This volume emphasizes the emergence of linguistic development through children's and learners' interactions with their environment - spatial, social, cultural, educational - bringing to light commonalities between primary language development, child and adult second-language learning, and language acquisition by robots. The studies presented here challenge a number of dominant ideas in language acquisition theory. It is of interest to language acquisition researchers and professionals.

Online Communication in a Second Language examines the use of social computer mediated communication (CMC) with speakers of Japanese via longitudinal case studies of up to four years. Through the analysis of over 2000 blogs, emails, videos, messages, games, and websites, in addition to interviews with learners and their online contacts, the book explores language use and acquisition via contextual resources, repair, and peer feedback. The book provides insight into relationships online, and the influence of perceived 'ownership' of online spaces by specific cultural or linguistic groups. It not only increases our understanding of online interaction in a second language, but CMC in general. Based on empirical evidence, the study challenges traditional categorisations of CMC mediums, and provides important insights relating to turn-taking, code-switching, and language management online.

The anecdotal view of language acquisition is that children learn language with apparent ease, no instruction and in very little time, while adults find learning a new language to be cognitively challenging, labour intensive and time-consuming. In this book Herschensohn examines whether early childhood is a critical period for language acquisition after which individuals cannot learn a language as native speakers. She argues that a first language is largely susceptible to age constraints, showing major deficits past the age of twelve. Second language acquisition also shows age effects, but with a range of individual differences. The competence of expert adult learners, the unequal achievements of child learners of second languages, and the lack of consistent evidence for a maturational cut-off, all cast doubt on a critical period for second language acquisition.

How does a child become bilingual? The answer to this intriguing question remains largely a mystery, not least because it has been far less extensively researched than the process of mastering a first language. Drawing on new studies of children exposed to two languages from birth (English and Cantonese), this book demonstrates how childhood bilingualism develops naturally in response to the two languages in the children's environment. While each bilingual child's profile is unique, the children studied are shown to develop quite differently from monolingual children. The authors demonstrate significant interactions between the children's developing grammars, as well as the important role played by language dominance in their bilingual development. Based on original research and using findings from the largest available multimedia bilingual corpus, the book will be welcomed by students and scholars working in child language acquisition, bilingualism and language contact.

This book is intended to help language teachers to work effectively and successfully with students who have specific learning differences (SpLD) such as dyslexia. The book takes an inclusive and practical approach to language teaching and encourages teachers to consider the effects that an SpLD could have on a language learner. It suggests strategies that can be implemented to enable learners to succeed both in the classroom and in formal assessment. The book places issues of language teaching for learners with an SpLD in a broad educational context and, in addition to practical advice on methodologies and classroom management, also discusses discourses of the field, the identification of SpLDs and facilitating progression.

A remarkable case study based on a detailed comparison of non-human primates and human infants brings together key abilities that provide the foundation for language. This link makes the case for phylogenetic continuity across species and ontogenetic continuity from infancy to childhood. Examined here are the fundamental aspects of language acquisition, such as vocalizations, mapping of meaning on to sound, use of gestures to communicate and to symbolize, tool use, object concept and memory. This volume goes a step further to analyse the similarities and differences across species, and how these influence the evolution of language. The author provides evidence linking abilities associated with language acquisition and describes fascinating hypotheses about the origins of language.

The lexicon is now a major focus of research in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), as more linguistic theories concentrate on the lexicon and as the acquisition of an adequate vocabulary has become the chief bottleneck in developing practical NLP systems. This collection describes techniques of lexical representation within a unification-based framework and their linguistic application, concentrating on the issue of structuring the lexicon using inheritance and defaults. Topics covered include typed feature structures, default unification, lexical rules, multiple inheritance and non-monotonic reasoning. The contributions describe both theoretical results and implemented languages and systems, including DATR, the Stuttgart TFS and ISSCO's ELU. This book arose out of a workshop on default inheritance in the lexicon organized as a part of the Esprit ACQUILEX project on computational lexicography. Besides the contributed papers mentioned above, it contains a detailed description of the ACQUILEX lexical knowledge base (LKB) system and its use in the representation of lexicons extracted semi-automatically from machine-readable dictionaries.

