Developing Language and Literacy: Studies in Honor of Dorit Diskin Ravid

716 Pages·2022·21.618 MB·

by  Ronit Levie, Amalia Bar-On, Orit Ashkenazi, Elitzur Dattner, Gilad Brandes

Literacy Studies: Perspectives from Cognitive Neurosciences,
Linguistics, Psychology and Education 23
Ronit Levie · Amalia Bar-On ·
Orit Ashkenazi · Elitzur Dattner ·
Gilad Brandes   Editors
Developing
Language
and Literacy
Studies in Honor of Dorit Diskin Ravid
Literacy Studies
Perspectives from Cognitive Neurosciences,
Linguistics, Psychology and Education
Volume 23
Series Editor
R. Malatesha Joshi , Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
Editorial Board Members
Rui Alves, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
Linnea Ehri, CUNY Graduate School, New York, USA
Usha Goswami, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Catherine McBride Chang, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Jane Oakhill, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Rebecca Treiman, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
While language defines humanity, literacy defines civilization. Understandably,
illiteracy or difficulties in acquiring literacy skills have become a major concern of
our technological society. A conservative estimate of the prevalence of literacy
problems would put the figure at more than a billion people in the world. Because
of the seriousness of the problem, research in literacy acquisition and its breakdown
is pursued with enormous vigor and persistence by experts from diverse backgrounds
such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and education. This, of
course, has resulted in a plethora of data, and consequently it has become difficult
to integrate this abundance of information into a coherent body because of the
artificial barriers that exist among different professional specialties.
The purpose of this series is to bring together the available research studies into
a coherent body of knowledge. Publications in this series are of interest to educators,
clinicians and research scientists in the above-mentioned specialties.
Some of the titles suitable for the Series are: fMRI, brain imaging techniques and
reading skills, orthography and literacy; and research based techniques for improving
decoding, vocabulary, spelling, and comprehension skills.
Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Publishing Editor: Natalie
Rieborn; Springer; Van Godewijckstraat 30; 3300 AA Dordrecht; The Netherlands;
e-mail: [email protected]
Ronit Levie • Amalia Bar-On
Orit Ashkenazi • Elitzur Dattner • Gilad Brandes
Editors
Developing Language and
Literacy
Studies in Honor of Dorit Diskin Ravid
Editors
Ronit Levie Amalia Bar-On
Department of Communication Disorders Department of Communication Disorders
Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel Tel Aviv, Israel
Orit Ashkenazi Elitzur Dattner
Department of Communication Disorders Department of Communication Disorders
Hadassah Academic College Tel Aviv University
Jerusalem, Israel Tel Aviv, Israel
Gilad Brandes
School of Education
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel
ISSN 2214-000X ISSN 2214-0018 (electronic)
Literacy Studies
ISBN 978-3-030-99890-5 ISBN 978-3-030-99891-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99891-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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A Path Less Traveled
This volume is an extraordinary tribute to an extraordinary scholar. Dorit Diskin
Ravid is a linguist, developmental psycholinguist, and educator who has established
herself as a leading international authority on morphology, language acquisition and
literacy development. To reach this summit, however, involved negotiating a path
strewn with obstacles likely to dissuade any but the truly courageous.
When Dorit began her study of Hebrew morphology, contributions to linguistics
from languages outside the family of European languages were dismissed as mere
esoteric curiosities. According to the generativist orthodoxy that dominated the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century, the task of the linguist is to uncover the universal
architecture of human language in its primary, that is, spoken form. Research into
written language, into the specifics of particular languages, and empirical investiga-
tion of their acquisition and variation over time within the individual (ontogeny) and
across time within communities (phylogeny) was frowned upon as inconsequential
and unworthy of the attention a “serious” linguist. Today, this work has taken on a
new significance as a growing number of linguists, psycholinguists, and social sci-
entists voice concern about the many forms of insularity and ethnocentrism that
plague research into many aspects of human behavior, including language, and call
for a broader, more inclusive picture.
Undeterred by the naysayers, Dorit followed in the footsteps of her mentor, Ruth
Berman, and chose to pursue the study of Hebrew morphology and morphological
acquisition. As she noted in her 1995 masterpiece, Language Change in Child and
Adult Hebrew: A Psycholinguistic Perspective, the study of language, with its deep
evolutionary roots, cannot afford to ignore the fact that the key to evolution itself is
variation and change. (And written language and literacy learning, a quintessen-
tially cultural tool lacking any evolutionary basis, is, almost by definition, funda-
mentally variable across individuals and cultures.) Above all, this first monograph
underscored the fact that language is a living, breathing, ever-evolving organism,
resplendent in its phylogenetic and ontogenetic diversity.
