Asymmetries Between Language Production And Comprehension

This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else. Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults. Gathering contemporary insights from theoretical linguistic research, psycholinguistic studies and computational modeling, Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension presents a unified explanation of this phenomenon. “Through a lucid, comprehensive review of acquisition studies on reference-related phenomena, Petra Hendriks builds a striking case for the pervasiveness of asymmetries in comprehension/production. In her view, listeners systematically misunderstand what they hear, and speakers systematically fail to prevent such misunderstandings. She argues that linguistic theory should take stock of current psycholinguistic and developmental evidence on optionality and ambiguity, and recognize language as a signaling system. The arguments are compelling yet controversial: grammar does not specify a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning; and the demands of the mapping task differ for listeners and speakers. Her proposal is formalized within optimality theory, but researchers working outside this framework will still find it of great interest. In the language-as-code vs. language-as-signal debate, Hendriks puts the ball firmly in the other court.” Ana Pérez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Canada

The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabrück in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshop developed from the observation that children's production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.

This volume contains the invited lectures, invited symposia, symposia, papers and posters presented at the 2nd European Cognitive Science Conference held in Greece in May 2007. The papers presented in this volume range from empirical psychological studies and computational models to philosophical arguments, meta-analyses and even to neuroscientific experimentation. The quality of the work shows that the Cognitive Science Society in Europe is an exciting and vibrant one. There are 210 contributions by cognitive scientists from 27 different countries, including USA, France, UK, Germany, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Spain, the Netherlands, and Australia. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with current research in Cognitive Science.

This edited collection contains 34 papers originally presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA) conference in 2013, held in Oldenburg, Germany. It represents theoretically guided, high quality work, and provides impressive insights into state-of-the-art research in the fields of first and second language acquisition and developmental impairments. The studies brought together here cover a wide variety of different (mainly European) languages, focusing on the areas of phonology, morpho-syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces. Since their first publication, the proceedings of GALA have become an invaluable reference for cutting-edge research in First and Second Language Acquisition and its impairments – and this volume continues that tradition.

How do production and comprehension processes interact in the bilingual brain during language interaction? Most experimental and theoretical research in psycholinguistics to date has focused on investigating the mechanisms that underlie language production and language comprehension separately. Only recently have researchers started emphasizing the importance of reconciling the two modalities into a unified account through the investigation of possible connections between the two systems. Authored by key researchers in psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and language development, this volume encompasses state of the art research on the relation between production and comprehension processes in bilingual children and adults. Articles highlight the most recent methodological approaches, as well as a variety of language pairs and linguistic structures. Indispensable for students and researchers working in the areas of language acquisition and processing, neurolinguistics, and experimental linguistics, this volume will also appeal to educators and clinicians focusing on language development and processing in multilingual children and adults. Originally published as special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5 (2019).

Over the past three decades studies investigating heritage speaker (HS) linguistic competencies have shown, time and again that, despite being L1 or 2L1 native speakers of their home language(s), HS outcomes display variation across a wide spectrum of differences as compared to each other, other types of bilinguals as well as their monolingual peers. Studies have traditionally used—mostly behavioral—methodologies rooted in adjacent established fields (e.g., L1 acquisition, adult L2 acquisition) offering, in addition to documenting and describing HS performance, important insights for linguistic theory and challenges related to (home/minority) language maintenance, contact, policy and more. A birds-eye view makes it clear that the methodologies one uses to tap into HSs’ linguistic knowledge areas, if not more, are important than the phenomena under investigation, especially in light of how their unique experiences with their heritage and other languages are present across a continuum.

Examining a key issue in second language acquisition (SLA) research, this book explores the relation between second language (L2) production and comprehension at the level of processing. The central question underlying this interface is the relationship between grammatical encoding and decoding, namely: are the two modalities of production and comprehension subserved by different types of processors, or by the same syntactic processing module? Proposing an 'Integrated Encoding-Decoding Model' of SLA, Anke Lenzing presents the results of a comprehensive empirical study to demonstrate the extent to which the two modalities rely on shared representations and/or shared processes. Through this detailed analysis The Production-Comprehension Interface in Second Language Acquisition sheds new light on the cognitive architecture of human language processing and offers a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at work in the L2 acquisition process.

This volume gathers fifty papers from the conference Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, GALA 2007, celebrated in Barcelona between the 6th and 8th of September, 2007. It covers the areas of syntax and phonology of child language from the theoretical perspective of generative grammar – the theoretical outlook which first placed language acquisition at the centre of linguistic inquiry.