New Directions In Language Development And Disorders

294 Pages·2000·11.413 MB·

by  Laurence B. Leonard (auth.), Michael Perkins, Sara Howard (eds.)

NEW DIRECTIONS IN
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
AND DISORDERS
NEW DIRECTIONS IN
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
AND DISORDERS
Edited by
Michael Perkins
and
Sara Howard
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, England
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
New directions in language development and disorders / edited by Michael Perkins and
Sara Howard,
p. cm.
"Proceedings of the Child Language Seminar 1998 held Sept. 4-6, 1998, in Sheffield,
England"«T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4613-6865-6 ISBN 978-1-4615-4157-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-4157-8
1. Language acquisition-Congresses. 2. Language disorders-Congresses. I. Perkins,
Michael. II. Howard, Sara. III. Child Language Seminar.
PI 18 .N49 1999
40r.93»dc21
99.047340
Proceedings of the Child Language Seminar 1998, held September 4-6, 1998, in Sheffield, England
ISBN 978-1-4613-6865-6
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media New York in 2000
Originally published by Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, New York in 2000
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise,
without written permission from the Publisher
In Memory of Nicky Wass
1969-1999
PREFACE
Research into child language development is being conducted more extensively, by
more people, and in more countries throughout the world than at any point in the past.
We now know more than we ever did before about the linguistic, cognitive, neurobio
logical, and social capacities that children bring to their language learning task, as well
as the ways in which these capacities interact with a whole range of factors present in the
child's environment throughout the learning process, not least the particular character
istics of the language or languages to which the child is exposed. Far from inducing a
sense of complacency, this new knowledge seems instead to create an even stronger
impetus to know more. This is partly because of the new and unforeseen questions it
raises and partly because of competition between different theories to provide the best
explanation of the phenomenon, and which in turn engender different methods of
enquiry.
This volume addresses many of the key issues which are currently exercising the
minds of child language researchers, and which are likely to motivate research for some
years to come. The chapters included here-all previously unpublished-present a great
deal of new data and address a range of theoretical issues from a variety of perspectives.
One theme which has been given particular emphasis, and is amply represented either
directly or indirectly in many of the chapters, is the nature of language acquisition in
children whose language learning capacity is in some way impaired. As well as being of
interest in its own right, it is our view that a better understanding of impaired language
development can throw a great deal of light on the nature of language development more
generally. This view is spelled out explicitly in the first two chapters in Section I by Larry
Leonard and Gina Conti-Ramsden. Leonard argues that consideration of atypical lan
guage development can playa crucial role in informing both modular and non-modular
theories of language learning, and Conti-Ramsden describes some of the insights to be
gained from cross-linguistic work on specific language impairment (SLI), and compari
son of children with SLI with other populations such as bilinguals, second language
learners, and normal adults in demanding circumstances.
Another theme which is well represented here is the crosslinguistic comparison of
language development, and in particular the relative contributions to the developmental
process made by the child's innate linguistic capacity and the specific properties of the
language being aquired. Languages considered are: Cantonese, Dutch, English, French,
Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Mandarin, Polish, and
Spanish. Grammar is a focus of many of the chapters, particularly the development of
verbs and argument structure, but in addition there is coverage of the lexicon, phonet-
vii
viii Contents
ics, phonology, discourse, pragmatics, metalinguistic ability, literacy, gesture and the rela
tionship between temporal processing ability and language development.
The chapters have been grouped into seven sections, each with a distinct focus.
However, because the themes represented are often intertwined or overlap, several of the
chapters could easily have been included in more than one section.
The contributions to this volume are a selection of papers originally presented at
the 1998 Child Language Seminar hosted by the Department of Human Communication
Sciences at the University of Sheffield. We would like to thank everyone who took part,
including those whose papers do not appear here, for making the conference so success
ful both intellectually and socially. The book is dedicated with gratitude and affection to
the memory of Nicky Wass who helped with the organisation and running of the con
ference, and whose wit, warmth, and sociability permeated the whole event.
Mick Perkins and Sara Howard
CONTENTS
Normal and Abnormal Language Development: Common Ground?
1. Theories of Language Learning and Children with Specific Language
Impairment ............................................... .
Laurence B. Leonard
2. The Relevance of Recent Research on SLI to Our Understanding of
Normal Language Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Gina Conti-Ramsden
3. Time Parsing, Normal Language Acquisition, and Language-Related
Developmental Disorders .................................... 13
Jill Boucher
4. How Optional is "Optional" in the Extended Optional Infinitive Stage? . . . . 25
Karen Brunger and Alison Henry
5. Derivational Morphology in SLI Children: Structure and Semantics of
