Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Psychology of Language

Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin

Jiansheng Guo, Elena Lieven, Nancy Budwig, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Keiko Nakamura, Seyda Ozcaliskan, Jiansheng Guo, Elena Lieven, Nancy Budwig, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Keiko Nakamura, Seyda Ozcaliskan

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136873676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

This volume covers state-of-the-art research in the field of crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language. The forty chapters cover a wide range of topics that represent the many research interests of a pioneer, Dan Isaac Slobin, who has been a major intellectual and creative force in the field of child language development, linguistics, and psycholinguistics for the past four decades.

Slobin has insisted on a rigorous, crosslinguistic approach in his attempt to identify universal developmental patterns in language learning, to explore the effects of particular types of languages on psycholinguistic processes, to determine the extent to which universals of language and language behavior are determined by modality (vocal/auditory vs. manual/visual) and, finally, to investigate the relation between linguistic and cognitive processes.

In this volume, researchers take up the challenge of the differences between languages to forward research in four major areas with which Slobin has been concerned throughout his career: language learning in crosslinguistic perspective (spoken and sign languages); the integration of language specific factors in narrative skill; theoretical issues in typology, language development and language change; and the relationship between language and cognition.

All chapters are written by leading researchers currently working in these fields, who are Slobin's colleagues, collaborators or former students in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Each section starts with an introductory chapter that connects the themes of the chapters and reviews Slobin's contribution in the context of past research trends and future directions. The whole volume focuses squarely on the central argument: universals of human language and of its development are embodied and revealed in its diverse manifestations and utilization.

Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Study of Language is a key resource for those interested in the range of differences between languages and how this impacts on learning, cognition and language change, and a tribute to Dan Slobin's momentous contribution to the field.

Part I
Language Learning in Crosslinguistic Perspective

Introduction

NANCY BUDWIG
Clark University

SUSAN ERVIN-TRIPP
University of California, Berkeley

The central claim is that LMC constructs similar early grammars from all input languages. The surface forms will, of course, vary, since the materials provided by the input languages vary. What is constant are the basic notions that first receive grammatical expression, along with early constraints on the positioning of grammatical elements and the ways in which they relate to syntactic expression.

Dan I. Slobin (1985, p. 1161)

I will propose, however, that such theorists-including myself-have erred in attributing the origins of structure to the mind of the child, rather than to the interpersonal communicative and cognitive processes that everywhere and always shape language in its peculiar expression of content and relation.

Dan I. Slobin (2001, p. 407)

Slobin argues that crosslinguistic study provides a method that “can be used to reveal both developmental universals and language-specific developmental patterns in the interaction of form and content” (Slobin, 1985, p. 5). While the specific proposals Slobin has endorsed over time have changed, the general idea that crosslinguistic study provides a method for revealing how children construct language anew has remained constant. How did Slobin come to build a lifetime program of research around crosslinguistic study?

Dan Slobin’s development of the field of comparative child syntax can be foreseen from his own history. He grew up in a multilingual family, spent a year with his family in Vienna at 14 and by the time he went to graduate school he could speak Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, and German, so typological contrasts were familiar to him. As a senior at the University of Michigan he completed an honors thesis on psycholinguistics and heard Roger Brown talk about Jean Berko’s work on children’s grammatical creativity. The move to Harvard in 1960 to pursue a Ph.D. with Brown and with George Miller seemed a natural. He participated in the analysis of child syntax first on the transcripts of Adam, Eve, and Sarah in Brown’s seminar. His dissertation was on grammatical processing, completed quickly to come to the job offered him by the Berkeley Psychology Department.

Arriving in Berkeley in 1963, he soon took part in an interdisciplinary seminar that met regularly to discuss communicative competence, a concept Dell Hymes proposed, which extended the boundary between competence and performance to include cultural and situational knowledge (see Ervin-Tripp, in press; Gumperz & Hymes, 1964). Dell Hymes, John Gumperz, Susan Ervin-Tripp, and Dan Slobin worked with students on a project to study crosslinguistic and cross-cultural contexts of language socialization. This led to the development of a Field Manual to help coordinate such research. Dan Slobin entered into this enterprise with gusto, taking on writing the comparative syntax section of the manual, and eventually editing the whole manual, called the Cross-Cultural Study of the Acquisition of Communicative Competence. Slobin had been told by a mentor that he should find a challenging topic rich enough for a lifetime commitment of his research. He had found it. This project made it clear to him that the method of comparative crosslinguistic study could provide a natural experiment for the study of the acquisition of grammar in relation to a cognitive common ground. Since cognition, he believed at the time, was everywhere alike, developmental differences would be due to the syntactic means available.

