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Ling 210, Dr. Troyer Acquisition/Psycholinguistics Article Response Page 1

Choose one of the three options below—you will read an article and write a 500 word response.

Option 1: Child Language Acquisition

From the class webpage (Week 8), download the article “When Knowledge Causes Failure” which was

published in the journal Lingua in 2009.

I chose this article because it is relatively short (by linguistics article standards), is not too technical,

and reveals current findings about: 1) when children learn adjectives, and 2) an interesting way in which

past research has failed.

By way of introduction, in linguistics “novel” means new, so the research examines at what age

children are able to understand that a new (novel) word is an adjective. The standard test is to play a

game—the researcher uses a cute puppet and a simple picture of an apple with a design or pattern on it

and says: “See what’s in this picture? The puppet says it’s bisk all over.”

Then shows the child two elephants, for example—one that has the design on it and one that does not—

and says: “Now look at these two pictures. Is there something here that’s bisk?”

Of course any adult will subconsciously analyze “bisk” as an unfamiliar adjective (it follows NP +

is) and pick the elephant that has the design on it, but at what age do children gain this syntactic/

semantic insight? If the child picks the one with the same design as the apple, we know that child has

correctly understood “bisk” as an adjective that can be applied to different objects.

Interestingly, in past research it was ‘proven’ that most 4-year-olds can do this but 3-year-olds

cannot. However, the authors of this article suggest that the way the older research worded some of the

questions to the child was unclear. Researchers often showed a picture and said:

“Let’s look at this one. The puppet says this is a very bisk one.”

“Now can you give the dragon another one that’s bisk?”

The writers of this article realized that using the pronoun “one” in the experiment can be confusing—

they even did the test with adults to make sure. Read the article to find out what the authors discovered

about children’s ability to understand novel adjectives and how adults understand the pronoun “one”.

Write a response of at least (500 words) that discusses any of your thoughts on the topic of

child language acquisition that are related to the article. You should also address the fact that a

very basic knowledge of lexical categories (adjectives, pronouns), syntax, and semantics is

necessary to even begin to think about how language is acquired. How will this knowledge help

you as a teacher in the future?

Option 2: American Sign Language and Language Acquisition

From the class webpage (Week 8), download the article “Issues in Second Language Literacy Education

with Learners Who are Deaf” which was published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education

and Bilingualism May 2009.

This article is written from an ESL/Bilingual perspective and focuses on people who grew up with

ASL as their first language (L1) who are trying to learn written English as their second language (L2).

As the authors state, this does not represent all deaf learners, but these days L1-ASL and L2-written

English is the case for the majority. Two important concepts that are used in the article are BICS (Basic

Ling 210, Dr. Troyer Acquisition/Psycholinguistics Article Response Page 2

Interpersonal Communication Skills) and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). One of

the main points is that hearing ESL students (whose L1 may be Spanish or Chinese or any other spoken-

written language) first acquire BICS (basic conversation) then it is easier to learn CALP (academic

English). However, deaf students do not have access to BICS, which makes it much harder for them to

learn CALP (which is more grammatically complex and has a far larger vocabulary).

Write a 500 word response to the article. You may summarize information that is new and

interesting to you, but also include your experiences that are directly related. Does the BICS vs.

CALP difference help explain difficulties deaf students have with reading and writing English?

The article is relatively short and does not discuss solutions in detail, so what ideas do you have to

help deaf students?

Option 3: Aphasia

From the class webpage (Week 8), download the article “Poetry and Prose in the Self-Perception of One

Man Who Lives with Brain Injury and Aphasia” which was published in Topics in Stroke Rehabilitation

May/June 2008.

Though I was tempted to assign a more challenging technical article on aphasia from the Journal of

Neurolinguistics, which you have access to through our library databases, I found this article fascinating

for the questions it raises about identity, language, and creative writing.

Read the article and write a response of at least (500 words) that discusses any of your

thoughts on the topic, including the nature and/or function of creative writing—just be sure that

at some point you address the connection between the physical brain and linguistic abilities. You

are also free to philosophize about the nature of what is and is not “poetry”.