The following decade, Dorit and Liliana Tolchinsky co-authored Developing
Linguistic Literacy: A Comprehensive Model, in which they expounded a broader
vision of language development emphasizing that language does not cease
v
vi A Path Less Traveled
developing in early childhood but is an ongoing lifelong synergy between spoken
and written language. Again defying tradition, Dorit and Liliana argued that written
language is not a shadowy, insignificant reflection of spoken language, but in many
ways, the epitome of language proficiency in literate societies. Their influential
notion of linguistic literacy regards literacy development as an inseparable part of
later language development. The constant interweaving of spoken and written lan-
guage in a literate community requires users to deploy language flexibly in a broad
range of communicative contexts. Becoming linguistically literate means gaining
command of a rich array of language forms, registers, and genres in a multitude of
spoken and written contexts used for a wide range of communicative purposes.
Again, variety, variation, and adaptive variation, is the keynote here.
Continuing her work on the interplay between spoken and written language,
Dorit’s next magnum opus, Spelling Morphology (2012), joined a growing move-
ment of literacy researchers and educators cautioning us that writing systems do not
just encode sound (phonology), but represent phonology and morphology, and this
has profound implications for literacy learning and teaching across all languages,
even those with only a sparse morphology such as English and Dutch.
Pursuing her long-range vision of language development (from infancy to adult-
hood) and inclusive approach covering spoken and written production, the past
decade culminated in another tour de force by Dorit (and her students) on Hebrew
verb acquisition based on a meticulous and innovative analysis of a massive corpus
of spoken and written productions. This 2020 mega-study provides a definitive
account of how Hebrew verb families and their components—verb lemmas, roots,
and binyan patterns, emerge and develop from toddlerhood to adulthood, highlight-
ing the role of the interaction between child speech and child-directed speech in the
emergence of morphological systems.
And the next chapter? A new line of research growing out of the past decade (and
perhaps setting the stage for the coming decade) currently focuses on the emergence
of syntactic systems in early development. Employing fine-grained and advanced
analytical tools, this work aims to show how a grammatical system dynamically
emerges out of experience, and how the system’s components interact with each
other, forming a complex network of cognitive connections, processes, and effects.
All these and innumerably more of Dorit’s contributions have been framed by the
usage-based approach to developmental psycholinguistics. Central to the mission of
usage-based linguistics is the compilation, description, and analysis of naturalistic
language corpora drawn from real-world language use. Systematic description and
classification, of course, is the first task of any scientific endeavor. And, as is often
the case, empirical inquiry, as Dorit herself has demonstrated on several occasions,
can unearth findings that run counter to popular untested intuitions. The descriptive-
empirical approach that Dorit’s work exemplifies not only provides the foundation
for future theory-testing, but also an invaluable applied-translational resource for
researchers and educators wishing to build ecologically valid assessment tools and
norms for clinicians and educators concerned with language and literacy develop-
ment, teaching materials, curriculum development, and policy formulation. And
true to the usage-centered study of the meaningful use of language across a variety
A Path Less Traveled vii
of authentic real-world contexts, Dorit has been (hyper-)active putting this knowl-
edge to use in schools and clinics, overseeing national and international language
and literacy testing initiatives, curriculum design and development, and even the
development of interventions for socially and culturally disadvantaged groups.
It is not surprising therefore that Dorit’s counsel has been highly sought after in
policy formulation and agenda-setting fora concerned with language and literacy in
almost all avenues of clinical and educational practice, contributing at every level,
from preschool to high school, college, and university on the national and interna-
tional stage.
Her boundless energy and passion for understanding language and its develop-
ment has generated a prodigious number of scholarly articles, books chapters, col-
loquia, and grants, including collaborations with so many leaders around the world,
as this volume bears witness. Her generosity in sharing her knowledge explains the
staggering number of research dissertations she has supervised (over 150!), inspir-
ing a new generation of researchers who have been privileged to work with or under
this exceptional scholar.
Dorit’s achievements were not only forged in an era when empirical inquiry into
her chosen topics was considered apocryphal by the linguistic establishment, but are
all the more remarkable when seen against the narrative of an individual who was a
latecomer to academia, a woman who took an unconventional and circuitous route
to the summit of what still is a male-dominated profession.
Kol HaKavod to the editorial team and the distinguished contributors who have
come together to offer this wonderful and worthy tribute to an extraordinary woman.
