a b s t r a c tMainstream research in Linguistics claims that grammatical regularities are scarcely represented in the linguistic input to which children are exposed. However, recent empirical research shows that child-directed speech contains a series of reliable cues that might assist young language learners in language development. The present study aims at testing whether English child-directed speech contains morphosyntactic regularities which might be robust enough for infants to group nouns in their grammatical category. The results from the study show that, in fact, the kind of input available to English-learning infants contains reliable and consistent distributional cues to account for most of the nouns to which children are exposed.
Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., good is up-bad is down and good is right-bad is left). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants' hands while responding to the task-regardless of the location of their dominant hand-facilitates the judgment of positive and negative-valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor-congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context.
Previous research indicates that developmental contexts influence language development. These developmental contexts include bilingualism, which is the focus of the current paper. This study analyses the influence that the acquisition of a language, Catalan, has when the simultaneous acquisition of another similar language, Spanish, occurs. This influence is examined according to degree of exposure to the languages. The parents of 801 children completed the Catalan version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI-II questionnaire, which assesses the acquisition of vocabulary, morphology and grammatical complexity. Subjects were divided into three groups according to age and linguistic context (Catalan monolingual, medium bilingual and familiar bilingual). The results do not reveal substantial differences according to linguistic context. However, children aged 26-30 months with a medium bilingual profile show a higher level of vocabulary as compared to the other groups. The results are discussed in relation to the sociolinguistic context, caregiver diversity, typological distance between the languages and developmental stages of language acquisition.
RESUMENEstudios previos señalan que los contextos de desarrollo influyen en el desarrollo del lenguaje. Entre ellos está el contexto bilingüe en el que se centra el presente artículo, que analiza la influencia en la adquisición de una lengua, el catalán, de la adquisición simultánea de otra lengua, el español, en función del grado de exposición. Los progenitores de 801 niños contestaron a la adaptación catalana del cuestionario MacArthur-Bates CDI-II. Esta muestra se dividió en tres grupos de edad y tres grupos de contexto lingüístico (monolingüe-catalán, bilingüe medio y bilingüe familiar), analizando la adquisición del vocabulario, de la morfología y de la complejidad gramatical. Los resultados no muestran diferencias substanciales en función del contexto lingüístico. Sin embargo, en los niños de 26-30 meses se observa un nivel de vocabulario mayor en el grupo bilingüe con exposición media en comparación con los otros grupos. Estos resultados se discuten en relación con el contexto sociolingüístico, la diversidad de ARTICLE HISTORY
The use of the students' first language (L1) in the foreign language class (FL) is a common but controversial issue that has received little attention. This might be more relevant in the case of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), since, under CLIL approaches, students need to acquire content through an FL that they have not mastered yet. The current paper aims at analysing teachers' uses and perceptions of translanguaging in CLIL classrooms in a primary education context following a case study. Five CLIL primary education teachers from Catalonia participated in the study. They were voice-recorded for several sessions teaching a subject in CLIL with the same class and they also completed a questionnaire. The analysis showed that all the participants used their L1 for a number of purposes. Even though individual perceptions differed, in general, teachers were positive about using translanguaging. CLIL teachers would benefit both from reflecting on their own practices in terms of translanguaging uses and from formal instruction in the matter.
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