Soon after this work on the Manual, which continued in his coordination of the field workers, he developed a new major crosslinguistic acquisition project, in which samples of adult-child speech would be gathered and comparable elicitation experiments would be performed in Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, English, and Italian. He had deliberately chosen languages where the syntactic challenges to children differed. It was these two projects in cross-cultural work that laid the groundwork for his major theoretical proposal of Operating Principles. The importance of this project has over the years attracted participation from scholars working in a wide range of languages. Slobin has edited a series of books refining and enriching his first theoretical description; the contributions to this section are testimony to the enduring importance of the project.

The eight chapters in this section suggest ways that ongoing research has been influenced by Slobin’s thinking about language learning in crosslinguistic perspective. Our introductory chapter is divided into three parts. First, we begin with a brief overview of some of the key aspects of Slobin’s views on crosslinguistic study, beginning with his discussion of the language-making capacity, operating principles and basic child grammar and tracing this forward to his later work on language typology. We conclude this first section by considering ways the eight chapters draw upon Slobin’s ideas about universals and particulars of acquisition. Second, we turn to two ways the authors in this section push Slobin’s thinking in new directions, first by focusing on issues of methodology and second, examining typology in use. Finally, we offer our own reflections for future lines of research examining language development within a crosslinguistic perspective.

THE LANGUAGE-MAKING CAPACITY, BASIC CHILD GRAMMAR, AND THE SHIFT TOWARD LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY

In one way or another, the eight chapters in this section draw upon Slobin’s discussion of the relative role of universals and particulars in the acquisition process. Slobin’s original theoretical perspective was built on the idea of the language-making capacity (LMC) and operating principles. Slobin originally argued that the LMC and Operating Principles provide the child with mechanisms to construct similar grammars regardless of input language. These early grammars were referred to as Basic Child Grammar: “What is constant are the basic notions that first receive grammatical expression, along with early constraints on the positioning of grammatical elements and the ways in which they relate to syntactic expression” (Slobin, 1985, p. 1161). Later the idea that children start with a core set of basic notions that they give grammatical treatment to regardless of input language was retracted. In 1997, in the final volume of the crosslinguistic series, Slobin argued that there is a collection of grammatically relevant notions but “there are too many different packagings of such semantic and pragmatic characteristics to build in all of the possible packages in advance or rank them in terms of “naturalness” or “accessibility” (Slobin, 1997, p. 301). From here Slobin went on to argue that typological aspects of the input language as used in practice played a far greater role in children’s use and development of grammatical systems than his earlier work had suggested.

The eight chapters in this section collectively develop aspects of arguments Slobin has made previously. Gleason, Phillips, and Ely focus on the lexicon, examining the acquisition of animal terms in Russian and English. They highlight the importance of studying lexical development crosslinguistically in order to conclude something about the universality of the acquisition process. Gleason et al. argue that animal terms are acquired as part of broader interaction routines that bridge to decontextualized discourse, and that despite some differences in frequency and density of the lexicon, there is universal interest by two-year-olds in talk about the animal world.

The other chapters focus more squarely on the acquisition of grammar. Two of the papers explicitly examine Slobin’s early claims about Basic Child Grammar. Goldin-Meadow, Özyürek, Sancar, and Mylander undertook a remarkable extension of the comparative method to the homesign of deaf children born to hearing parents in China, Turkey and the United States. The children have contextual and gestural input to language formation, but they were not exposed to conventional sign language or to speech training. When the developmental course of homesign was followed, there were striking similarities in the types of semantic elements expressed, types of gesture combinations, and the order at sentence level. Among these similarities were focusing on patient first (by pointing or iconic gesture), and on results. They suggest, consistent with Slobin’s discussion of Basic Child Grammar, that the constructions they found show conceptual starting points for grammatical notions that are highly accessible to all children. In contrast, Kyratzis challenges Slobin’s early focus on the Manipulative Activity Scene. Consistent with Slobin’s later ideas about more flexible starting points for children, Kyratzis argues that the transitivity parameters that children come to use in a particular situation may be shaped by the pragmatic uses they themselves put their language to, which in turn may derive from the pragmatic functions of language with peers, the language that they hear spoken around them in that situation, and by the socialization influences and ideologies that they are exposed to in their language community.

Several other chapters that focus on grammar are concerned with Slobin’s more recent interest in the role of typology. Behrens, for example, looks at the early use of particles that encode deixis in German-speaking children and fi...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Dedication
• Contributors
• The Editors
• Authors
• A Poetic Portrait of Dan Isaac Slobin
• Introduction
• Part I Language Learning in Crosslinguistic Perspective
• Part II Narratives and Their Development
• Part III Theoretical Perspectives on Language Development, Language Change, and Typology
• Part IV Language and Cognition
• APPENDIX A DAN SLOBIN’S MENTORS, MODELS, INFLUENCES, AND CONNECTIONS
• APPENDIX B BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DAN ISAAC SLOBIN’S PUBLICATIONS, 1960–
• Author Index
• Subject Index