This comprehensive guide to research and debate centres around language learning in childhood, the age factor and the different contexts where language learning happens, including home and school contexts. The scope is wide, capturing examples of studies with different age groups, different methodological approaches and different languages.

Internationally recognised as one of the leading texts in its field, this volume offers a comprehensive introduction to vocabulary for language teachers who would like to know more about the way vocabulary works. Two leading specialists make research and theory accessible, providing the background knowledge necessary for practitioners to make informed choices about vocabulary teaching and testing. This second edition retains the popular format of the first edition, and has been rewritten to take account of the many developments in the past 20 years. There is a greater focus on the vocabulary learning process, with new chapters on incidental learning, and intentional learning, and a new wide-ranging discussion of formulaic language. The book now also includes extensive treatment of word lists and vocabulary tests, with explanations of their various strengths and limitations. Updated further reading sections, and new Exercises for Expansion make this volume more invaluable than ever.

The relationship between language and other aspects of conceptual development is one of the central issues in child language acquisition. One view holds that language is a special capacity, separate from other areas of cognition and learning. Another maintains that language is part of a larger, more general cognitive system, and is crucially dependent on other cognitive domains. Recent research has turned to blind children and their acquisition of language as a way of evaluating whether and how language development relies on the non-linguistic context. Vision and the Emergence of Meaning addresses this complex problem through a detailed empirical analysis of early language development in a group of blind, partially sighted and fully sighted children who took part in a pioneering longitudinal investigation at the University of Southern California. By exploring the strategies which blind children bring to selected aspects of the language learning task, Anne Dunlea not only identifies some important differences between blind and sighted children, but also offers new insights on semantic and pragmatic development in general. Further, the study demonstrates the role of conceptual information in language learning and, at a more fundamental level, reveals a convergence of early language and conceptual development.

This book deals with the question of how children exposed to two languages simultaneously from birth learn to speak those two languages. After a critical and comprehensive survey of most of the literature on the subject, the author concludes that empirically well-documented knowledge in this area is very scant indeed. The core of the book concerns a naturalistic study of a Dutch-English bilingual girl around the age of three. The study's main aim is to explore the nature of early bilingual morphosyntactic development. Detailed analyses of most aspects of this development show that a child who hears two separate languages spoken to her reflects this distinctness in the utterances she produces: each language is handled as a system in its own right. Furthermore, the young bilingual three-year-old greatly resembles her monolingual peers in either language. Both these findings, the author concludes, highlight the language-specific nature of the morphosyntactic development process. This book will interest linguists, psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, and child language specialists.

Ayhan Aksu-Koc's empirical research on Turkish children's acquisition of the past tense forms the basis for this original and important contribution to the current debate among psycholinguistics on the interrelationship between language and cognitive development. Turkish, in its grammar, makes a clear distinction between direct and indirect experiencing, separating personal observation of processes from both inference and narrative. This distinction thus provides an ideal means by which linguistic and nonlinguistic conceptual development can be observed. Dr Aksu-Koc has exploited this to full advantage in her broadly based longitudinal and cross-sectional study, conducted across a wide age range. The data are meticulously analyzed, and the theoretical implications for a neo-Piagetian paradigm are carefully considered.

This study examines the variation between children in early language development, focusing on their acquisition of the auxiliary verb. Learning auxiliary verbs and the syntactic and pragmatic functions with which they are associated is an essential component in the child's language development from an early stage. At the same time, children vary extensively in the age and stage at which auxiliaries emerge and also in the style and rate at which subsequent development takes place. Some aspects of this variation have been linked with the quality of interaction with the child's conversation partners, others with a tendency to acquire language holistically through unanalysed 'chunks'. Using data drawn both from the Bristol Longitudinal Study of Language Development and from independent case studies conducted in Wales, Dr Richards points to a number of important areas of variation between children, for example in sequence of syntactic development and in the relationship between pragmatic and syntactic factors, and raises a number of important methodological and theoretical issues, such as how to assess the level of unanalytical usage and how to measure real syntactic advance. By analysing relationships between input and auxiliary growth, the study attempts to resolve some of the inconsistencies in the results of previous studies which have included the auxiliary as a measure. The book will be of value to all those interested in language acquisition, whether linguists, psychologists, speech therapists or lecturers in nursery, infant and special education.

