About the Book
Developmental research has long focused on regularities in language acquisition, minimizing factors that might be responsible for variation. Although researchers are now increasingly concerned with one or another of these factors, this volume brings together research on three different sources of variation: language-specific properties, the nature of the input to children across contexts, and several aspects of the learners themselves. Chapters explore these sources of variation within an interdisciplinary and comparative approach allying theories and methodologies stemming from linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, and neuroscience. The comparative perspective involves different languages, contexts of use, types of learners (first/second language acquisition, monolingual/bilingual learners, autism, language impairment), as well as vocal and visuo-gestural communicative modalities (co-verbal gestures, sign language acquisition). The volume points to the need to enhance interdisciplinary research using complementary methodologies to further examine sources of variation and to integrate variation into a more general developmental theory.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction. What can variation tell us about first language acquisition? (by Hickmann, Maya); 2. Part I. Universals and cross-linguistic variation in acquisition; 3. Chapter 1. Templates in child language (by Vihman, Marilyn); 4. Chapter 2. Phonological categories and their manifestation in child phonology (by Rose, Yvan); 5. Chapter 3. Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition (by Brusini, Perrine); 6. Chapter 4. Retrieving meaning from noun and verb grammatical contexts: Interindividual variation among 2- to 4-year-old French-speaking children (by Veneziano, Edy); 7. Chapter 5. Language-specificity in motion expression: Early acquisition in Korean compared to French and English (by Choi, Soonja); 8. Chapter 6. Cross-linguistic variation in children's multimodal utterances (by Ozyurek, Asli); 9. Chapter 7. Gesture and speech in adults' and children's narratives: A cross-linguistic investigation of Zulu and French (by Colletta, Jean-Marc); 10. Part II. Variation in input and contexts during acquisition; 11. Chapter 8. Conversational partners and common ground: Variation contributes to language acquisition (by Clark, Eve V.); 12. Chapter 9. Invariance in variation: Frequency and neighbourhood density as predictors of vocabulary size (by Kern, Sophie); 13. Chapter 10. New perspectives on input-output dynamics: Example from the emergence of the Noun category (by Bassano, Dominique); 14. Chapter 11. Referential features, speech genres and activity types (by Salazar Orvig, Anne); 15. Chapter 12. Development of discourse competence: Spatial descriptions and narratives in L1 French (by Watorek, Marzena); 16. Chapter 13. Texting by 12-year-olds: Features shared with spoken language (by Bernicot, Josie); 17. Part III. Variation in types of acquisition and types of learners; 18. Chapter 14. A unified model of first and second language learning (by MacWhinney, Brian); 19. Chapter 15. On-line sentence processing in simultaneous French/Swedish bilinguals (by Kail, Michele); 20. Chapter 16. The blossoming of negation in gesture, sign and oral productions (by Morgenstern, Aliyah); 21. Chapter 17. Motion expression in children's acquisition of French Sign Language (by Sallandre, Marie-Anne); 22. Chapter 18. Early predictors of language development in Autism Spectrum Disorder (by Tager-Flusberg, Helen); 23. Chapter 19. Spoken and written narratives from French- and English-speaking children with Language Impairment (by Reilly, Judy); 24. Chapter 20. Non-literal language comprehension: Brain damage and developmental perspectives (by Dardier, Virginie)
Review :
This collection presents a broad new look at the importance of variation in language acquisition. The first part considers it in the course of language acquisition, from first words through syntax, including phonology, prosody, rhythm, grammatical morphemes, syntax, discourse and narrative. The chapters in the middle section present evidence on the effects of practice, speech genre, and register. The final section addresses different types of learners, including multilingual, sign language and autism spectrum disorder. Data are from French, Dutch, Korean, English, Turkish, Japanese, Zulu, Swedish, LSF and Italian.
This book is timely. “Celebrate diversity” is a motto of our era, and the authors assembled here examine many ways in which language learners and language environments are diverse. The study of variation can reveal the range of possible developmental paths and the factors that influence those paths, leading to more refined models of language learning. This rich volume provides masses of much-needed data of many sorts. Variations in input are examined along with necessary attention to variations in ways in which learners make use of different sorts of input across types of communication and communicative settings. This book makes it evident that there is no prototypical learner or learning situation, no prototypical type of communication or type of language. The challenge lies in determining what aspects of all of this diversity are relevant for models of language learning. That challenge cannot be met without the findings and ideas provided here.
