-02

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 9027263604

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This volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface, and the relation between logical content and inferences on language meaning (semantics and pragmatics), the papers in this volume introduce the reader to the variety of ways in which children come to realize that semantic content is encoded in word meaning (for example, in the event semantics of the verbal domain or the scope of logical operators), and at the level of the sentence, which requires the composition of semantic meaning. The authors represent some of the most established and promising researchers in this domain, demonstrating collective expertise in a range of methodologies and topics relevant to the acquisition of semantics. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for students and faculty, and junior and seasoned researchers alike.

Syntactic Development

Syntactic Development PDF

Author: William O'Grady

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 0226620786

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Syntactic Development presents a broad critical survey of the research literature on child language development. Giving balanced coverage to both theoretical and empirical issues, William O'Grady constructs an up-to-date picture of how children acquire the syntax of English. Part 1 offers an overview of the developmental data pertaining to a range of syntactic phenomena, including word order, subject drop, embedded clauses, wh-questions, inversion, relative clauses, passives, and anaphora. Part 2 considers the various theories that have been advanced to explain the facts of development as well as the learnability problem, reporting on work in the mainstream formalist framework but also considering the results of alternative approaches. Covering a wide range of perspectives in the modern study of syntactic development, this book is an invaluable reference for specialists in the field of language acquisition and provides an excellent introduction to the acquisition of syntax for students and researchers in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.

Semantics in Acquisition

Semantics in Acquisition PDF

Author: Veerle van Geenhoven

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-07-15

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1402044852

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This volume contains writings focusing on semantic phenomena and their interpretation in the analysis of the language of a learner. The variety of phenomena that are addressed is substantial: temporal aspect and tense, specificity, quantification, scope, finiteness, focus structure, and focus particles. These phenomena are investigated is many languages. The volume creates a theoretical as well as an empirical bridge between semantic research on the one hand and psycholinguistic acquisition studies on the other.

Signal to Syntax

Signal to Syntax PDF

Author: James L. Morgan

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 1317781708

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In the beginning, before there are words, or syntax, or discourse, there is speech. Speech is an infant's gateway to language. Without exposure to speech, no language--or at most only a feeble facsimile of language--develops, regardless of how rich a child's biological endowment for language learning may be. But little is given directly in speech--not words, for example, as anyone who has ever listened to fluent conversation in an unfamiliar language can attest. Rather, words and phrases, or rudimentary categories--or whatever other information is required for syntactic and semantic analyses to begin operating--must be pulled from speech through an infant's developing perceptual capacities. By the end of the first year, an infant can segment at least some words from fluent speech. Beyond this, how impoverished or rich an infant's representations of input may be remains largely unknown. Clearly, in the debate over determinants of early language acquisition, the input speech stream has too often been offhandedly dismissed as a potential source of information. This volume brings together internationally-known scholars from a range of disciplines--linguistics, psychology, cognitive and computer science, and acoustics --who share common interests in how speech, in its phonological, prosodic, distributional, and statistical properties, may encode information useful for early language learning, and how such information may be deciphered by very young children. These scholars offer a spectrum of viewpoints on the possibility that aspects of speech may provide bootstraps for language learning; contribute important, state-of-the-art findings across a variety of relevant domains; and illuminate critical directions for future inquiry. The publication of this volume represents a significant step in renewing the bonds between two fields that have long been sundered--speech perception and language acquisition.

The Acquisition of Verbs at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

The Acquisition of Verbs at the Syntax-Semantics Interface PDF

Author: Paolo Lorusso

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-06-11

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1527512207

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This book presents theoretical and experimental analyses of the nature of early verbs. At around the age of two years old, children start to combine words and produce their first verbs. Verbal items appear later than nouns in a child’s speech and refer to the relational concepts in the world that are represented in syntax through the argument structure. The central set of data investigated here is based on the analysis of the features of first verbal productions in Italian. Since the appearance of verbs implies the mastery of a mapping procedure between syntactic positions and semantic roles, the syntactic regularities found for each lexical verb class suggest that the relation at the syntax-semantics interface is well-established early on. The non-adult-like sentences are those which involve the mastery of the scope-discourse semantic interface or higher functional syntactic categories. The analysis of the delay in the production and comprehension of some constructions here uncovers some general characteristics of language acquisition devices.

Language Development from Two to Three

Language Development from Two to Three PDF

Author: Lois Bloom

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1993-05-28

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9780521435833

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The studies in this book cover a range of topics in child language development, including: acquistion of semantic-syntactic relations, negation, verb inflections, questions, syntactic connectives, complementation, causality, imitation, and discourse contigency. Of special interest is the development of verb subcategorization, and the importance of action, locative, epistemic, and perception verbs in particular. Language Development from Two to Three will be of interest to a range of readers in psychology, linguistics, early childhood education, speech and language pathology, and second language learing.

Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition PDF

Author: Susan Foster-Cohen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-07-16

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 023024078X

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This book provides a snapshot of the field of language acquisition at the beginning of the 21st Century. It represents the multiplicity of approaches that characterize the field and provides a review of current topics and debates, as well as addressing some of the connections between sub-fields and possible future directions for research.

Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures PDF

Author: Noam Chomsky

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-05-18

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 3112316002

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