Article
Four is Not Fourteen: Tongue Twister Patterns and the Unmastery of Language
By using tongue twisters from a variety of folk traditions, the article demonstrates how the inevitable failure to perform a tongue twister flawlessly consists of the performer's inability to differentiate between phonemic, semantic, morphological and syntactic homonyms, thus mirroring the experience of a child learning his/her native language. The article suggests that tongue twisters serve as an artistic means for the linguistically competent performer to revisit that earlier and forgotten stage in language acquisition.
Russian jussives with a particle pust’, while being rare and late acquired, still demonstrate some features special for child-adult communication. The communicative situation influences the characteristics of these constructions in terms of the use of aspect and transitive verbs, causing dissimilarity between child-directed and adult-directed speech.
Children’s ability to interpret color adjective noun phrases (e.g., red butterfly) as contrastive was examined in an eyetracking study with 6-year-old Russian children. Pitch accent placement (on the adjective red, or on the noun butterfly) was compared within a visual context containing two red referents (a butterfly and a fox) when only one of them had a contrast member (a purple butterfly) or when both had a contrast member (a purple butterfly and a grey fox). Contrastiveness was enhanced by the Russianspecific ‘split constituent’ construction (e.g., Red put butterfly . . .) in which a contrastive interpretation of the color term requires pitch accent on the adjective, with the nonsplit sentences serving as control. Regardless of the experimental manipulations, children had to wait until hearing the noun (butterfly) to identify the referent, even in splits. This occurred even under conditions for which the prosody and the visual context allow adult listeners to infer the relevant contrast set and anticipate the referent prior to hearing the noun (accent on the adjective in 1-Contrast scenes). Pitch accent on the adjective did facilitate children’s referential processing, but only for the nonsplit constituents. Moreover, visual contexts that encouraged the correct contrast set (1-Contrast) only facilitated referential processing after hearing the noun, even in splits. Further analyses showed that children can anticipate the reference like adults but only when the contrast set is made salient by the preceding supportive discourse, that is, when the inference about the intended contrast set is provided by the preceding utterance.
This paper is aimed to show crucial points of Quine’s language acquisition conception that were criticized by Noam Chomsky. Willard Van Orman Quine tried to build a language theory in a behavioristic way using such terms as: stimulus, reaction and reinforcement. He thought that language acquisition by children could be explained as the process of ontogenesis of reference. N. Chomsky mainly objected to behaviorism and showed its weak explanatory force in language theory.
The article gives an overview of mistakes made by a peculiar type of speakers – children of emigrants from Russia who grew up in a foreign linguistic environment and inherited their Russian from their parents. English tradition refers to this variety of Russian as heritage Russian. The study is based on the data from the Russian Learner Corpus, which includes texts produced by children of emigrants to the USA. The results show that the mistakes made by this type of speakers are different from those made by both common speakers of Russian and L2 students, and the process of their emergence is of significant linguistic interest.
This book is a collection of papers written by Russian and foreign linguists to highlight the different aspects of bilingualism. Much attention is paid to the early simultaneous and successive bilingualism in children; however, adults speaking several languages in natural settings as well as in classroom are also considered. Some chapters are concentrated on language attrition — an opposite process to language acquisition that happens when a native language for some reasons is not more used for communication. The data from Azerbaijan, English, Finnish, Georgian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Urum and Uzbek served as a base for comparison. This volume is addressed to linguists, psychologists, speech pathologists and teachers working with bilingual children, as well as to their parents.
The joint workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) & NLP for Language Acquisition (LA) – shorthand NLP4CALL&LA – is an effort to provide a debate space and collaboration between two closely related areas. Both focus on language acquisition, related resources and technologies, that can support research of the language learning process as well as aim to bring interdisciplinary advantage to the field. Individual workshop areas are outlined below.
The main focus of the present article lies on the speech errors by students of English in the process of role playing. The article gives thorough analyses of external and internal factors that cause speech errors in role plays and offers some ways of preventing and correction the errors in the process of teaching English as a second language.
The paper is focused on the study of reaction of italian literature critics on the publication of the Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Jivago". The analysys of the book ""Doctor Jivago", Pasternak, 1958, Italy" (published in Russian language in "Reka vremen", 2012, in Moscow) is given. The papers of italian writers, critics and historians of literature, who reacted immediately upon the publication of the novel (A. Moravia, I. Calvino, F.Fortini, C. Cassola, C. Salinari ecc.) are studied and analised.
In the article the patterns of the realization of emotional utterances in dialogic and monologic speech are described. The author pays special attention to the characteristic features of the speech of a speaker feeling psychic tension and to the compositional-pragmatic peculiarities of dialogic and monologic text.