The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition

The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition
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DOI:
10.2307/326492
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发表时间:
1987-01
期刊:
The Modern Language Journal
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
D. Slobin
D. Slobin
中科院分区:
其他
文献类型:
--
作者:
D. Slobin

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这两卷共 16 章,并附有编辑引言。第二卷中的一篇论文也是由斯洛宾撰写的,他是第一卷中土耳其语章节的合著者。第一卷面向特定语言的习得(即英语、德语、希伯来语、日语、卡卢利语、波兰语、罗曼语[特别提到法语]、萨摩亚语、土耳其语、美国手语),而第二卷则侧重于理论问题。 MacWhinney 在第二卷中的论文将匈牙利语添加到了提取数据的语言列表中。显然,这是一个重要的集合,因为这种范围和类型的东西都不存在。它是大约 15 年语言习得研究的顶峰,主要是受斯洛宾指导语言习得的操作原则概念的推动。贡献者致力于解决一系列常见问题,并总结对特定语言所做的研究。然而,与此同时,这些卷让我们注意到我们拥有足够的习得数据的语言是多么少。因此,该集合的一个有用功能是识别文献中的空白并从特定类型的数据中分离出需要阐明的特定问题。即使在英语和法语等研究相对充分的语言中,我们仍然没有关于习得的许多方面的数据。目前,实际上只能对少数结构和/或类别进行跨语言比较,例如被动语态、处所介词、关系从句。即使对于已经被广泛研究的特征,不同的研究之间也往往没有达成一致。为跨语言比较选择的子系统通常偏向于印欧语言中的类型区分。因此,据我所知,还没有关于儿童习得开关参考系统的比较研究,这并不奇怪。日语、萨摩亚语和卡卢利语等语言提供的证据也表明我们对儿童语言的看法有多么偏见。语言学通常将儿童语言的早期阶段称为电报语言,因为在假定的成人同等语言中必须存在的许多内容尚未表达。然而,在其他语言中省略号是常态。正如奥克斯(808)指出的,在萨摩亚语中,主要成分的相对不表达是能力的标志,因为主体或客体的存在将代表一种明显的表达策略。然而,在英语中,电报演讲则表示无能。还有一些情况,例如土耳其语,儿童语言并不具有电报性,因为儿童在两岁或更早的时候就掌握了大部分的屈折变化系统。虽然话语很短
These two volumes contain 16 chapters together with an editorial introduction. One of the papers in Volume II is also by Slobin and he is coauthor of the chapter on Turkish in Volume I. Volume I is oriented towards the acquisition of specific languages (namely, English, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Kaluli, Polish, Romance [with special reference to French], Samoan, Turkish, American Sign language), whereas the second focuses on theoretical issues. MacWhinney's paper in the second volume adds Hungarian to the list of languages from which the data are drawn. It should be obvious that this is an important collection since nothing of this scope and type exists. It is the culmination of some 15 years of research on language acquisition motivated largely by Slobin's notion of the operating principles which guide language acquisition. The contributors address themselves to a common set of issues and sum up the research that has been done on particular languages. At the same time, however, these volumes draw our attention to how few languages we have adequate acquisitional data for. One useful function of this collection is thus to identify lacunae in the literature and to isolate particular problems that require elucidation from a particular type of data. There are still many aspects of acquisition for which we have no data, even in relatively well-investigated languages like English and French. At the moment, cross-linguistic comparison can be realistically carried out for only a handful of constructions and/or categories, for example, passives, locative prepositions, relative clauses. And even for features that have been extensively studied, there is often little agreement across different studies. The subsystems chosen for cross-linguistic comparison are generally biased towards the typological distinctions made within Indo-European languages. Thus, not surprisingly, there have been no comparative studies of children's acquisition of switch reference systems, as far as I know. The evidence presented from languages like Japanese, Samoan, and Kaluli indicate too how biased our notions are of what children's language is like. Linguistics generally refer to the early stages of child language as telegraphic because much that would have to be present in the presumed adult equivalent has not been expressed. However, in other languages ellipsis is the norm. As Ochs (808) points out, in Samoan the relative nonexpression of major constituents is a sign of competence, since the presence of a subject or object would represent a marked strategy of expression. In English, however, telegraphic speech is indicative of incompetence. In still other cases, like Turkish, child speech is not telegraphic because children acquire most of the inflectional system by 2 years of age or earlier. Although utterances are short