Language Learning in Childhood and Adulthood:
How different are they?
Brian MacWhinney
Carnegie Mellon University
People are often impressed with the idea that young children acquire language quickly and without effort, whereas adults often struggle with second languages. However, much of this work fails to focus on the specific contexts and processes of language learning. Using materials from the CHILDES and TalkBank databases, this talk will contrast language learning input to the child and adult in terms of both quantity and quality with an emphasis on interactional contexts and conversational expectations. Are there, in fact, fundamental differences in the course of acquisition? We will examine differences between L1 and L2 learning in terms of varying barriers to and supports for learning, including transfer, access to orthography, and interlanguage effects.
Scope in Two Languages
William O’Grady
University of Hawaii
It is commonly assumed in the literature on theoretical syntax that the interpretation of scope is sensitive to intricate features of syntactic structure and subject to abstract principles of Universal Grammar. In the first part of this paper, I will consider scope involving negation and universal quantifiers in English and Korean sentences such as the following.
(1) English
The student didn’t read every book.
(‘not > every’ interpretation strongly preferred)
(2) Korean
Haksayng-i motwun chayk-ul an ilk-ess-ta.
Student-Nom every book-Acc not read-Pst-Decl
(‘every > not’ interpretation strongly preferred)
Drawing on earlier work of mine on syntax and processing (O’Grady 2005, 2007), I will argue that the contrast between the two language can and should be understood with reference to the processor rather than the grammar: processing considerations, not grammatical principles, offer the best account of how scope works and on how it varies across languages.
The second part of the paper will focus on scope interpretation in bilingual children. Drawing on work with Korean–English bilinguals that is currently underway, I will explore the question of how children’s early scope judgments reflect the (at times) competing demands of their processor and the interpretive preferences of their dominant language.
References
O’Grady, William. 2005. Syntactic Carpentry. Erlbaum.
O’Grady, William. 2007. The syntax of quantification in SLA: An emergentist approach. Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2006): The Banff Conference, ed. by M. O’Brien, C. Shea, & J. Archibald. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 98-113.
Are Bilingual Children Slower to Acquire Language
than Monolingual Children?
Johanne Paradis
University of Alberta, Canada
The impact of early bilingual acquisition on children’s rate of development has long been a concern for parents and teachers, and the prevailing folk wisdom has been that bilingualism slows children down in the acquisition process. The fact that bilingual children receive less input in each language compared with monolinguals is at the root of this belief, the “Dual Language Burden” (DLB) hypothesis. More recently, the DLB hypothesis has received attention from researchers. There are conflicting findings on whether bilingual children in the preschool and elementary school years lag behind their monolingual peers, but the majority of studies have found some evidence supporting the DLB hypothesis. However, the majority of studies has been conducted with Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States, and has focused on the lexicon.
In this talk, I will present data from studies examining French-English bilingual children’s acquisition from age 4;0 to 11;0, in the lexical and morphosyntactic domain, to argue that in a highly positive and additive bilingual environment like Canada, bilingual children display limited signs of delay compared to their monolingual peers, and compared to what has been found in other social contexts. Specifically, it will be shown that (1) bilingual children meet monolingual age-expectations in their dominant language, and (2) differences between monolinguals and bilinguals vary depending on the domain of language being examined, the complexity of the target structure, and the task used to examine children’s linguistic abilities. In sum, the Canadian data are not entirely consistent with the DLB hypothesis. These findings will be discussed in terms of their broader support/non-support for the Usage-Based Theory of language acquisition.