Virginia C Mueller Gathercole
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1692576 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Virginia C Mueller Gathercole |
| NOMBRES | Virginia C Mueller |
| APELLIDO | Gathercole |
| FIRMA | GATHERCOLE V C M |
| AFILIACIONES | Bangor University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4597-1383 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 6 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1978 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
Phonological interaction in Spanish-English bilinguals
This study compared Spanish-English bilinguals’ and English monolinguals’ VOT values for /b, d, g/ in cognates and non-cognates. Twenty-six young adult participants (fourteen bilinguals and twelve monolinguals, mean age 24 years) were administered a picture-naming task, balanced for cognate and non-cognate forms. VOT values of 30 target words per participant and per language were measured. The data support cross-linguistic interaction in bilingua…
Acquisition of doubly articulated stops among Ga-speaking children
This study investigates the acquisition of labio-velar stops by Ga-speaking children in Ghana. Such stops were elicited in initial, intervocalic, and pre-lateral positions through a picture naming task. Sixty Ga-dominant and Ga-English children at 5-, 6 1/2 -, and 8-years of age were tested. All age groups showed some difficulty with the doubly articulated stops, but this was relative to voicing, phonological environment, age, and input. Performa…
Preface
The influence of first language polysemy and first language and second language lexical frequencies on second language learners’ use of false cognates
Aims and objectives: This study examines second language (L2) bilinguals’ use of words that have the same or similar forms in their two languages but whose meaning extensions differ – that is, false cognates. We examine the conditions under which L2 speakers inappropriately use false cognates in the L2. How do frequency of the relevant words in each language and polysemy of the word in the first language (L1) affect L2 learners’ use of such words…
The influence of native English-speaking environment on Akan-English bilinguals’ production of English inter-dental fricatives
Aims and Objectives: This study examined how age of acquisition, immersion in a native English-speaking environment, and phonological environment influence Akan-English bilinguals’ production of English inter-dental fricatives. Design/Methodology: Forty-five Akan-English bilinguals who immigrated to the USA between the ages of 10 and 64 participated. English inter-dental fricatives occurring in word-initial, intervocalic, and word-final positions…
Eye tracking investigation into semantic convergence in fully fluent Spanish–English bilingual adults
Aims and Objectives: This article examines semantic convergence of bilinguals’ two languages in the case of words that overlap semantically but are not fully isomorphic in meaning and application. To what extent do the type of bilingual, type of category, and relative semantic width across the languages matter? Design: The primary method involves eye tracking while participants chose pictures corresponding to an English word heard. The data exami…
WHODUNNIT? Language interaction in identification of sentential subjects in Wales and Patagonia
This study examined Spanish-Welsh (in Patagonia) and Welsh-English (in North Wales) bilingual children’s and adults’ processing of sentences in which two noun phrases acted as arguments of a verb. The goal was to determine the relative importance of distinct cues to the identification of the subject in the bilinguals’ processing of their two languages, and to explore possible crosslinguistic influence between their two languages. We provided spea…
Gender Assignment to Spanish Pseudowords by Monolingual and Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children
This study examines gender marking in the Spanish of Basque-Spanish bilingual children. We analyze data collected via a production task designed to elicit 48 DPs, controlling for gender of referents and for number and types of morphological cues to grammatical gender. The goals were to determine the extent to which participants rely on biological cues (female referent =>FEM gender, male referent =>MASC gender) and morpho-phonological cues (-a end…
Teasing apart factors influencing executive function performance in bilinguals and monolinguals at different ages
This study attempts to tease apart a variety of factors that may contribute to performance on executive function tasks. Data from the Simon task is re-examined to determine the contributions of age, SES, language proficiency/vocabulary, general cognitive performance, and bilingualism on performance. The results suggest influence from a variety of factors, with a major contribution from relative age and from language proficiency, as measured by vo…
Semantic and conceptual factors in Spanish–English bilinguals’ processing of lexical categories in their two languages
This study examines possible semantic interaction in fully fluent adult simultaneous and early second language (L2) bilinguals. Monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English ( n = 144) were tested for their understanding of lexical categories that differed in their two languages. Simultaneous bilinguals came from homes in which Spanish or Spanish and English were spoken when they were children, and L2 bilinguals entered the US as chil…
The invisible gorilla of piecemeal, lexically-specific acquisition
Preview this article: The invisible gorilla of piecemeal, lexically-specific acquisition, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/lab.4.3.05gat-1.gif
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
