Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:42:36.084Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cross-linguistic comparisons in child language research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2014

RUTH A. BERMAN
RUTH A. BERMAN*
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Major large-scale research projects in the early years of developmental psycholinguistics were English-based, yet even then numerous studies were available or under way in a range of different languages (Ferguson & Slobin, 1973). Since then, the field of cross-linguistic child language research has burgeoned in several directions. First, rich information is now available on the acquisition of dozens of languages from around the world in numerous language families, spearheaded by the five-volume series edited by Slobin (1985–1997) and complemented by in-depth examination of specific constructions – e.g. causative alternation, motion verbs, passive voice, subject elision, noun compounding – in various languages, culminating in an in-depth examination of the acquisition of ergativity in over a dozen languages (Bavin & Stoll, 2013). A second fruitful direction is the application of carefully comparable designs targeting a range of issues among children acquiring different languages, including: production of early lexico-grammatical constructions (Slobin, 1982), sentence processing comprehension (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), expression of spatial relations (Bowerman, 2011), discourse construction of oral narratives based on short picture series (Hickmann, 2003) and longer storybooks (Berman & Slobin, 1994), and extended texts in different genres (Berman, 2008). Taken together, research motivated by the question of what is particular and what universal in child language highlights the marked, and early, impact of ambient language typology on processes of language acquisition. The challenge remains to operationalize such insights by means of psychologically sound and linguistically well-motivated measures for evaluating the interplay between the variables of developmental level, linguistic domain, and ambient language typology.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue S1: Reflections: 40 years of JCL , July 2014 , pp. 26 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Allen, S. E. M. (1996). Aspects of argument structure acquisition in Inuktitut. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Allen, S. E. M. (1998). Categories within the verb category: learning the causative in Inuktitut. Linguistics 36(4), 633–77.Google Scholar
Allen, S. E. M. & Crago, M. B. (1996). Early passive acquisition in Inuktitut. Journal of Child Language 23(1), 129–55.Google Scholar
Ammon, M. S. & Slobin, D. I. (1979). A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentences. Cognition 7, 3–17.Google Scholar
Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1982). Functionalist approaches to grammar. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. (eds), Child language: the state of the art, 173–218. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the Competition Model. In MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (eds), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing, 3–76. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bates, E., McNew, S., MacWhinney, B., Devescovi, A. & Smith, S. (1982). Functional constraints on sentence processing: a cross-linguistic study. Cognition 11, 245–99.Google Scholar
Bavin, E. (1990). Locative terms and Warlpiri acquisition. Journal of Child Language 17, 43–66.Google Scholar
Bavin, E. & Stoll, S. (eds) (2013). The acquisition of ergativity (Trends in Language Acquisition series (TILAR)). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1981a). Regularity vs. anomaly: the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Journal of Child Language 8, 265–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berman, R. A. (1981b). Language development and language knowledge: evidence from acquisition of Hebrew morphophonology. Journal of Child Language 8, 609–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berman, R. A. (1982), Verb-pattern alternation: the interface of morphology, syntax, and semantics in Hebrew child language. Journal of Child Language 9, 169–91.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1986). The acquisition of morphology/syntax: a crosslinguistic perspective. In Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. (eds), Language acquisition, 2nd ed., 429–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1993a). Marking of verb transitivity by Hebrew-speaking children. Journal of Child Language 20, 641–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berman, R. A. (1993b). Developmental perspectives on transitivity: a confluence of cues. In Levy, Y. (ed.), Other children, other languages: issues in the theory of acquisition, 189–241. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (ed.) (2005). Journal of Pragmatics 37(2). [Special Issue on Developing discourse stance across adolescence].Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (2008). The psycholinguistics of developing text construction. Journal of Child Language 35, 735–71.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (2009a). Beyond the sentence: language development in narrative contexts. In Bavin, E. (ed.), Handbook of child language, 354–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (2009b). Acquisition of compound constructions. In Lieber, R. & Stekauer, P. (eds), Handbook of compounding, 298–322. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (2011) Revisiting impersonal constructions in Hebrew: corpus-based perspectives. In Malchov, A. & Sierwieska, A. (eds), The typology of impersonal constructions, 323–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Relating events in narrative: a crosslinguistic developmental studys. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. & Verhoeven, L. (eds) (2002). Cross-linguistic perspectives on the development of text production abilities: speech and writing. Written Language and Literacy 5(1), 1–43.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1974). Learning the structure of causative verbs: a study in the relationship of cognitive, semantic, and syntactic development. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 8, 142–78.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1985). What shapes children's grammars? In Slohin, Dan I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Volume 2, 1257–319. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1993). Typological perspectives on language acquisition: Do crosslinguistic patterns predict development? In Clark, E. V. (ed.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Child Language Research Forum, 7–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (2011). Linguistic typology and first language acquisition. In Song, J. J. (ed.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology, 591–617. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2001). Shaping meanings for language: universal and language-specific in the acquisition of semantic categories. In Bowerman, M. & Levinson, S. C. (eds), Language acquisition and conceptual development, 475–511. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In Gentner, D. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (eds), Language in mind: advances in the study of language and thought, 387–427. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Brown, P. (2012). Time and space in Tzeltal: Is the future uphill? Frontiers in Psychology, online: <http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00212/full>.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choi, S. & Bowerman, M. (1991). Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: the influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns. Cognition 41, 83–121.Google Scholar
Choi, S., McDonough, L., Bowerman, M. & Mandler, J. M. (1999). Early sensitivity to language-specific spatial categories in English and Korean. Cognitive Development 14, 241–68.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Berman, R. A. (1987). Types of linguistic knowledge: interpreting and producing compound nouns. Journal of Child Language 14, 547–68.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V., Gelman, S. A. & Lane, N. M. (1985). Noun compounds and category structure in young children. Child Development 56, 84–94.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. (1984). Aspects of Sesotho language acquisition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. (1989). Maturation and the acquisition of Sesotho passive. Language 65, 56–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, K. (1990). Subject, topic and the Sesotho passive. Journal of Child Language 17, 67–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Evans, N. & Levinson, S. C. (2009). The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(5), 429–92.Google Scholar
Ferguson, C. A. & Slobin, D. I. (eds) (1973). Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Fries, C. C. (1945). Teaching and learning English as a second language. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Guo, J., Lieven, E., Ervin-Tripp, S., Budwig, N., Özçalişkan, S. & Nakamura, K. (eds) (2009). Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: research in the tradition of Dan I. Slobin. New York: Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Imai, M. & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: universal ontology and linguistic influences. Cognition 62, 169–200.Google Scholar
Hickmann, M. (1980). Creating referents in discourse: a developmental analysis of linguistic cohesion. In Kreiman, J. & Odejo, I. (eds), Papers from the Sixteenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 192–203. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Hickmann, M. (2003). Children's discourse: person, space, and time across languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hickmann, M., Hendriks, H., Roland, F. & Liang, J. (1996). The marking of new information in children's narratives: a comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language 23, 591–619.Google Scholar
Hochberg, J., (1986). Children's judgements of transitivity errors. Journal of Child Language 13, 317–34.Google Scholar
Hyams, N. (1991). A reanalysis of null subjects in child language. In Weissenborn, J., Goodluck, H. & Roeper, T. (eds), Theoretical issues in language acquisition, 249–67. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Hyams, N. (2012). Missing subjects in early child language. In De Villiers, J. & Roeper, T. (eds), Handbook of generative approaches to language acquisition, 13–52. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Jakubowicz, C., Müller, N., Riemer, B. & Rigaut, C. (1996). The case of subject and object omission in French and German. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual BUCLD, Volume 1, 331–42. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Jisa, H., Reilly, J., Rosado, E. & Baruch, E. (2002). Passive voice constructions in written texts: a cross-linguistic developmental study. Written Language & Literacy 5(2), 163–81.Google Scholar
Johnston, J. R. & Slobin, D. I. (1979). The development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. Journal of Child Language 6, 531–47.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Krott, A. & Nicoladis, E. (2005). Large constituent families help children parse compounds. Journal of Child Language 32, 139–58.Google Scholar
Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics across cultures: applied linguistics for language teachers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk, 3rd ed.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2014). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk, online: <http://childes.psy.cmu.edu>..>Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (1978). Sentential devices for conveying giveness and newness: a cross-cultural developmental study. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 17(5), 539–558.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (eds) (1989). The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Snow, C. E. (1990). The Child Language Data Exchange System: an update. Journal of Child Language 17, 457–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Majid, A., Bowerman, M., Van Staden, M. & Boster, J. S. (2007). The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: a crosslinguistic perspective. Cognitive Linguistics 18(2), 133–52.Google Scholar
Majid, A., Gullberg, M., Van Staden, M. & Bowerman, M. (2007). How similar are semantic categories in closely related languages? A comparison of cutting and breaking in four Germanic languages. Cognitive Linguistics 18(2), 179–94.Google Scholar
Mellenius, I. (1997). The acquisition of nominal compounding in Swedish. Lund: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
Narasimhan, B., Kopecka, A., Bowerman, M., Gullberg, M. & Majid, A. (2012). Putting and taking events: a crosslinguistic perspective. In Kopecka, A. & Narasimhan, B. (eds), Events of putting and taking: a crosslinguistic perspective, 1–18. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Pfeiler, B. (ed.) (2007) Learning indigenous languages: child language acquisition in Mesoamerica. Hannover: Verlag für Ethnologie, Colección Americana X.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., Lebeaux, D. S. & Frost, L. A. (1987). Productivity and constraints in the acquisition of the passive. Cognition 26, 195–267Google Scholar
Pye, C. (1986). Quiché Mayan speech to children. Journal of Child Language 13, 85–100.Google Scholar
Pye, C. (1993). A cross-linguistic approach to the causative alternation. In Levy, Y. (ed.), Other children, other languages: issues in the theory of language acquisition, 243–64. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Pye, C. & Quixtan Poz, P. (1988). Precocious passives and (antipassives) in Quiché Mayan. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 27, 71–80.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (ed.) (1967). A field manual for cross-cultural study of the acquisition of communicative competence. Berkeley, CA: Language-Behavior Research Laboratory.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1982). Universal and particular in the acquisition of language. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art, 128–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (ed.) (1985–1997). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition – Volumes I to V. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1996a). From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking to speaking’. In Gumperz, J. J. & Levinson, S. C. (eds), Rethinking linguistic relativity, 70–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1996b). Two ways to travel: verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In Shibatani, M. S. & Thompson, S. A. (eds), Grammatical constructions: their form and meaning, 195–220. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (2001). Form–function relations: How do children find out what they are? In Bowerman, M. & Levinson, S. C. (eds), Language acquisition and conceptual development, 406–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (2004a). The many ways to search for a frog: linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In Strömqvist, S. & Verhoeven, L. (eds), Relating events in narrative: typological and contextual perspectives, 219–57. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (2004b). How people move: discourse effects of linguistic typology. In Moder, C. L. & Martinovic-Zic, A. (eds), Discourse across languages and cultures, 195–210. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. & Bever, T. G. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: a crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition 12, 229–65.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I., Bowerman, M., Brown, P., Eisenbeiss, S. & Narasimhan, B. (2011). Putting things in places: developmental consequences of linguistic typology. In Bohnemeyer, J. & Pederson, E. (eds), Event representation in language and cognition, 134–65. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Strömqvist, S. & Verhoeven, L. (eds) (2004). Relating events in narrative: typological and contextual perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Suzman, S. M. (1991). Language acquisition in Zulu. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation) University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.Google Scholar
Suzman, S. M. (1999). Learn Zulu the way children do. South African Journal of African Languages 19(2), 134–47.Google Scholar
Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In Shopen, T. (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description. Volume 3: grammatical categories and the lexicon, 36–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Valian, V. (1991). Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children. Cognition 40, 21–81.Google Scholar
Wardaugh, R. (1970). The contrastive analysis hypothesis. TESOL Quarterly 4, 123–30.Google Scholar