A considerable proportion of our everyday language is 'formulaic'. It is predictable in form, idiomatic, and seems to be stored in fixed, or semi-fixed, chunks. This book explores the nature and purposes of formulaic language, and looks for patterns across the research findings from the fields of discourse analysis, first language acquisition, language pathology and applied linguistics. It gradually builds up a unified description and explanation of formulaic language as a linguistic solution to a larger, non-linguistic, problem, the promotion of self. The book culminates in a new model of lexical storage, which accommodates the curiosities of non-native and aphasic speech. Parallel analytic and holistic processing strategies are the proposed mechanism which reconciles, on the one hand, our capacity for understanding and producing novel constructions using grammatical knowledge and small lexical units, and on the other, our use of prefabricated material which, though less flexible, also requires less processing.

Dr. Dolittle-and many students of animal communication-are wrong: animals cannot use language. This fascinating book explains why. Can animals be taught a human language and use it to communicate? Or is human language unique to human beings, just as many complex behaviors of other species are uniquely theirs? This engrossing book explores communication and cognition in animals and humans from a linguistic point of view and asserts that animals are not capable of acquiring or using human language. Stephen R. Anderson explains what is meant by communication, the difference between communication and language, and the essential characteristics of language. Next he examines a variety of animal communication systems, including bee dances, frog vocalizations, bird songs, and alarm calls and other vocal, gestural, and olfactory communication among primates. Anderson then compares these to human language, including signed languages used by the deaf. Arguing that attempts to teach human languages or their equivalents to the great apes have not succeeded in demonstrating linguistic abilities in nonhuman species, he concludes that animal communication systems-intriguing and varied though they may be-do not include all the essential properties of human language. Animals can communicate, but they can't talk.

"Researching Vocabulary" is written for language researchers who want to carry out valid and reliable studies on first and second language vocabulary. The author is a well-known vocabulary researcher and he outlines the dos and don'ts of good lexical research. Practical advice is given on a wide variety of research methodologies, ranging from paper-and-pencil tests of acquisition to the newest psycholinguistic techniques utilizing fMRI scanning. Some of the many topics include initial learning of the form-meaning link, attrition, the role of frequency and the L1 in vocabulary research, receptive and productive knowledge of vocabulary, formulaic language, word associations, vocabulary measurement, vocabulary learning strategies, and computer simulations of vocabulary acquisition. The book includes a Resources section which outlines the lexical tests, corpora, software, internet sites, and other resources available to vocabulary researchers. A list of past and present vocabulary researchers, annotated with their specialisms, is also provided.

Language plays an essential role in how we portray our personalities. Through social interaction, others develop a picture of us based on our linguistic cues. However, when we interact in a foreign language and in a new country, limitations in linguistic and cultural knowledge can make self-presentation a more difficult task. This book explores the problems faced by language students embarking on 'study abroad' programmes, spending time in a foreign country and having to interact - and express their personalities - in a second language. Drawing on her extensive work with students, Valerie Pellegrino Aveni explores the factors that complicate self-presentation and the strategies students use for overcoming these, looking in particular at issues of anxiety, control, age, gender, risk-taking and self-esteem. Offering rich insights into the study abroad experience, this book will be an invaluable resource for professionals in second language acquisition, and for teachers and students preparing for study abroad.

Language plays an essential role in how we portray our personalities. Through social interaction, others develop a picture of us based on our linguistic cues. However, when we interact in a foreign language and in a new country, limitations in linguistic and cultural knowledge can make self-presentation a more difficult task. This book explores the problems faced by language students embarking on 'study abroad' programmes, spending time in a foreign country and having to interact - and express their personalities - in a second language. Drawing on her extensive work with students, Valerie Pellegrino Aveni explores the factors that complicate self-presentation and the strategies students use for overcoming these, looking in particular at issues of anxiety, control, age, gender, risk-taking and self-esteem. Offering rich insights into the study abroad experience, this book will be an invaluable resource for professionals in second language acquisition, and for teachers and students preparing for study abroad.

Autonomy has become a keyword of language policy in education systems around the world, as the importance of independent learning and new technologies has grown.

Now in a fully revised and updated second edition, "Teaching and Researching Autonomy "provides an accessible and comprehensive critical account of the theory and practice of autonomy. Examining the history of the concept, it addresses important questions of how we can identify autonomy in language learning behaviours and how we can evaluate the wide variety of educational practices that have been designed to foster autonomy in learning.

