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Preface
FRAUENFELDER, Ulrich Hans, RIZZI, Luigi, ZESIGER, Pascal Eric
FRAUENFELDER, Ulrich Hans, RIZZI, Luigi, ZESIGER, Pascal Eric. Preface. Language and Speech , 2008, vol. 51, no. 1-2, p. 1-2
DOI : 10.1177/00238309080510010101
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The papers appearing in this double special issue were presented at the Latsis Colloque
“Early Language Development and Disorders” (ELDD). This conference which took place from January 26 –28, 2006, was organized by members of the University of Geneva.
Its primary goal was to promote research on the early acquisition of phonology, the lexicon, and grammar. The research presented adopted an interdisciplinary approach, combining linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. A secondary goal of the conference was to promote the careers of junior scientists working in this area by giving them the opportunity of presenting their work. Thanks to the support of the Latsis Foundation more than 30 of these junior scientists received travel grants to come to Geneva and to present their work at the conference.
This conference was attended by more than 170 participants from 33 different countries. Its program included five plenary presentations by invited speakers, 30 papers and 47 poster presentations. Papers on the topic of language disorders have already been published in a Special issue of Advances in Speech-Language Pathology, Volume 8, Number 4, December, 2006.
The eight papers published in this special issue divide into two groups, roughly organized around the interfaces of grammar with phonetics-phonology and with semantics-pragmatics, respectively.
The first group includes papers dealing with the acquisition of phonology and the role of bootstrapping in the acquisition of grammar. In their paper, Mani, Coleman, and Plunkett demonstrate the phonological sensitivity of English infants at 18-months to vowel mispronunciations in known words. Hallé, Durand, and de Boysson-Bardies show that 11-month old French infants can recognize definite and indefinite articles in the context of a following noun and that these articles contribute to the recognition of the following words.
The paper by Jolly and Plunkett presents experimental evidence that 30 month old children are able to use word inflections (i.e., plural marker) to infer the picture referent (one or two objects). Finally, Christophe, Millotte, Bernal, and Lidz present a model of how infants bootstrap lexical and syntactic structure on the basis of prosodic information and some experimental evidence that supports several assumptions of this model.
The papers of the second group concern classical issues on the interface between syntax and interpretation. Di Sciullo and Agüero-Bautista address pronominal binding and the “delay of principle B Effect” in early grammars, with special reference to the fact that the delay is not observed in languages with pronominal clitics. The article by Jackubowicz and Strik focuses on the (non-adult-like) strategies that children use to build long-distance wh-questions, often favouring wh scope marking over long wh-movement;
Lee and Lee address the “delay of verbal passive” by investigating the acquisition of passive in Korean, and arguing for the relevance of the event structure of the verb in differentiating early from late occurring passive structures. Finally, Crain analyses certain discrepancies between the child and adult interpretation of or, arguing that children initially rely on a priori knowledge in the interpretation of disjunction.
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Language and Speech
2 Preface to the Special Issue
Language and Speech
We wish to thank Bronwyn Glaser whose dedication and hard work were indispensable in the organization of the conference. We would also like to thank Tim Bunnell and Jim Polikoff for all their editorial support in the preparation of this special issue. Last by not least, we are grateful to the Latsis Foundation which provided the generous financial support that made this conference possible.
Celia Jakubowicz left us a few months before the completion of this special issue.
Over the last twenty years, Celia made outstanding contributions to the theoretical and empirical study of language acquisition in normal and pathological conditions.
Her analyses of cliticization, wh-movement, the binding principles, among many other topics, have set the standards for acquisition research on these constructions. Celia worked till the very end on the non-target-consistent strategies of wh-extraction in children. Overcoming her weakness and the distress of her final months, she was abso- lutely determined to fulfil her promise and complete the paper for our volume, and she succeeded to do so. We would like to dedicate this special issue to Celia, and thereby remember her intellectual achievements and her courage.
Ulrich Frauenfelder
1, Luigi Rizzi
2, and Pascal Zesiger
1January, 2008
1 Faculty of Psychology and Education Science, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
2 CISCL - Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Cognitivi sul Linguaggio, III piano, Complesso S. Niccolò, Via Roma, 56, I-53100 Siena, Italy.
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