engleski

Late language acquisitions and reformulation

The aim of the proposed symposium is to show that children have an active role in acquiring their native language. The initially available and memorized linguistic data determine what children can produce and how they do it. We would like to argue that each new utterance produced by a child is a result of a change called Reformulation that a child makes on previously available utterance, and that this reformulation is the hallmark of a language acquisition process. Each reformulation involves a double simultaneous movement applied on the source utterance: A part or an aspect of the source utterance is changed while another part or aspect of the same utterance remains unchanged. For example, a reformulation can modify the meaning of the source utterance but not the construction, or it can modify the construction but not the lexicon and the meaning. We will attempt to show that if the reformulation procedures are the marks of the language acquisition process, there should be observable age-related differences that in return should characterize each stage of language acquisition as a function of the reformulation procedures that can be located, analysed and described. In order to make the age-related comparison of reformulations, we apply the following experimental protocol: a group of children 4 ; 0-4 ; 3, 6 ; 0-6 ; 3, 8 ; 0-8 ; 3 and 10 ; 0-10 ; 3-years-old listen individually and only one time to the same story, Tom and Julie (around 500 words) and retell it immediately after listening to it. The ensuing narrative is recorded, transcribed and analyzed for the presence of specific reformulations, such as lexical, structural, or semantic changes, by comparing the source text and child’ s retelling of it. This research is an international project and includes children with typical language development from 12 different linguistic backgrounds, as well as children with specific language impairment (SLI) from 4 different linguistic backgrounds. We present the first results relating to French, Italian, English, Russian, Croatian and Polish languages for children with typical language development. The crosslinguistic comparison of reformulation procedures serves two purposes: It should show if the linguistic stages of acquisition are comparable in all languages and are determined by age, or the reformulation procedures are determined not only by age, but by the language-specific aspects of each individual language. Retelling of the story “ Tom and Julie” by the group of 4- and 6- year-old English-speaking children was analyzed through the process of reformulation. According to our initial predictions and in agreement with the finding from the Russian-speaking cohort, there are specific age-related time-frames that allow children to apply different processes of reformulation. The younger group of children (4 ; 0-4 ; 3) did tend to use simple transformations for the parts of the original story that they were able to recall. The use of nouns and verbs were dictated less by the grammatical complexity of the source text (ST), but more by the child’ s perception of the action in the ST being meaningful. Older children where able to manipulate the original text at the level of both: the simple transformation and simple restructuring. We maintain that the complexity of the reformulation process is dependent on at least two aspects of acquisitional process: level of linguistic proficiency and cognitive/perceptual level of each individual child with a clear age-related differences in cognitive and linguistic abilities. The analysis of reformulations produced by Russian-speaking children show that grammatical complexity of reformulations commiserates with age. 18 children between the ages of 4 ; 0 and 10 ; 3 years old participated in this part of research project. Our data indicate that there are specific time frames in terms of the use of different reformulation procedures. Children in the 4 ; 0-4 ; 3 age category had the most difficulties in retelling the story and therefore their reformulations were at the simple lexical level (formal transformation). Children at the 6 ; 0-6 ; 3 age level were able to use verbs of the same semantic value and complexity in their reformulations as the verbs used in the source text. Regardless of the age, our data indicate that all children had difficulties using lexical constituents denominating temporal, spatial and locative aspects of the story in their reformulations. Children in the 8 ; 0 to 10 ; 3 age category have the most interesting and varied use of the process of reformulation, at the level of semantic paraphrases. Our data supports the idea that process of reformulation is age-dependent and allows to identify the most problematic aspects of language acquisition in normal language developing Russian children. In the analysis of the Croatian sample we have focused mostly on preschool children. Comparisons between four and six- year old children have shown how the ability of reformulation develops. The length of narrative is quite shorter in the group of four-year old children than in the group of six year-old children and according to that the reformulations are less frequent in the younger group. In the group of four- year old children a lot of utterances and sequences were omitted, some utterances were created just from noun phrases (e.g. Julie. In the garden. School. etc.) and many sequences are reversed. We have noticed that four-year old children reformulated more nouns than verbs. This is not the case with older children. Our data include both verb and noun reformulations. Analysing all the reformulations used by these two groups of children we have defined the features which differentiate younger from older preschool children. Using the protocol of retelling of Tomek i Julka story, we propose to analyse how the 4-, 6-, 8- and 10-year old Polish children use the movement verbs and adverbial phrases of place (place adverbs). We will focus our analysis on the comparison between the retellings produced by pre-school (4-years), early-elementary (6-years) and late-elementary (8- and 10-years) school children. In the analysis of the Polish sample, we suggest that process of reformulation is certainly age-dependent but the narrative ability developed in the classroom may have an important influence on it. For this reason, we propose to observe the correlation between the school input (in the category of movement verbs and place adverbs) and the actual retelling produced by children and present in the Polish data. Using the same protocol in retelling the story applied to Germanic and Slavic languages, we propose that the procedures of Reformulation used by children should be similar in close languages, such as French and Italian. The analysis of reformulations will focus firstly on the semantic relationship between the source verbs (verbs of the original text) and retold verbs. Previous work suggests that definitory reformulations, i.e., providing the definition of the source verb, begin to appear in child’ s narratives at the age of 4-years-old. However, young children tend to substitute semantically complex verbs of the source text with semantically simple ones, whereas older children are observed to use synonyms of the complex verbs. Secondly, we will show how children change the source utterances at the syntactic level. Older children are capable of changing the structure of the source sentence while retaining lexical and semantic aspects of the original utterance. Younger children tend to use paraphrastic reformulations which only maintain situational equivalence. We argue that reformulations produced in French and Italian languages will differ more at the level of lexicon and grammar rather that on semantic level.

narrative ability; child language; reformulation

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