Browsing by Subject "language acquisition"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Opportunities for Language Learning in Bilingual Conversation: A Study in Language Exchange Partnership
    (2019-11-30) Clumpner, Ellisa
    Language exchange programs such as Tandem Plus aim to create opportunities for language learners to practice and improve their second languages by pairing fluent speakers with learners; but what opportunities for learning are actually presented and taken up by participants? Through my participation in Tandem Plus, I formed a strong friendship with my language exchange partner; our conversations often delved into emotional topics as well as switched frequently between our two strongest languages, English and Mandarin Chinese. In this self-study, I analyzed an excerpt of a recorded conversation between my Tandem partner and myself in order to answer the following questions: (1) In bilingual conversation, including deep personal exchanges, between my language partner and myself, were there opportunities for me to learn Chinese? (2) When there were opportunities, did I take up and use the new Chinese? In each case, why/why not? Findings show that opportunities for learning did exist, but were not always taken up, and that I seemed less likely to take up new language the more emotionally invested I was in the topic. Although this is a very limited study, there are implications for educators and learners seeking to improve language through partner conversations.
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    Resting-state and task functional magnetic resonance imaging correlates of early language development in temporal and frontal lobe
    (2024-05) Day, Trevor
    Language is a critically important cognitive skill that enables both higher-order cognition andinteraction between individuals. Children face a daunting task of acquiring their first language through passive input, a task they do remarkably well in only a few short years. Linguistic processing is known to be lateralized to the left hemisphere in the majority of the population. The exact mechanism by which this lateralization emerges is not fully understood. In this dissertation, I use functional neuroimaging to evaluate the changing laterality of the language network, focused on two nodes. Those two nodes are the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which is implicated in syntactic processing, and middle temporal gyrus (MTG), which is implicated in semantic processing, with the goal of understanding how the language network emerges. I use two groups of participants and techniques. I applied resting-state functional neuroimaging to a large accelerated longitudinal imaging study of infants and toddlers aged 8 mo to 30 mo. Secondly, I used both resting-state and task imaging to investigate an n = 4 subset of that study who returned for densely sampled imaging visits between 4.5 y and 6.5 y. These analyses show that laterality related to MTG, but not IFG, increase between 8 mo to 30 mo. These findings are consistent with other work in this domain that suggests IFG does not assume its adult-like role until 9 y or older. Furthermore, task studies in the older population show that IFG remains uninvolved in the language network at those ages, yet IFG participates in the ventral attention network (VAN) (and IFG-related laterality increases between 2.5 y and 4.5 y, despite this). These results suggest that the language network co-opts the VAN to accelerate processing in left hemisphere (LH).
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    Stop consonant voicing in young children's speech: Evidence from a cross-sectional study
    (2016-05) Ganser, Emily
    There are intuitive reasons to believe that speech-sound acquisition and language acquisition should be related in development. Surprisingly, only recently has research begun to parse just how the two might be related. This study investigated possible correlations between speech-sound acquisition and language acquisition, as part of a large-scale, longitudinal study of the relationship between different types of phonological development and vocabulary growth in the preschool years. Productions of voiced and voiceless stop-initial words were recorded from 96 children aged 28-39 months. Voice Onset Time (VOT, in ms) for each token context was calculated. A mixed-model logistic regression was calculated which predicted whether the sound was intended to be voiced or voiceless based on its VOT. This model estimated the slopes of the logistic function for each child. This slope was referred to as Robustness of Contrast (based on Holliday, Reidy, Beckman, and Edwards, 2015), defined as being the degree of categorical differentiation between the production of two speech sounds or classes of sounds, in this case, voiced and voiceless stops. Results showed a wide range of slopes for individual children, suggesting that slope-derived Robustness of Contrast could be a viable means of measuring a child’s acquisition of the voicing contrast. Robustness of Contrast was then compared to traditional measures of speech and language skills to investigate whether there was any correlation between the production of stop voicing and broader measures of speech and language development. The Robustness of Contrast measure was found to correlate with all individual measures of speech and language, suggesting that it might indeed be predictive of later language skills.