Search results for "Language acquisition"
showing 10 items of 219 documents
Kulttuurienvälisen tietoisuuden ja kieliasenteiden kehittyminen CLIL-opetuksessa
2018
CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) has been claimed to create a positive attitude towards languages and language learning in general and to raise intercultural awareness. The studies on the topics have however remained scarce. This study examines the issue from former pupils’ perspective. The 24 participants, who received English-medium CLIL during their comprehensive school in the 1990s, were interviewed in-depth and the data were analysed qualitatively. Most participants felt that CLIL had had a very positive effect on their attitudes towards English. However, many considered that CLIL had partly been detrimental to their attitudes towards and learning of other languages. The…
Early ERP Evidence for Children’s and Adult’s Sensitivity to Scalar Implicatures Triggered by Existential Quantifiers (Some)
2021
How quickly do children and adults interpret scalar lexical items in speech processing? The current study examined interpretation of the scalar terms some vs. all in contexts where either the stronger (some = not all) or the weaker interpretation was permissible (some allows all). Children and adults showed increased negative deflections in brain activity following the word some in some-infelicitous versus some-felicitous contexts. This effect was found as early as 100 ms across central electrode sites (in children), and 300–500 ms across left frontal, fronto-central, and centro-parietal electrode sites (in children and adults). These results strongly suggest that young children (aged betwe…
The interaction of language and thought in children's language acquisition: a crosslinguistic study
1997
The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential interaction of conceptual representations and linguistic systems in the process of language acquisition. Language–thought interactions were studied in 80 American, 48 Finnish and 48 Polish preschool children. The research focused on the conceptual and linguistic development of space and time. The spatial and temporal conceptual tasks were designed to measure the transition from experiential to inferential knowledge of space/time representations. In the linguistic domain, comprehension and production tests were used to evaluate the children's capacity to understand mono- and bi-referential location in space and time, where mono-re…
Differentiation in language and gesture use during early bilingual development of hearing children of Deaf parents
2014
Hearing children of Deaf parents simultaneously acquire sign language and spoken language, which have many structural differences and represent two different modalities. We video-recorded eight children every six months between the ages of 12 and 24 months during three different play sessions: with their Deaf parent, with the Deaf parent and a hearing adult, and with a hearing adult alone. Additionally, we collected data on their vocabulary development in both sign language and spoken language. Children as young as 12 months old accommodated their language use according to the language(s) of their interlocutor(s). Additionally, the children used a manual modality that included gestures more…
Facework and Prosocial Teasing in a Synchronous Video Communication Exchange
2019
This study centres on the analysis of prosocial teasing during a videoconference (telecollaboration) exchange between mixed-gender adolescent secondary school students from Spain and Germany. We contend that the provocative elements present in prosocial teasing activate a play frame, in Gregory Bateson’s terms, in which seemingly hostile face acts can be interpreted as playful behaviour. We argue that successful teasing can ultimately enhance the face of the teaser and that of the person being teased and thus build up rapport between them. Our analysis of the facework in the interaction during this telecollaboration exchange is based on Erwin Goffman’s notions of face, demeanour and deferen…
Segment duration in Finnish as imitated by Russians
2014
The paper reports findings of a study in which Russian speakers without any prior knowledge of Finnish imitated utterances in that language, and, in particular, how they succeeded in imitating segmental duration. The data was analysed using acoustic measurements of segment duration as well as auditory analysis by four judges. The results show that Russian speakers faced difficulties in imitating some aspects of the complicated Finnish quantity system. On the other hand, many of the imitated words were judged as comprehensible. Index Terms: duration, length, Finnish, imitation, language learning
The Early Bird gets the Word
2019
Success in an increasingly globalized world sets requirements for versatile communication skills and understanding about other cultures. One of the keys to success is versatile language skills, on which the European Commission spoke out as early as in 1995, recommending that every European citizen should learn two foreign languages in addition to their mother tongue. Now, more than twenty years later, the launch of early A1 language teaching that is to begin in the first grade in Finland, in January 2020, is a significant step towards this goal. Studies show that early foreign language learning needs to be carefully carried out in order to achieve positive effects and the effects that have …
The effects of training on the grammar of preschool children
1974
The acquisition of morphological and syntactic rules of language during early childhood has been the object of intensive study in many languages during the last few years. As regards English, some surveys have already been published on the results (McNeill, 1970; Slobin, 1971). Research on the acquisition of morphological and syntactic patterns has been influenced on the one hand by psycholinguistics, on the other by the psychology of learning. This duality of starting points manifests itself also in the way of presenting problems and in the interpretation of results. One of the methodological difficulties when studying the acquisition of grammar was for a long time how to separate those la…
Accelerating early language development with multi-sensory training
2012
This paper reports the outcome of a multi-sensory intervention on infant language skills. A programme titled ‘Rhyming Game and Exercise Club’, which included kinaesthetic–tactile mother–child rhyming games performed in natural joint attention situations, was intended to accelerate Finnish six- to eight-month-old infants’ language development. The participants were 20 infants (10 training group children and 10 control children). Their cognitive skills and both receptive and expressive language skills (Bayley Scales III) were tested three times (pre-, post- and follow-up assessments). The groups differed significantly in receptive language skills at the baseline, in favour of the controls. Th…
Trajectories of reading development: A follow-up from birth to school age of children with and without risk for dyslexia
2006
In order to understand why some children are vulnerable to difficulties in their language development and their acquisition of reading skill, the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia followed 200 Finnish children from birth to school age. Half of these children had a family history of reading problems and were considered at risk for dyslexia; the other half were not at risk. A novel analysis, mixture modeling, revealed four subgroups with differential developmental trajectories to early reading. The subgroups who showed either a “dysfluent trajectory” (n = 12; 11 at risk vs. 1 control) or a “declining trajectory” (n = 35; 24 vs. 11) contained more children with familial risk for dyslexi…