SHOSHANA BLUM-KULKA & CATHERINE E. SNOW (eds), Talking to adults: the contribution of multiparty discourse to language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. 360. ISBN 0-8058-3666-8
Telic predicates code completed/past and atelic predicates code ongoing/present. [...]the semantic structure of the predicate plays a critical role in the system formation starting with the initial phase of acquisition. [...]he argues that it underestimates the potential power of the learning mechan...
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| Published in: | Journal of Child Language 2005, Vol.32 (3), p.692-697 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Review |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Telic predicates code completed/past and atelic predicates code ongoing/present. [...]the semantic structure of the predicate plays a critical role in the system formation starting with the initial phase of acquisition. [...]he argues that it underestimates the potential power of the learning mechanisms available to the child. [...]while even the more learner-friendly representations assumed by Tomasello could not be acquired by isolated association-making and induction, it is clear that young children are much more than simple associative learners, and come to the language-learning task with a potentially powerful (and species-specic) combination of intention-reading and pattern-nding skills. A second strength of Tomasellos approach is that it allows him to show how sidestepping traditional learnability analyses opens up the possibility of a much richer, more data-driven approach to the problem of language acquisition. [...]rejecting the continuity assumption not only allows one to treat the nature of childrens early representations as an empirical issue, but also to focus on questions such as the following: (1) How do childrens representations change over time (e.g. what asymmetries do children show in their use of dierent instances of particular grammatical constructions at dierent points in development?)? (2) How are restrictions in childrens knowledge related to childrens cognitive limitations or to the distributional properties of the language to which they are exposed (e.g. how are any asymmetries that are found related to dierences in childrens sensitivity to local and non-local cues, or to the frequency with which dierent instances of particular constructions occur in the input?)? (3) How might this knowledge be shaped by dierences in the kind of cues that are employed in dierent languages (e.g. what dierences are there in the rate and manner in which children acquire grammatical systems in dierent languages as a function of the extent to which these systems rely on morphological cues such as case-markers or congurational cues such as word order?)? INANIMATE) and the relationship between them (e.g. CAUSED MOTION, LINK). [...]to learn the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, for example, infants must simply recognize that certain structural patterns of linguistic input (transitive vs. intransitive frames) map onto particular image-schematic notions. |
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| ISSN: | 0305-0009 1469-7602 |