Developing linguistic flexibility across the school years

Kaplan, Dafna; Berman, Ruth A.

doi:10.1177/0142723714566335

Cited by 18 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 80 publications

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“…Various forms of metalinguistic awareness have been proven beneficial for reading, including phonemic awareness (see Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001), morphological awareness (Carlisle, 1995), and syntactic awareness (Gaux & Gombert, 1999;Nation & Snowling, 2000;Tunmer, Nesdale, & Wright, 1987). More recently, Kaplan and Berman (2015) confirmed that linguistic flexibility is an important facet of later language development. One theory for why metalinguistic awareness improves reading ability is that MA training causes students' thinking about the meanings of words and sentences in and out of text to become less rigid, more active, and more flexible (Cartwright, 2008).…”

Section: Metalinguistic Awarenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The importance of flexibility of pronunciation in learning to decode: A training study in set for variability

Zipke

2016

First Language

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The ability to flexibly approach the pronunciation of unknown words, or set for variability, has been shown to contribute to word recognition skills. However, this is the first study that has attempted to teach students strategies for increasing their set for variability. Beginning readers (N = 15) were instructed to correct oral mispronunciations and then systematically alter sounds in words with exception spellings, while a control group (N = 15) was encouraged to decode passages without the set for variability instruction. It was hypothesized that this brief training would result in readers who are more persistent and more successful in attempting to read words with irregular spellings. Participants who received the experimental training made more attempts to read words with irregular spellings; however, they were not more successful in these attempts. It is argued that this means that set for variability is a teachable concept, in that students in this study acquired the strategy.

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Section: Metalinguistic Awarenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The importance of flexibility of pronunciation in learning to decode: A training study in set for variability

Zipke

2016

First Language

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“…teachers in relation to their acquisition of the language for the specific purposes of linguistics as an academic register. Register flexibility is understood as an individual productive skill which pertains to the capacity of the speaker for fast and controlled adjustments of language use based on sensitivity for changing communicative goals and circumstances (Kaplan and Berman, 2015;Qin and Uccelli, 2020). Methodologically, the project combines written elicitation tasks with a grammar test (TEDS-LT) evaluating the development of linguistic terminology and declarative grammar knowledge (Bremerich-Vos et al, 2011).…”

Section: Development Of Productive Register Variation In German Bache...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It explores the register flexibility of students (mainly native speakers of German) recruited from a bachelor program for primary school teachers in relation to their acquisition of the language for the specific purposes of linguistics as an academic register. Register flexibility is understood as an individual productive skill which pertains to the capacity of the speaker for fast and controlled adjustments of language use based on sensitivity for changing communicative goals and circumstances (Kaplan and Berman, 2015 ; Qin and Uccelli, 2020 ).…”

Section: Experimental Approaches: Isolating Intra-individual Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods

et al. 2023

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In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center “Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define “register” as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register. In order to achieve this goal, we are using complementary methods and measures. In the review, we start by clarifying the concept of “register”, by reviewing the state of the art, and by setting out our methods and modeling goals. Against this background, we discuss three key challenges, two at the methodological level and one at the theoretical level: (1) To better uncover registers in text and spoken corpora, we propose changes to established analytical approaches. (2) To tease apart between-subject variability from the linguistic variability at issue (intra-individual situation-based register variability), we use within-subject designs and the modeling of individuals' social, language, and educational background. (3) We highlight a gap in cognitive modeling, viz. modeling the mental representations of register (processing), and present our first attempts at filling this gap. We argue that the targeted use of multiple complementary methods and measures supports investigating the pervasiveness of register phenomena and yields comprehensive insights into the cross-methodological robustness of register-related language variability. These comprehensive insights in turn provide a solid foundation for associated cognitive modeling.

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“…Note that this is a rather conservative estimate: we know that language development begins before age 1 ( Jusczyk, 1997 ; Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith, 2001 ) and continues throughout childhood and adolescence ( Nippold, 1998 ; Berman, 2004 , 2007 ; Nippold et al, 2005 ; Kaplan and Berman, 2015 ); moreover, children are exposed to language—through utterances directed to them, utterances directed to other people present, radio and television, and later school, reading and the internet almost every waking hour of their lives.…”

Section: Arguments For Ugmentioning

confidence: 99%

What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?

Dąbrowska

2015

Front. Psychol.

105

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Universal Grammar (UG) is a suspect concept. There is little agreement on what exactly is in it; and the empirical evidence for it is very weak. This paper critically examines a variety of arguments that have been put forward as evidence for UG, focussing on the three most powerful ones: universality (all human languages share a number of properties), convergence (all language learners converge on the same grammar in spite of the fact that they are exposed to different input), and poverty of the stimulus (children know things about language which they could not have learned from the input available to them). I argue that these arguments are based on premises which are either false or unsubstantiated. Languages differ from each other in profound ways, and there are very few true universals, so the fundamental crosslinguistic fact that needs explaining is diversity, not universality. A number of recent studies have demonstrated the existence of considerable differences in adult native speakers’ knowledge of the grammar of their language, including aspects of inflectional morphology, passives, quantifiers, and a variety of more complex constructions, so learners do not in fact converge on the same grammar. Finally, the poverty of the stimulus argument presupposes that children acquire linguistic representations of the kind postulated by generative grammarians; constructionist grammars such as those proposed by Tomasello, Goldberg and others can be learned from the input. We are the only species that has language, so there must be something unique about humans that makes language learning possible. The extent of crosslinguistic diversity and the considerable individual differences in the rate, style and outcome of acquisition suggest that it is more promising to think in terms of a language-making capacity, i.e., a set of domain-general abilities, rather than an innate body of knowledge about the structural properties of the target system.

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Developing linguistic flexibility across the school years

Cited by 18 publications

References 80 publications

The importance of flexibility of pronunciation in learning to decode: A training study in set for variability

The importance of flexibility of pronunciation in learning to decode: A training study in set for variability

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods

What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?

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