Hebrew Nouns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Dorit Ravid, Galit Avivi, and Ronit Levy
6. Speech Monitoring in Retarded Children: Evidence for Metalinguistic
Competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Y. Levy, A. Tennebaum, and A. Ornoy
7. Gesture Use by Two Children with Tracheostomy: Getting Ready to
Use Words ................................................ 61
Marilyn Kertoy and Alison A. Morrison
Language Universals and Language Specifics
8. Three Hypotheses on Early Grammatical Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Michael Garman, Christina Schelletter, and Indra Sinka
9. Could a Chomskyan Child Learn Polish? The Logical Argument for
Language Learning ......................................... 85
Ewa D\lbrowska
ix
x Contents
10. On the Acquisition of Pronominal Reference in Child-Greek. . . . . . . . . . . 97
Spyridoula Varlokosta, Panayiota Karafoti, and Varvara Karzi
11. The Emergence of Periphrastic Questions in Child-French 105
Bernadette Plunkett
Argument Structure
12. The Role of Performance Limitations in the Acquisition of "Mixed" Verb-
Argument Structure at Stage I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Anna L. Theakston, Elena V. M. Lieven, Julian M. Pine, and
Caroline F. Rowland
13. Argument Structure Preferences in Pre-School and School-Age Children . . . 129
Richard Ingham, Christina Schelletter, and Indra Sinka
14. Argument Structure Alternation in French Children's Speech 139
I. Barriere, M. Lorch, and M. T. Le Normand
Verbs and Verb Morphology
15. Lexically Specified Patterns in Early Verbal Morphology in Spanish 149
Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole, Eugenia Sebastian, and Pilar So to
16. Infants of 24-30 Months Understand Verb Frames 169
Edith L. Bavin and Carli Growcott
17. Morphological Future in Italian Children 179
Carla Bazzanella and Cristina Bosco
18. Cross-Linguistic Developmental Evidence of Implicit Causality in Visual
Perception and Cognition Verbs ............................... 189
Fabia Franco, Alessandra Tasso, M. Chiara Levorato, and
James Russell
19. What They Hear Is What You Get? Infinitives and Modality in Child
Language and Child-Directed Speech .......................... 199
Elma 810m, Masja Kempen, Steven Gillis, and Frank Wijnen
Phonology
20. An Experimental and Computational Exploration of Developmental
Patterns in Lexical Access and Representation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 211
Tom Loucas and William D. Marslen-Wilson
21. Learning to Produce Three-Syllable Words: A Longitudinal Study of
Finnish Twins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 223
Tuula Savinainen-Makkonen
Contents xi
22. The Acquisition of the Systematic Use of Pitch By GermanlEnglish
Bilingual Children: Evidence for Two Separate Phonological
Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 233
Ulrike Gut
Pragmatics and Discourse
23. Acquisition of Sentence-Final Particles in Japanese .................... 243
Junko Shirai, Hidetoshi Shirai, and Yoshiteru Furuta
24. Cohesion and Coherence Anomalies and Their Effects on Children's
Referent Introduction in Narrative Retell 251
Maya Hickmann and Phyllis Schneider
Literacy
25. The Cognitive Determinants of Literacy Skills in a Regular
Orthography ............................................... 261
Dimitris Nikolopoulos and Nata Goulandris
26. Social Class Does Not Predict Reading Success, But Language and
Metalinguistic Skills Do .................................... " 271
Carolyn Chaney
27. Do Children With Literacy Difficulties Have Non-Native-Like CVC
Perception? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 279
Nick Thyer, Barbara Dodd, and Louise Hickson
Contributors ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 293
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 301
1
THEORIES OF LANGUAGE LEARNING
AND CHILDREN WITH SPECIFIC
LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT
Laurence B. Leonard
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana
1. DEFINING THE DISORDER
"Specific language impairment" (SLI) is a term applied to children who show
significant deficits in language learning ability but age-appropriate scores on non-verbal
tests of intelligence, normal hearing. and no clear evidence of neurological impairment.
Children who meet this definition are not identical in their characteristics, though some
linguistic profiles are rather common. Boys outnumber girls, with a ratio of approxi
mately 2.8 to I (Robinson. 1987). At age five years, the prevalence of SLI might be as
high as 7% (Tomblin, 1996). This percentage is probably lower at older ages, due to the
fact that some proportion of children with milder language difficulties achieve normal
levels of ability within a few years, often with the help of intervention.
During the early years. children with SLI seem to be judged by adults as less capable
(Fujiki. Brinton. & Todd, 1996; Rice, Alexander, & Hadley, 1996), and they are less fre
quently sought out as playmates by other children (Gertner, Rice. & Hadley. 1994).
During the grade school years. children with SLI are at greater risk for reading disabili
ties and poorer academic achievement overall (e.g .• Aram, Ekelman, & Nation, 1984;
Catts, 1991). As adults, they often show residual oral language deficits (Tomblin, Freese,
& Records, 1992) and are more likely to face economic barriers (Records. Tomblin. &
Freese, 1992).
Children with SLI have been the topic of research for many years, but, unfortu
nately, the labels applied to these children have varied considerably, giving the
impression that a new disorder has been identified with each new label coined by an inves
tigator. Regardless of the label used, however, the study of these children can make
an important contribution to the development and evaluation of language learning the
ories. I provide some reasons below. borrowing many of the ideas discussed in Leonard
(1998).
Nell' Directions in Language Development and Disorders, edited by Perkins and Howard.
Kluwer Academic I Plenum Publishers, New York, 2000.