Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development-JCLAD

Verbs' unaccusativity in existential constructions

2024-05-02T15:30:22+03:00

The Unaccusative Hypothesis(UH) advocates the dominance of syntactic structure in assigning semantic values to sentence arguments. The same thematic roles should only be assigned by the same syntactic configuration. In recent studies, however, the unaccusative hypothesis was highly contentious and controversial and faced several problems. Certain verbs classified as unaccusative or unergative based on semantic or syntactic criteria do not conform to expectations due to the prevalence of unaccusative mismatches. Based on the previous cross-linguistic studies, this paper is motivated to focus on the nature of unaccusativity by a thorough syntactic and semantic dissection for verbs in existential constructions. It is argued that unaccusativity is primarily determined by syntactic positions rather than semantic features by providing a distributional pattern of verbs entering into existential constructions.

The influence of drama-based pedagogical techniques on younger school children's vocabulary development

2024-07-19T20:10:44+03:00

Any educational content acquisition, the linguistic one included, has its initial and its final phase. At the beginning of education, a child’s source language is most often based on the organic idiom, whereas the target language refers to the level of acquisition of the standard language idiom at the end of primary education. Various linguistic and extralinguistic factors determine the formation and the level of acquisition of the target language and consequently vocabulary development, i.e. lexical competence. Since primary school children are exposed to a great variety of different media today, it has been observed that their communication is lacking on different levels and their vocabulary is becoming inadequate. Therefore, it is crucial, especially in the mother tongue (Croatian) teaching, to use various techniques that will not only help develop communicative skills, e.g. listening, speaking, reading and writing, but also enrich students’ lexis in written and oral mode. Accordingly, experimental research is conducted in the third and fourth grade of primary school. In one class, Croatian language content is presented to students with the help of drama techniques during a two-week period, whereas another group is taught using traditional methods. Both groups are tested twice: before and after conducting the experiment. The results are analysed in the SPSS programme for statistical analysis. It is confirmed that drama-based techniques significantly improve vocabulary development and that students who had two weeks of experimental teaching show better results in understanding deeper meaning of words in various contexts. The richness and broadness of their vocabulary improved as well by measuring of lexical density and diversity.

Insights from novel word learning: Error analysis and its relevance in understanding fast versus slow mapping

2024-09-14T06:16:20+03:00

Novel word learning refers to the process of learning words. The words are assumed to be acquainted even after a short exposure and this phenomenon is termed as fast mapping. Some proponents believe that the new word learnt as a consequence of new word learning is momentous and the word may not be transferred to the lexicon if the word is not rehearsed and this strategy involving conscious learning is termed as slow mapping. The present study was carried out with the aim of carrying out of error analysis on data involving fast and slow mapping. 20 participants were divided into two sub groups of 10 each. The first method was exposed to lexical method of teaching while the second group was exposed to slow mapping. Participants performed well with slow mapping but the errors were more with this method compared to fast mapping.

Expressive morphological deficiencies in children with autism: regular past inflections and pluralization morphemes

2024-10-23T10:52:42+03:00

The inability of children with autism spectrum disorder to communicate effectively and with confidence as well as the documentation of the level of deficiencies in their speech motivated the thrust of this study. A survey of 20 children aged 5 to 12 was conducted at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Autistic Centre in Rivers State, Nigeria. It examined the severity of the clients' morphological disorder. A judgment sampling technique was used to identify autistic children with intermediate autism who still had speech and could be remediated. Data were gathered employing the verified Word Structure (WS) evaluation, with sentence completion tasks, in addition to a validity test re-test of mean length of utterance (MLU), which professionals discovered to have a significant degree of internal coherence (r = 94). The respondents were asked to read a paragraph of 100 utterances, and the readings were then recorded and transcribed for analysis using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcript (SALT) software. The analysis was made easier with the use of the word-based theory. The major findings showed that the production of the past tense and plural morphemes of the clients both in the mean length of utterance in word (MLUw) and mean length of utterance in morpheme (MLUm) were less than 5.0. The findings can be used to arrange for a suitable assessment design and therapy for the clients.