Perspectives on the complexity of language acquisition: Conversation, prosody, typology and individual differences.

Edy Veneziano (1, 2)

1 FRE 2987 - Laboratoire Cognition et Comportement
2 MoDyCo - Modèles, Dynamiques, Corpus

Ann Peters' vision has contributed greatly to moving the field away from the assumption that language acquisition is an all-or-none affair. Owing to her detailed child-centered transcriptions and analyses of production, Ann Peters has provided evidence for partial acquisitions undergoing long and individually-varied processes of differentiation and reconstruction. Looking across the boundaries of linguistic notions, such as phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon, she took seriously those unglossable syllables (called « fillers ») that many children, confronted with different languages, start producing in their late single-word period. She has greatly contributed to research on the development of fillers as a fertile domain for the understanding of how linguistic categories might grow out of an initial intermingling of prosody, phonology and morphosyntax. By imposing only strictly necessary linguistic assumptions on children's production, Ann Peters has made researchers aware of the difficulties involved in identifying linguistic units in early child speech, an issue that still faces us and heavily conditions the developmental paths of language acquisition that are drawn.
Participants will highlight some leading concepts and empirical work contributed by Ann Peters to the field of language acquisition, and discuss how they resonate with their own past and ongoing research. They will discuss the theoretical impact of Ann Peters' conception of fillers (Demuth, Lleó, MacWhinney, Menn, Veneziano), the important place she has given to individual differences in the way children go about language acquisition (Lieven, Lleó, Smoczynska), the move from all-or-none concepts and categories to transitional and fuzzy phonoprosodic phenomena (Lopez Ornat), the emergence of syntactic forms and the importance of interim strategies in language acquisition (Lieven and Berman), her ideas about phonetic forms (Lieven), early segmentation and prosodic bundling (MacWhinney), and her contribution to transcription and to CHILDES (MacWhinney). Slobin will look at the notion of operating principles, as he and Ann Peters used it, and where it stands today. Aoyama will reveal the role of Ann Peters as a teacher and advisor, while Veneziano will talk about Ann Peters' influence and present involvement in a cross-linguistic project on the emergence of grammaticality that is very much in line with her encompassing approach to language acquisition.
Speakers will also share anecdotes of personal experience illuminating different facets of Ann Peters' personality.

Mots clés: Language acquisition; Conversation; prosody; typology; individual differences.; individual differences

Domaines: Linguistique

Edy Veneziano. Perspectives on the complexity of language acquisition: Conversation, prosody, typology and individual differences.. XI International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Jul 2008, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom. ⟨halshs-00416154⟩