本論文藉由分析兩位三歲兒童和他們母親的對話來探討兒童行使請求(request)的情形。文中的討論主要涵蓋了三個層面。分別是兒童行使請求時採取的策略，使用的語言形式，以及運用的互動知識(interactional knowledge)。結果發現，兩位兒童行使請求時會採用下面的策略：指明一特定的動作、指明想要取得的物體、指出自已的需求及間接暗示。此外，他們利用以上的策略行使請求時所使用的語言形式有所不同；而這些差異似乎間接反映出這兩位兒童的一些對話或是人際互動的知識(conversational or interpersonal knowledge)影響了他們請求時所使用的語言形式。因此，本論文推論兒童在三歲左右或許已經知道了一些互動知識，而這些互動知識會影響他們在對話中如何請求。 / This study aims to explore children’s requests in mother-children conversation based on dyads of two three-year-old children and their mothers. Three aspects about children’s requests in daily conversation are concerned: (1) the means or strategies children depend on to convey their request intents; (2) the formal or linguistic elements children employ to realize their request intents; and (3) the conversational or interpersonal skills children may have acquired as they are requesting. With a careful examination over the collected conversations, it is found that children at the age of three tend to demonstrate their requests through the following means. First, children indicate a specific action they intend their hearers to do in their utterances. Second, children request for a desired object by indicating literally the target objects, or information about the target object, e.g. adjectives or quantifiers. Thirdly, they indicate their self-want to have their hearer fulfill their desire. The last means children employ to request is hinting. They indirectly convey their request intents, and their hearer can infer the intended act. In addition, children usually use different formal elements to manifest their requests. For example, their requests for a specific action were found to be conveyed with imperatives, imperatives with sentence-final particles, or imperatives with A-not-A tags. Further investigation on the formal varieties of children’s requests reveals that some conversational or interpersonal factors may play a role in how children convey their request intents, e.g. cooperativeness, social status, conversational topic. The findings, therefore, show that children at the age of three have probably been aware of some conversational or interpersonal knowledge and the knowledge may affect their performance of requests in conversation.

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The term ‘phrasal vocabulary’ refers to multi-word expressions, that is, idioms, templates or “strings of words, which appear to be processed without recourse to their lowest level of composition” (Wray, 2002, p.4). Formulaicity constitutes an essential feature of language production and comprehension, and phrasal vocabulary plays a central role in everyday language usage. This research study replicates the experimental design carried out in the study Acquiring phrasal vocabulary by Kuiper, Columbus, & Schmitt (to appear), which used a cloze procedure to test three main hypotheses: a) There are significant differences between the degree of acquisition of formulaic language items by native and non-native speakers of English; b) The frequency of usage of the head-verbs contained in verb plus complement formulaic sequences is positively correlated with the acquisition of such sequences; and, c) Phrasal vocabulary is age graded. In the present study the target language is Spanish instead of English. In addition, available evidence suggests that cultural integration seems to be linked to the acquisition of formulaic language. Thus, a questionnaire intended to measure the participants’ cultural integration level to the target language community was developed. The results of this study supported the predictions that the amount of formulaic language acquired by native speakers is positively correlated with age, and that non-native speakers’ phrasal vocabulary is significantly less extensive than that of native speakers. Most importantly, the results also showed a significant effect of verb frequency on the participants’ acquaintance with the formulaic sequences tested. However, the prediction that cultural integration would be positively correlated with the number of correct answers in the cloze test for both groups was not supported. Extending to the Spanish language the results reported by Kuiper, Columbus, & Schmitt supports the argument that the processes of acquisition of formulaic language across diverse linguistics systems function in a very similar way (Corpas Pastor, 2003). A better comprehension of the mechanisms by which speakers acquire formulaic language may significantly contribute to the development of an appropriate methodology to teach phrasal vocabulary to second language learners.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the relation between the teaching of Chinese syntax and the acquisition process by adult learners based on multitheoretical and multimethodological approaches. Through a brief review of the features of Chinese syntax and a comparative study of three different syntactic analytic systems, a Chinese linguistic background is provided. A further study of pedagogical Chinese syntax was conducted by investigating the teaching materials and methods introduced in three commonly used Chinese textbooks. Based on the Chinese linguistic and pedagogical background, the surveys were designed to probe the learners' acquisition process of Chinese syntax. The studies involved a total of 73 subjects who are native English speakers learning Chinese at different universities. It has been found that: (1) adult learners' acquisition order and rate are closely related to their cognitive skills; (2) the scope of acquisition in adults is subject to time limitations; (3) analysis & analogy are the main methods used by adult learners in the acquisition of syntax; (4) the learning environment & the knowledge of the target syntax by adult learners are not required to be situationally linked; (5) the process of syntactic transfer is incomplete among adult learners due to the lack of target language input; (6) the general failure rate in L2 acquisition partially associates with the lack of the fully functional innate language faculty; (7) the adult learners' common mistakes in syntactic acquisition process are predictable due to syntactic transfer and the influences from L1; (8) different teaching methods result in different strengths in students; (9) there is a gap between grammatical competence & communicative competence in the adult learners' acquisition process. According to those features, I proposed nine pedagogical principles for the Chinese syntax teaching, and a case study of teaching Chinese structures with three post-verbal complements was conducted in order to have a field-test. The discussion in this dissertation has partially confirmed the claim made by psycho-linguistic researchers that learning a second language is a complex process. There is a hierarchical order in acquiring language competence, and the acquisition of hierarchically ordered skills requires integrated approaches.