Topics new to this edition include:

- Autonomy and new technologies

- Teacher autonomy

- The sociocultural implications of autonomy

With over three hundred new references and five new case studies of research on autonomy providing practical advice on research methods and topics in the field, "Teaching and Researching Autonomy" will be an essential introduction for teachers and students to a subject at the cutting edge of language teaching and research.

This book presents a comprehensive study of how children acquire complex sentences. Drawing on observational data from English-speaking children aged 2 to 5, Holger Diessel investigates the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and nonfinite relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and coordinate clauses. His investigation shows that the development of complex sentences originates from simple non-embedded sentences and that two different developmental pathways can be distinguished: complex sentences including complement and relative clauses evolve from simple sentences that are gradually expanded to multiple-clause constructions, and complex sentences including adverbial and coordinate clauses develop from simple sentences that are integrated in a specific biclausal unit. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the ambient language, the semantic and syntactic complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the social-cognitive development of the child.

This book presents six new studies on identity construction in the speech of older adolescents and young adults learning French. It takes a sociolinguistic approach to acquisition. First language sociolinguistic research has shown that identity construction is particularly intense during adolescence and young adulthood, and language use has been found to be an especially key resource in this dynamic construction. The contributors examine the language practices of L2, L3 and L4 speakers in multilingual and multicultural societies in Ireland, Canada, Belgium and France in order to demonstrate their use in identity construction. Several contexts of language acquisition for multilingual speakers are examined and compared, including formal and naturalistic settings for acquisition and learning. The book also investigates the speech of learners at upper-intermediate and advanced stages of acquisition of French to provide a holistic view of the way individuals use the language resources available to them to stake a claim to a new multilingual identity in their target language networks. The papers in this book combine qualitative and quantitative data on French speech and the context in which it occurs to provide detailed pictures of the co-construction of identity and complex speech patterns by multilingual speakers of French.

This volume investigates the linguistic development of children with regard to their knowledge of the verb and its grammar. The selection of papers brings to researchers and in particular psycholinguists empirical evidence from a wide variety of languages from Hebrew, through English to Estonian. The authors interpret their findings with a focus on cross-linguistic similarities and differences, without subscribing to either a UG-based or usage-based approach.

Combining the World Englishes framework with First Language Acquisition methodology, this book investigates children's acquisition of L1 English in the context of multilingual Singapore, one of the traditional Kachruvian Outer Circle or ESL countries. The book investigates language choice, use, and dominance in Singaporean families, identifies common linguistic characteristics of L1 Singapore English, as well as the acquisitional route that Singaporean children take. It discusses characteristics at the different levels of language organization, i.e., phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features, drawing on a variety of systematically elicited data and Praat-based acoustic analyses. Comparing the results to similar data obtained from children living in England (both mono- and bi-/multilingual), the book also sheds light on how the acquisitional steps taken by Singaporean children differ from or are similar to traditional native speakers of English and children from immigrant families in England.

Jim Miller and Regina Weinert investigate syntactic structure and the organization of discourse in spontaneous spoken language. Using data from English, German, and Russian, they develop a systematic analysis of spoken English and highlight properties that hold across languages.
The authors argue that the differences in syntax and the construction of discourse between spontaneous speech and written language bear on various areas of linguistic theory, apart from having obvious implications for syntactic analysis. In particular, they bear on typology, Chomskyan theories of first language acquisition, and the perennial problem of language in education. In current typological practice written and spontaneous spoken texts are often compared; the authors show convincingly that typological research should compare like with like. The consequences for Chomskyan, and indeed all, theories of first language acquisition flow from the central fact that children first learn spoken language before they are taught written language.

Beyond Yellow English is the first edited volume to examine issues of language, identity, and culture among the rapidly growing Asian Pacific American (APA) population. The distinguished contributors-who represent a broad range of perspectives from anthropology, sociolinguistics, English, and education-focus on the analysis of spoken interaction and explore multiple facets of the APA experience. Authors cover topics such as media representations of APAs; codeswitching and language crossing; and narratives of ethnic identity. The collection examines the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans of different ethnicities, generations, ages, and geographic locations across home, school, community, and performance sites.