This study explores the extent to which a bilingual advantage can be observed for executive function tasks in children of varying levels of language dominance, and examines the contributions of general cognitive knowledge, linguistic abilities, language use and socio-economic level to performance. Welsh–English bilingual and English monolingual primary school age and teenage children were tested on two executive function tasks, a tapping task and…
Interactive influences in bilingual processing and development
I wish to send my extreme gratitude to all of the reviewers who assisted in the review of the articles submitted for this special issue. Their work added immeasurably, through their constructive feedback to the authors, to the quality of the work presented here. I am grateful also to Colin Baker for taking on the editing role for the last article, by myself and colleagues, and for his unfailing support and good humor in the preparation of this sp…
Bilingual first-language development
This study explores the extent to which bilingual speakers in stable bilingual communities become fully bilingual in their two community languages. Growing evidence shows that in bilingual communities in which one language is very dominant, acquisition of the dominant language may be quite unproblematic across sub-groups, while acquisition of the minority language can be hampered under conditions of reduced input. In Wales, children are exposed t…
Designing a Normed Receptive Vocabulary Test for Bilingual Populations
The purpose of this paper is to propose an applied model for the assessment of bilingual children's language abilities with standardised tests. We discuss the purposes of such tests, especially in relation to vocabulary knowledge, and potential applications of test results for each of those purposes. The specific case to be examined here is that of Welsh vocabulary, but the principles are relevant to any other bilingual population and any other a…
Miami and North Wales, So Far and Yet So Near
This paper proposes a constructivist account of the development of morphosyntax in bilinguals, based on an examination of two populations – English–Spanish bilinguals in Miami and English–Welsh bilinguals in North Wales. Despite sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences across these groups, the development of bilinguals in the two groups reveals core commonalities. These core commonalities are posited to be a by-product of normal processes of…
Children's productive command of grammatical gender and mutation in Welsh
This paper examines Welsh-speaking children's productive command of mutation — a set of morphophonological changes, conditioned by lexical and syntactic environments, that affect the initial consonants of words. In Welsh, grammatical gender is marked by mutations, and the mapping between mutation and gender is opaque. Using a Cloze-type procedure, Experiment 1 presented children between the ages of 4 1 /2 and 9 years with a distant gender-marked …
Introduction to Special Issue
This special issue focuses on evidence bearing on the specific ways in which linguistic differences across languages may affect what is learned early (or late) in language and to what extent language-specific structures interact with cognition. The ultimate question is whether or not development follows a universal course or is influenced by the linguistic system being acquired. Of particular interest in the linguistic realm are data exploring wh…
Categorizing collections of objects
This study examines the effect of collective nouns in Welsh on children's processing. Welsh- and English-speaking children aged 4, 8 and 11 were tested in a categorization and a recognition task. Results show significant effects of number of objects and numbers of collections in displays, as well as of the syntax used in presenting novel words, on participants' categorization. The most robust finding was that Welsh-speaking participants took sign…
Special Issue
Negative commands in Spanish-speaking children
In a recent commentary, Grinstead (2000) argues against Bates & Goodman's (1999) claims that the development of grammar is contingent on developments in the lexicon, and that, therefore, there is no need for an independent grammar domain. Citing data on the acquisition of negative commands in Catalan and Spanish, Grinstead argues that beyond grammatical elements that are linked with lexical items, there must also exist independently a computation…
The Emergence of Linguistic Person in Spanish-Speaking Children
Data from 3 children (2 male, 1 female) acquiring Spanish are explored for the development of linguistic person in an inflectional language. Contrastive use of person, tense, and number and the presence of overt subjects and overt objects are examined. Recent claims that person emerges before tense and number and that the latter license overt subjects are not supported. Each of the 3 children follows a different route in the development of person…
Function as a criterion for the extension of new words
Four experiments examine the child's ability to draw on functional information to predict the similarity of function across exemplars and to extend new words from an initial exemplar to one of two others. Experiments 1 and 2 tested 16 three- and four-year-olds each (mean ages: 4;5 and 4;4, in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively) and reveal that three- and four-year-olds are able to predict similarity of function and to extend new words on the basis…
What's in a noun? Welsh-, English-, and Spanish- speaking children see it differently
This paper examines young children's abilities to interpret new words as referring to collections. Two experiments examine English-, Spanish-, and Welsh-speaking children's interpretations of novel nouns that could refer either to a single object or to a collection. Experiment 1 tested 53 3- and 4-year-olds; Experiment 2 tested 30 2- to 3-year-olds and 30 4- to 5-year-olds. As early as two years of age, children's responses to new nouns differ ac…
The early acquisition of Spanish verbal morphology
