Early Language Development Sonja Eisenbeiss http://essex.academia.edu/SonjaEisenbeiss @SonjaEisenbeiss http://languagegamesforall.wordpress.com/ @LanguageGames4a https://childdirectedspeech.wordpress.com/ http://experimentalfieldlinguistics.wordpress.com/ http://psylingx.wordpress.com/ https://essexcorpuslinguistics.wordpress.com/ Research Areas How do babies, pre-school and primaryschool children interact with their parents and learn sounds, words, and sentences? • very early language development • cross-cultural studies on children’s grammatical development • language games and child-directed speech Very early language development Babies need to learn how to spot words within speech and learn their properties. • How do children cope with accent variability? • How are words stored in the child's lexicon? • How do they access words, as a whole or sound by sound? • How are words organised in the bilingual infant lexicon? • Researcher: Claire Delle Luche Do consonants guide lexical processing? • It has been shown for many languages that consonants help adult lexical processing more than vowels (Nespor, Pena & Mehler, 2003). • In a task where either consonants or vowels must be changed to turn a non-word into a real word of English, participants reading KEBRA change it more often to COBRA instead of ZEBRA. What about Infants? With infants, this consonant bias has also been observed with children. Is this because consonants are more informative than vowels? For instances, if one hears /j-g-/ only one word exists: yoga. English vs. French The consonant bias has been observed: • French: from the age of 11 months • English: from 30 months What Makes English and French Different? • In English, the child's early vocabulary is often monosyllabic (e.g. cat), and some consonant combinations are frequent: coat, cot... English consonants are not so informative. • In French children's early vocabulary, however, consonant structures are more varied French consonants are more informative. This could explain why the consonant bias is observed earlier in French. Planned Word Recognition Studies • Children will see pictures of two items on a TV screen, and one of them would be named. • Familiar words will be chosen: • with the same consonant structure as other words in the child's vocabulary (cat, cot, coat) • with a unique consonant structure (bib) • We expect words like bib to be recognised faster because their consonants are more informative. Cross-cultural studies on children’s grammatical development The languages that children acquire share properties, but also differ in many ways. We compare language acquisition across languages. • Which acquisition processes are universal? • Where do children differ in their path? Researcher: Sonja Eisenbeiss German and English Possessives Both German and English have s-possessives and possessives and prepositional possessives with of/von. Mia’s hat Mias Hut the rim of the hat der Rand von dem Hut However, the choice between s and of/von follows different rules in the two languages. German vs. English Possessives English: s is preferred for animates, of for inanimates The lady’s leg vs. the leg of the chair German: s can only appear with names that are single words (e.g. Mias), not phrases (* der/die Fraus ‘the woman’s’). Phrases require von/of (von der Frau ‘of the woman’). Our Ongoing Studies Young English-speaking children occasionally overuse s (mine’s), but they show animacy effects like adults. German children sometimes overextend s to non-names (Clown’s Hut ‘clown’s hat’), but never use it for phrases. productive use of language but early adaptation to grammar and animacy effects. Language Games and Child-Directed Speech Language Games play a role in language acquisition research and in children’s linguistic development. • • What makes a good language game for data collection? • Which properties of child-directed speech support language acquisition? • Can we use research on child-directed speech to create games that support language development? Researcher: Sonja Eisenbeiss Why do linguists develop language games? We want to study how learners acquire language. We need rich data that are as naturalistic as possible. We do not want to underestimate what learners can do by looking at the same situation over and over again. We do not want to overestimate what learners can do by using experiments that are too demanding for twoyear olds. We want to make our projects fun for learners. The Puzzle Game (Eisenbeiss 2009, 2011) The child describes contrasting pictures on a puzzle board. The adult finds the matching pieces. The child puts them into the correct cut-out. Pictures and puzzle pieces can be swapped on the board. Some Universals of Child-Directed Speech short, but mostly correct and complete utterances slow, with longer pauses than adult-directed speech high, varied pitch, exaggerated intonation and stress => identification of word and phrase boundaries restricted vocabulary reference mostly restricted to here and now => word learning high proportion of imperative and questions more repetitions than in adult-adult speech => sentence structure and grammar Variation Sets Variation sets are series of adult utterances with a common theme and a constant intention, but variation in form: • adding or deleting a word or phrase, • replacing one word with another, • changing the word order, etc. (Küntay/Slobin 1996, Slobin et al. 2011) English Variation Set (Slobin et al. 2011) VERB OBJECT 1 let’s put J’s bottles 2 want to put them 3 let’s put J’s bottles 4 we’ll put it 5 let’s put it 6 we’ll put it 7 you can put it 8 I’ll let you put it 9 you put it 10 you put it 11 put it GOAL in the refrigerator in the refrigerator with me in the refrigerator in the refrigerator in the refrigerator in the refrigerator in in yourself right in in there right in the refrigerator How could Variation Sets support Learning? • • Variation sets occur across languages and cultures (Slobin et al. 2011). • They repeat words (e.g. put) and show how words can be combined with others. • This has been shown to foster word learning. Ongoing Studies • Which properties of child-directed speech are universal and where do cultures/languages differ from one another? • Do some games lead to a particularly frequent use of variation sets and other beneficial properties of childdirected speech? • Can we design language games that can support children’s language development? Plans • Investigations of a broader range of languages (e.g. in ongoing collaboration with researchers working in India, Papua New Guinea, etc.). • Support for research on broad range of languages: blogs and research tools (e.g. language-game toolkit: https://languagegamesforall.wordpress.com/examples -of-games/ ). • Information for the general public via blog posts about child-language, language games and child-directed speech. Support Sites and Blogs Language Games http://languagegamesforall.wordpress.com/ @LanguageGames4a Child-Directed Speech https://childdirectedspeech.wordpress.com/ Tools for research (on under-studied languages) http://experimentalfieldlinguistics.wordpress.com/ @SonjaEisenbeiss