I get asked from time to time about usage-based versus universal grammar (UG) perspectives regarding language acquisition. I usually end up summarizing bits of the histories of these two perspectives. Better yet would be to provide a short list of articles that do a more thorough job at walking readers through this history. This is that list:
Goldschneider, J. M., & DeKeyser, R. M. (2001). Explaining the “natural order of L2 morpheme acquisition” in English: A meta‐analysis of multiple determinants. Language learning, 51(1), 1-50. This article's literature review takes readers back to the first findings by Brown and the children he was researching in the 1970s. He noticed the children developed certain English grammatical endings in similar orders. This sparked interest among researchers regarding how consistent this ordering of acquired morphemes (parts of words) is among all children learning English. The authors of this study then investigated several potential causes of the observed developmental orders. Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence?. Cognition, 74(3), 209-253. This article summarizes research regarding item-based (usage-based perspective) versus rule-governed (UG perspective) observations in the development of grammar. Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Implicit statistical learning: A tale of two literatures. Topics in Cognitive Science, 11(3), 468-481. This article ties two separate stands of research together, showing how they have essentially repeated the same work. Saffran, J. R., & Kirkham, N. Z. (2018). Infant statistical learning. Annual review of psychology, 69, 181-203. This article summarizes a history of research that initially looked into how very young children were able to start separating speech streams heard from adults into separate words. Soon after, researchers began to explore whether such abilities in such young children were specific to language, or were also used in recognition of visual, sound, and other non-language stimuli. A bit of this research even extended to learning by non-human animals. I will add more articles when I think of more; for now, less is more:)
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Reed Riggs (Author)I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Hawai‘i. My research looks at entrenchment, frequency effects, and salience along with interactional behaviors from Usage-based Linguistics (UBL) and Conversation Analytic (CA) perspectives. Archives
June 2023
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