The remainder of the book is divided into two parts. In the first part, Chapter 2 compares different approaches to language acquisition with respect to a number of controversial issues, further showing how functional approaches ac- count for the regulation of personal, spatial, and temporal information in discourse.
Chapter 3 then discusses some general similarities and differences across linguis- tic systems, which are shown to be relevant for our understanding of language.
Chapter 4 examines studies of children’s discourse, including their early conversa- tional skills, their increasing ability to decontextualise information in communica- tion, and their reliance on cognitivemacrostructuresto represent event sequences.
Chapter 5 reviews studies of children’s comprehension and production of refer- ring expressions, which present strikingly divergent claims about the acquisition of the nominal and pronominal system. The evidence suggests that discourse-internal functions are a late development in comparison to other uses, but little is still known about children’s discourse-internal uses of clause structure across languages.
Chapter 6 discusses the acquisition of spatial and temporal-aspectual devices.
In both domains, studies have invoked either language-independent factors or language-specific ones to account for recurrent and variable developmental patterns.
Some evidence suggests that children have difficulties with the linear organisation of spatio-temporal information and that typological factors influence their discourse organisation.
The second part of the book first pursues this literature review in Chapter 7, which focuses on pervasive methodological problems in the study of language acquisition.
The remainder of this chapter describes the design of the study presented in subse- quent chapters, which examines the narrative productions of children and adults in four languages (English, German, French, and Chinese) in order to address some of the unanswered questions previously raised. Chapter 8 examines how animate char- acters are introduced and mentioned subsequently in the narratives. It is shown that the relative functional complexity of these devices, which contribute to two levels of organisation (the sentence and discourse), accounts for the cross-linguistic sim- ilarities and differences that can be observed in the acquisition process. Chapter 9 examines the expression of motion and location within and across utterances. It is concluded that sentence factors (grammaticalisation or lexicalisation) and discourse factors (spatial anchoring and marking the status of spatial information) both affect children’s uses of spatial devices and interact during acquisition, resulting in invari- ant as well as language-specific developmental patterns. Chapter 10 examines the
Introduction
uses of temporal-aspectual devices in the narratives. The evidence partly supports the ‘defective tense hypothesis’, but also shows the impact of language-specific and discourse factors on uses of tense/aspect markings.
Chapter 11 synthesises the results, comparing them with those of previous stud- ies. The discussion highlights three main recurrent points across domains. First, discourse-internal functions develop only gradually in all languages, allowing chil- dren to organise discourse without reliance on non-linguistic context. Second, the evidence shows the impact of – and interactions among – two main types of determinants: syntactic and semantic factors affecting how children learn to rep- resent events within well-formed utterances, and functional factors affecting how they learn to regulate information flow across these utterances within well-formed discourse. Third, only some aspects of the developmental process can be generalised to all languages, while others are clearly language-specific. In each domain, cross- linguistic similarities and differences are shown to either complement or invalidate the conclusions of previous studies. Finally, more general conclusions are drawn in the context of available models of language acquisition. It is argued that the simul- taneous contribution of linguistic devices to the organisation of the sentence and of discourse is a crucial key to understanding language acquisition. This type of multifunctionality is universal, even though cross-linguistic variations result from the different ways in which languages map sentence and discourse functions onto forms. An adequate model of acquisition therefore requires an account of how the sentence and discourse levels of organisation are related within a cross-linguistic perspective. Concluding remarks make some suggestions for future lines of research that still need to be further explored.
I Available theories and data
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2 Theoretical issues
The present chapter provides theoretical background by spelling out some of the major current debates that oppose different approaches in developmental psycholin- guistics. I first summarise a number of main controversial issues that are currently debated in the study of language acquisition (Section 2.1). I then focus on some fun- damental properties of language within functional approaches to language (Section 2.2), including multifunctionality and context-dependence, as well as the existence of two levels of linguistic organisation, the sentence and discourse. Finally, I exam- ine general universal principles of discourse organisation that underlie how speakers regulate the flow of personal, spatial, and temporal information across utterances in cohesive discourse (Section 2.3). Subsequent chapters show how these principles constitute fundamental aspects of our linguistic competence that must be mastered by children and that affect their acquisition of linguistic devices across domains.