Conversation and language acquisition
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Edy Veneziano
Abstract
Conversational exchanges have unique properties that have a great potential for language acquisition such as the motivation to communicate, information about language meanings and structures, and the construction of new ways of expression. Results from the literature and from new data analyses show that conversational exchanges have both immediate and long-term effects. Two properties are considered here to have particularly great learning potential. One is the facilitated access to unities of meaning underlying the successive transformations in utterance shapes, cognitively analogous to the discovery of physical and logico-mathematical invariances under the transformations of shape and configuration. The other is the co-construction of sequences that foreshadow behaviors still beyond the individual child’s present capacities.
Abstract
Conversational exchanges have unique properties that have a great potential for language acquisition such as the motivation to communicate, information about language meanings and structures, and the construction of new ways of expression. Results from the literature and from new data analyses show that conversational exchanges have both immediate and long-term effects. Two properties are considered here to have particularly great learning potential. One is the facilitated access to unities of meaning underlying the successive transformations in utterance shapes, cognitively analogous to the discovery of physical and logico-mathematical invariances under the transformations of shape and configuration. The other is the co-construction of sequences that foreshadow behaviors still beyond the individual child’s present capacities.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- List of contributors ix
- introduction Language acquisition in interaction 1
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Part 1. The social and interactional nature of language input (five papers)
- Conversational input to bilingual children 13
- Social environments shape children’s language experiences, strengthening language processing and building vocabulary 29
- The interactional context of language learning in Tzeltal 51
- Conversation and language acquisition 83
- Taking the floor on time 101
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Part 2. The role of paralinguistic information in language learning (three papers)
- Temporal synchrony in early multi-modal communication 117
- Shared attention, gaze and pointing gestures in hearing and deaf children 139
- How gesture helps children learn language 157
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Part 3. Pragmatic forces in language learning (six papers)
- Referential pacts in child language development 175
- “We call it as puppy” 191
- Learning words through probabilistic inferences about speakers’ communicative intentions 207
- Word order as a structural cue and word reordering as an interactional process in early language acquisition 231
- The discourse basis of the Korean copula construction in acquisition 251
- Emergent clause-combining in adult-child interactional contexts 281
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Part 4. Interactional effects on language structure and use (three papers)
- Analytic and holistic processing in the development of constructions 303
- From speech with others to speech for self 315
- How to talk with children 333
- Index 353
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- List of contributors ix
- introduction Language acquisition in interaction 1
-
Part 1. The social and interactional nature of language input (five papers)
- Conversational input to bilingual children 13
- Social environments shape children’s language experiences, strengthening language processing and building vocabulary 29
- The interactional context of language learning in Tzeltal 51
- Conversation and language acquisition 83
- Taking the floor on time 101
-
Part 2. The role of paralinguistic information in language learning (three papers)
- Temporal synchrony in early multi-modal communication 117
- Shared attention, gaze and pointing gestures in hearing and deaf children 139
- How gesture helps children learn language 157
-
Part 3. Pragmatic forces in language learning (six papers)
- Referential pacts in child language development 175
- “We call it as puppy” 191
- Learning words through probabilistic inferences about speakers’ communicative intentions 207
- Word order as a structural cue and word reordering as an interactional process in early language acquisition 231
- The discourse basis of the Korean copula construction in acquisition 251
- Emergent clause-combining in adult-child interactional contexts 281
-
Part 4. Interactional effects on language structure and use (three papers)
- Analytic and holistic processing in the development of constructions 303
- From speech with others to speech for self 315
- How to talk with children 333
- Index 353