David Share
A U-Shaped and Dynamical Story of an
Inspirational Career
Dorit Ravid was born in 1952, just four years after the establishment of the State of
Israel. She began her professional life in 1971—just four years after the establish-
ment of the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, about a decade after
the birth and rise of modern linguistics. Israel and academia, these are the two
homes in which she grew up. Dorit is deeply connected and committed to both, as
she is identified and identifies with their cultural and social foundations, with the
local language. Critical thinking and clear sight are the lifeblood of democracy,
necessary tools for the constant examination and judgment of the regime as well as
of the scientific discipline. In both cases, Dorit is well equipped with these tools.
The 1970s in the United States, as well as in the Department of Linguistics at Tel
Aviv University—a distinctly Chomskyan hub—were the heyday of generative lin-
guistics. In every approach and theoretical framework, there are principles that are
considered taboo. The list of these issues in the context of Chomskyan linguistics is
long and extensive. They include data collection, interest in written language,
research into the acquisition of a specific language, interest in special populations
and development. All these topics, deemed irrelevant and considered “not interest-
ing” for generative linguistics, actually became the center of Dorit’s work from her
early days in the department.
The theoretical linguist (sometimes referred to as an armchair linguist) would
argue that linguistic knowledge and human linguistic ability are not acquired
through empirical experience but derive from innate universal grammar. In a sense,
the hypotheses of theoretical linguistics have become facts and dogmas, and have
not been tested empirically.
As is well known, the object of research for the generative linguist is the spoken
language—human cognitive ability. It is considered as the only aspect of language
that deserves independent research, as it is the primary and natural form that every-
one masters, whereas writing is only seen as a secondary phenomenon. The genera-
tive linguist is interested in the universal profile of human language and does not
work on specific languages.
Another irrelevant issue is variability between speakers, whether due to environ-
mental factors or language impairments. Last and perhaps most prominent of all is
ix
x A U-Shaped and Dynamical Story of an Inspirational Career
the study of development. The language acquisition process is admittedly incredibly
automatic and fast, but it is not characterized by random leaps, as one would expect
if it were strongly predetermined by an innate program.
Chomskyan linguistics, therefore, does not deal with the question of language
acquisition from a developmental point of view, since its premises and the answers
it provides are different. Yet, all the components of the aforementioned “forbidden
list” were in fact what preoccupied Dorit already in her doctoral studies and at the
beginning of her professional path. Generative linguistics has offered an array of
methods to answer the question of what is the linguistic ability of each person and
how it is acquired. Not only did Dorit not rely on those methods, but she also ques-
tioned the correctness of the questions asked by this approach, which dominated the
place where she was trained.
Criticism and inquisitiveness are an integral part of scientific research; they pro-
vide strength and independence. However, questioning basic premises and research
methods might also produce an experience of loneliness and difficulty when the
surrounding academic environment speaks a different “language.”
Fortunately for Dorit, she met Prof. Ruth Berman, who was her thesis advisor,
teacher and mentor, and later became her colleague. Prof. Berman, who is consid-
ered the mother of developmental psycholinguistics in Hebrew, has researched
Modern Hebrew in a variety of fields and is one of the pioneers of research in Israel
and in the world of language acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective, with an
emphasis on Hebrew as a mother tongue. Ruth mentored Dorit and gave her full
support and legitimacy to engage in all the components of the “forbidden list.”
Dorit is a linguist and a developmental psycholinguist. Remarkably, and perhaps
not coincidentally, one cannot miss the parallel lines and similarities between her
areas of research, and especially the characteristics of her particular developmental
approach to language acquisition, and the unique nature of the development of her
path as a researcher.
We can mention two key concepts in Dorit’s approach to development that are
also metaphorically applicable for her own academic research journey: U-shaped
learning and Dynamical Systems. They both describe the dynamic, non-linear, and
non-monotonic nature of her own professional development.
True to her belief in the richness of linguistic input and the ability of children to
learn from it, she examined this empirically from the very beginning. Among other
things, she recorded her own children, Sivan, Asaf, and Itamar—examples that
many of her students have heard over the years. These recordings were used as part
of the research tools in her doctoral dissertation that dealt with the relationship
between language acquisition, socio-economic status (SES) and linguistic change,
with the focus on the morphophonology of inflection.
Just as linguistic knowledge emerges, and as items are organized into dynamical
systems while revealing features that were not in the system before, so over the
years Dorit continued to explore many specific systems of the Hebrew language and
build up a vast body of knowledge. She studied the acquisition of Hebrew and the
development of linguistic literacy, the establishment of lexicon and grammar
throughout early childhood, the school years and adolescence. There was almost no