This study explored the construction of written language knowledge as evidenced by the changes in forty-seven preschool children's autographs. Throughout the school year children were asked to "write your name and draw a picture of yourself." The resulting name writing samples indicated that changes in children's autographs were not idiosyncratic but identifiable transitions in a cognitive constructive process as children gradually attempted to make sense out of written language by writing their names. Transitions identified in children's autographs included: graphic actions (scribbling); random graphemes dispersed within drawing; spatial differentiation between writing and drawing; zigzag lines; zigzag lines with graphemes; linear and eventually horizontal, discrete, letterlike strings; reduced number of graphemes; increasing number of pertinent letters in and/or out of order; appropriate number of placeholders and pertinent letters; recognizable letters; and, eventually conventional signatures. As children's autographs evolved over time they provided evidence that children construct knowledge about written language much as Piaget and others have suggested young children construct logico-mathematical knowledge; not by using adult logic but by trying to make sense of and understand written language. Conventional or even recognizable autographs did not suddenly appear or result from the copying of models. Rather, autographs evolved over time as children devised strategies and followed intuitive rules while solving the problem of distinguishing writing from drawing, generating the culturally significant actions involved in writing, discovering the distinctive orthographic features of letters, and eventually controlling the orthographic conventions of name writing. In addition to providing evidence for name writing as a constructive process, this study also presented information indicating that initially, name writing is ideographic and is not based on knowledge of letter names or understanding letter/sound correspondences. Name writing was also discussed as a significant sign of young children's emerging use of symbols. The conclusion was reached that name writing, when approached as a constructive process, is an appropriate curriculum component in preschool programs and an essential ingredient in the emerging literacy of young children.

This study of one echolalic boy with autism assessed the effects of interlocutor directiveness (high and low) and knowledge of the lexical items (known and unknown) on the frequency of occurrence of immediate verbal imitations (IVIs). The occurrence of IVIs produced in response to the condition in which unknown items were presented with a high directive style differed significantly (p < .05) from the occurrence of IVIs produced in response to the other conditions. This finding suggests that previous studies attributing increases in IVIs solely to either linguistic or social variables did not account for interaction effects. A visual display of the data indicated that the first presentation of a lexical item accounted for most of the increases in IVIs relative to subsequent presentations of the same item. This observation is in line with the interpretation of Leonard, Schwartz, Folger, Newhoff, & Wilcox, (1979), that normal children imitate the most "informative" items.

In this study, the effect of the word processor on third semester Spanish students at the University of Arizona was examined. The study was performed over two semesters, using a control and an experimental group each time. The communicative language approach for second language learning was implemented in a cooperative learning environment for both control and experimental groups. Control groups used paper and pencil to write their class essays and experimental groups used the word processor. The experimental groups outperformed the control groups. The semester variable by itself was also significant. However, there was no significant interaction between group and semester. Replication studies are needed to validate the results of this study.

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No description available.

This thesis is a case study on the emergence of functional categories in bilingual first language acquisition. The investigation focuses on the transition from one-word to multiword utterances and the shaping of functional projections of Determiner, Agreement and Tense and their associated formal features. The empirical basis of this work is a corpus of thirty-nine videorecorded observations of Carlo, an English-Italian bilingual child, during free-play sessions with an adult. Data was collected separately for English and Italian for a period of fifteen months from when the child was 1;10 until he was 3;1, and was then transcribed in CHAT format. Four interrelated lines of enquiry inform the analysis presented here. The principal research question concerns the acquisitional strategies adopted by C. in these early stages of development in the two languages. A bilingual child is the closest one can get to a perfect matched pair where a number of variables such as socio-cognitive development, socio-economic status, parents' education, etc. are eliminated, and the two main variables to be investigated are the child's two input languages. This is an ideal situation in which the respective roles of general acquisitional strategies and language particular ones can be teased apart. An analysis of the emergence of the morphosyntactic correlates of Determiner, Agreement and Tense categories in English and Italian reveals a discrepancy between the two languages in the age of acquisition, rate of acquisition and in the language-specific strategies the child adopts. The observation of a significant difference in C.'s acquisitional strategies in English and Italian leads us to the second and third research questions: the way in which the emergence of functional categories differs between the two languages, and the reasons why this should be the case. The most obvious difference is the extent to which morphological correlates of functional categories emerge in the child's speech. In Italian, verbal and nominal morphology emerges earlier than in English and, at least in the nominal system, there is evidence that an Agreement category is part of the child's grammar. In English, verbal morphology is virtually non-existent by the end of the period of observation, and there is no substantial evidence that either Agreement or Tense are realised. Lexically-specific, item-based learning plays a substantial role in both languages, but in Italian there is some evidence that a number of grammatical contrasts are becoming productive by age 3;0, albeit some of them are still limited to a small number of lexical items. Two reasons were identified for the observed differences in the emergence of Determiner, Agreement and Tense in English and Italian: a typological reason, and an environmental reason. The former concerns the richness of Italian morphology, where grammatical contrasts are transparently marked both on nominal and verbal paradigms, as opposed to the relative poverty of English morphology where such contrasts correlate less obviously ans systematically with morphophonological markers. The latter reason concerns the very different input conditions in which C. is exposed to Italian and English: Italian is the home language spoken to him by his family and his babsysitters, while he is addressed in English by the staff at the nursery where one adult is in charge of several children and cannot engage in the one-to-one interaction which is typical of the dyadic situation in which C. finds himself at home. The differences observed in the lead-lag pattern between C.'s Italian and his English also provide sufficient evidence to address the fourth research question concerning the separate developement of the two languages. The analysis of the data did not reveal any systematic interferences from one language to the other. On the contrary there is evidence that C. is sensitive to the different morphosyntactic cues of his two input languages, and that he can treat the two as independent, self-contained problem spaces.