Different speakers, different grammars – ScienceOpen
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      Different speakers, different grammars : Individual differences in native language attainment

      Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
      John Benjamins Publishing Company

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          Abstract

          This article reviews several recent studies suggesting that — contrary to a widespread belief — adult monolingual native speakers of the same language do not share the same mental grammar. The studies examined various aspects of linguistic knowledge, including inflectional morphology, passives, quantifiers, and more complex constructions with subordinate clauses. The findings suggest that, in some cases, language learners attend to different cues in the input and end up with different grammars; in others, some speakers extract only fairly specific, ‘local’ generalizations which apply to particular subclasses of items while others acquire more abstract rules which apply ‘across the board’. At least some of these differences are education-related: more educated speakers appear to acquire more general rules, possibly as a result of more varied linguistic experience. These findings have interesting consequences for research on bilingualism, particularly for research on ultimate attainment in second language acquisition, as well as important methodological implications for all language sciences.

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          Most cited references35

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            The Role of Consciousness in Second Language Learning1

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              Language input and child syntax.

              Existing work on the acquisition of syntax has been concerned mainly with the early stages of syntactic development. In the present study we examine later syntactic development in children. Also, existing work has focused on commonalities in the emergence of syntax. Here we explore individual differences among children and their relation to variations in language input. In Study 1 we find substantial individual differences in children's mastery of multiclause sentences and a significant relation between those differences and the proportion of multiclause sentences in parent speech. We also find individual differences in the number of noun phrases in children's utterances and a significant relation between those differences and the number of noun phrases in parent speech. In Study 2 we find greater syntactic growth over a year of preschool in classes where teachers' speech is more syntactically complex. The implications of our findings for the understanding of the sources of syntactic development are discussed.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
                LAB
                John Benjamins Publishing Company
                1879-9264
                1879-9272
                September 20 2012
                September 20 2012
                : 2
                : 3
                : 219-253
                Article
                10.1075/lab.2.3.01dab
                a7980830-ce8d-4aeb-91ed-99634c109b7a
                © 2012
                History

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