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Perceptual Salience (perceptual + salience)
Selected AbstractsThe Birth of Words: Ten-Month-Olds Learn Words Through Perceptual SalienceCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2006Shannon M. Pruden A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particular spatial location rather than to an object. Results show that 10-month-olds can learn new labels and do so by relying on the perceptual salience of an object instead of social cues provided by a speaker. This is in direct contrast to the way in which older children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) learn and extend new object names. [source] Explaining the "Natural Order of L2 Morpheme Acquisition" in English: A Meta-analysis of Multiple DeterminantsLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue S1 2005Jennifer M. Goldschneider This meta-analysis pools data from 25 years of research on the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by students of English as a second language (ESL). Some researchers have posited a "natural" order of acquisition common to all ESL learners, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. Our study investigated whether a combination of 5 determinants (perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for the variance in acquisition order. Oral production data from 12 studies, together involving 924 participants, were pooled to obtain weighted accuracy scores for each of 6 grammatical functors. Results of a multiple-regression analysis showed that a large portion of the total variance in acquisition order was explained by the combination of the 5 determinants. Several of these determinants, it was argued, can be seen as part of a broad conceptualization of salience. Since the article was originally published, a number of meta-analyses have appeared in the applied linguistics literature (e.g., Masgoret & Gardner, 2003; Norris & Ortega, 2000; Ortega, 2003), and a book on meta-analysis in applied linguistics research is forthcoming (Norris & Ortega, in press). Meanwhile, research on the acquisition of Hebrew as a second language has begun to provide cross-linguistic evidence for how different aspects of salience contribute to ease or difficulty of second language acquisition (DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay, Ravid, & Shi, 2005) and how salience interacts with age of learning (DeKeyser, Ravid, & Alfi-Shabtay, 2005). [source] Explaining the "Natural Order of L2 Morpheme Acquisition" in English: A Meta-analysis of Multiple DeterminantsLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 1 2001Jennifer M. Goldschneider Some researchers have posited a &;ldquo;natural&;rdquo; order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes common to all learners of English as a second language, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. This meta-analysis investigated whether a combination of five determinants (perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for a large part of the total variance found in acquisition order. Oral production data from 12 studies over almost 25 years, together involving 924 subjects, were pooled. Multiple regression analysis showed that a very large portion of the total variance in acquisition order is explained by the combination of the five determinants. We suggest research on other potential contributing factors and discuss the need for similar research in other languages. [source] Some Input on the Easy/Difficult Grammar Question: An Empirical StudyMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2009LAURA COLLINS The purpose of this study was to determine whether it is possible to distinguish between "difficult" and "easy" constructions for second language (L2) learners by examining characteristics of the structures as they occur in aural input. In a multidimensional analysis of 3 English structures with different acquisition profiles,the simple past, possessive determiners,his/her, and the progressive aspect,we examined the phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexicosemantic characteristics of the forms as they occurred in a 110,000-word corpus of instructional talk to L2 learners. We analyzed the type/token distributions of the forms, their lexical properties, and their perceptual salience. Our findings revealed key input factors that distinguished between the early-acquired progressive, on the one hand, and the later-acquired past and,his/her,determiners, on the other hand. These results lend support to theoretical accounts of the input,acquisition relationship and also generate hypotheses for manipulating instructional input to increase the salience of opaque constructions. [source] The Birth of Words: Ten-Month-Olds Learn Words Through Perceptual SalienceCHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2006Shannon M. Pruden A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particular spatial location rather than to an object. Results show that 10-month-olds can learn new labels and do so by relying on the perceptual salience of an object instead of social cues provided by a speaker. This is in direct contrast to the way in which older children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) learn and extend new object names. [source] | ||||||||||