Book review

Developmental Psycholinguistics

Irina Sekerina, Eva Fernandez & Harald Clahsen (Eds.) 2008. Developmental Psycholinguistics. Amsterdam and Phildelphia: John Benjamins

Reviewed by Christina Behme, Dalhousie University

This volume is the result of the Workshop on Online Methods in Children's Language Processing held at CUNY in 2006. Traditionally it has been assumed that children acquire step by step the knowledge of a static database (grammar) but little emphasis had been placed on the mechanisms that operate in real time when children use language (e.g., Bellugi & Brown 1964, Ferguson & Slobin 1973, McDaniel et al. 1996). Research had primarily focused on language competence but recently the interest of researchers has shifted towards several aspects of language performance. Some of the techniques that have initially only been used in research with adult subjects (e.g., eye tracking, event related brain activity measurement, cross modal priming) have been adapted successfully to use with preschoolers and infants. The contributers provide insights in how changing research paradigms advance our understanding of language processing in children and demonstrate the tight interaction of linguistic and cognitive development.

The six chapters highlight different research methods and provide a broad coverage of many aspects of language acquisition throughout the entire span of early childhood. Harald Clahsen describes experiments that use response time measures to examine how children process sentences and inflected words in real time. He points out that methods for studying children's online language processing must be appropriate for children, time sensitive, linguistically versatile, field compatible and should furthermore provide natural stimuli. Claudia Maennel and Angela Friedrich introduce neurocognitive studies of language acquisition in infants from birth to three years. They utilize event-related brain potentials to investigate the onset of discrimination of phonotactic language features (some already present in newborns), phonotactic knowledge and word recognition (in 12-month-old infants), sentence comprehension (in 14-month-old infants), and structural dependencies (in 24-to-32-month-old children). The methods used by these researchers allow studying language development in very young children and provide an opportunity "to gain a more fine-grained picture of [language] acquisition and its neurophysiological basis" (p. 62).

The following three chapters are dedicated to different applications of eye tracking measurement. John Trueswell advocates an integrated, dynamic processing approach to language development. He uses the visual world paradigm and the world situated eye gaze paradigm (for detailed overviews see Fernald et al. 1998, Trueswell & Tanenhaus 2005) to study the comprehension of syntactically ambiguous sentences in toddlers and preschoolers. His work demonstrates how the eye position of children can be used as online tool to obtain information about attention to spoken language. His research suggests that "children weigh multiple linguistic and non-linguistic constraints when making referential decisions" (p. 91) and he concludes that cognitive development is the acquisition of dynamic skills (e.g., interaction with the world, language comprehension and production). Anne Fernald and her coworkers show how the 'looking while listening' methodology can produce high resolution moment to moment measures of speech processing in young children and discuss in detail the individual steps of the procedure. This method supplements traditional methods (e.g., diary studies (Bloom 1973), studies of vocabulary growth (Fenson et al. 2007), comprehension experiments (Shipley et al., 1969) and word learning experiments (Markman 1989, Tomasello 2000) and provides researchers with a powerful way of exploring how very young children relate perceptual and linguistic features of speech to the visual world they experience. Tracking the eye gaze of young children allows researchers access to young children's referential decision making process. The researchers confirm that the acquisition process of vocabulary occurs in a piecemeal fashion and is fine-tuned over time. Furthermore, the eye gaze paradigm has been used successfully to confirm that not only adults but also young children rely on abstract syntactic representations when they comprehend spoken sentences. Jesse Snedecker and Malathi Thothathiri report on several experiments which use a 'poor man's eyetracker' technique to confirm that lexical within-verb priming and abstract between-verb priming plays a role in sentence comprehension in children as young as 3 years and occurs reliably in children 4.5 years and older. They stress the need for future research to uncover " whether young children ... have a language processing system in which lexical and abstract representations interact to produce both item-specific and generalized patterns of use" (p. 163).

Eye tracking techniques will play an important role in this research. The concluding chapter by Helen Smith Cairns places the research using on-line processing methods in a historical context and provides suggestions for future research topics. Much work remains to be done before we can hope to obtain a full understanding of the development of linguistic competence and performance. This work is not only important to satisfy our scientific curiosity but a better understanding of the complexities of language acquisition in normal children will also enable us to recognize (and hopefully treat) anomalies in the language acquisition process already in early infancy.

Developmental Psycholinguistics aims at a relatively narrow audience and provides a wealth of valuable information for this target group. Especially students of language acquisition, developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience will profit from the detailed description of experimental methods and find ample of motivation for formulating future research questions. Speech pathologists and early childhood educators can adjust the described methods for targeted search of early signs of anomalies in risk groups (e.g., Chapters 2, 4, 6). In addition the volume would also be a good supplemental reading for advanced philosophy of language courses since it will provide valuable empirical insights that can inform philosophical debates.

References

Bellugi, U. & Brown, R. 1964. The acquisition of language. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

Bloom, P. 1973. One word at a time. The Hague, Mouton.

Fenson, L., Marchman, V., Thal, P., Reznick, J., & Bates, E. 2007. MacArthur-Bates communictive development inventories: User's guide and technical manual. 2nd edition. Baltimore: Brookes.

Fernald, A., Pinto, J., Swingley, D., Weinberg, A. & McRoberts, G. 1998. Rapid gains in speed of verbal processing by infants in the 2nd year. Psychological Science 9, 72-72.

Ferguson, C. & Slobin, D. (Eds.) 1973. Studies of Child Language Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Markman, E. 1989.Categorization and naming in children. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Shipley, E., Smith, C., & Gleitman, L. 1969. A study of the acquisition of language: Free responses to commands. Language 45, 322-342.

Tomasello, M. 2000. Do young children have syntactic competence? Cognition 74, 209-253.

Trueswell, J. & Tanenhaus, M. 2005. Approaches to studying world-situated language use: Bridging the language-as-product and language-as action traditions. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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