This paper examines the earliest uses of verbal morphology in aninflectional language, Spanish . Stringent criteria are applied to data from two children to determine what inflections are used productively. Analyses reveal that there is little productive command of verbal morphology at early ages and that subjects begin with a single form per verb. When elements of the verb paradigm do begin to become productive, they do so in a very gradual, pie…
Gender Assignment to Spanish Pseudowords by Monolingual and Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children
This study examines gender marking in the Spanish of Basque-Spanish bilingual children. We analyze data collected via a production task designed to elicit 48 DPs, controlling for gender of referents and for number and types of morphological cues to grammatical gender. The goals were to determine the extent to which participants rely on biological cues (female referent =>FEM gender, male referent =>MASC gender) and morpho-phonological cues (-a end…
Semantic and conceptual factors in Spanish–English bilinguals’ processing of lexical categories in their two languages
This study examines possible semantic interaction in fully fluent adult simultaneous and early second language (L2) bilinguals. Monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English ( n = 144) were tested for their understanding of lexical categories that differed in their two languages. Simultaneous bilinguals came from homes in which Spanish or Spanish and English were spoken when they were children, and L2 bilinguals entered the US as chil…
The Emergence of Linguistic Person in Spanish-Speaking Children
Data from 3 children (2 male, 1 female) acquiring Spanish are explored for the development of linguistic person in an inflectional language. Contrastive use of person, tense, and number and the presence of overt subjects and overt objects are examined. Recent claims that person emerges before tense and number and that the latter license overt subjects are not supported. Each of the 3 children follows a different route in the development of person…
Some Myths You May Have Heard about First Language Acquisition
This article focuses on three assumptions that have been made in recent work on second language acquisition about first language acquisition: Comprehension precedes production; children acquire language in a systematic, rule-governed way; and the impetus behind first language acquisition is communicative need. Research on first language acquisition challenges these assumptions. Empirical evidence indicates that the relationship between comprehens…
Towards a Universal for Deictic Verbs of Motion
Haphazard examples, prototype theory, and the acquisition of comparatives
The 'simple' and 'intensive' hypotheses for X-er and too X are re- examined with data from children's spontaneous speech. Although the data to some extent support these hypotheses, they provide evidence that children's uses of X-er and too X extend beyond simple and intensive uses and indicate that these forms do not MEAN 'X' or 'very X' for young children. The data are best explained by drawing on two theories that have been proposed in work on …
‘He has too much hard questions’
Subjects aged 3;6–9;0 were asked to judge sentences in which much and many modified prototypical and non-prototypical mass and count nouns, and to correct those sentences judged to be deviant. The experimental results indicate that children do not approach the co-occurrence conditions of much and many with various nouns from a semantic point of view, but rather from a morphosyntactic or surface-distributional one. Children learn the proper form t…
The acquisition of the present perfect
This study assesses the role of frequency of input in the acquisition of the present perfect by Scottish and American children. Two questions were addressed: (1) Do adults speaking Scottish English use the present perfect more frequently in speech to children than those speaking American English? (2) If there is a difference in the frequency of input, how does this affect the course of development of this structure in the language of Scottish vs.…
The contrastive hypothesis for the acquisition of word meaning
The evidence for the Contrastive Hypothesis (Clark 1980, 1983 a, b , 1987, Barrett 1978, 1982) is reviewed. An examination of data from the acquisition of object words, relational words and superordinate terms reveals little support for this hypothesis that young children automatically assume that every two words in their lexicons contrast. Further, theoretical problems with the positions that children assign words to semantic fields as they are …
Some Myths You May Have Heard about First Language Acquisition
This article focuses on three assumptions that have been made in recent work on second language acquisition about first language acquisition: Comprehension precedes production; children acquire language in a systematic, rule-governed way; and the impetus behind first language acquisition is communicative need. Research on first language acquisition challenges these assumptions. Empirical evidence indicates that the relationship between comprehens…
Contrast
This article challenges the position of Clark (1988) with regard to Contrast. The evidence cited in support of this theory from adult languages is far from clear, and the evidence coming from child language admits of alternative explanations. In addition, the ‘logic’ of assuming Contrast leads to insurmountable difficulties in the acquisition of irregular forms and allomorphs. An alternative to Contrast is proposed. This draws on the drive toward…
The influence of function on ontological status
Word meaning biases or language-specific effects? Evidence from English, Spanish and Korean
This study examines the hypothesis that children learning distinct languages will show differential adherence to proposed word- meaning, biases. English-, Spanish-, and Korean-speaking pre schoolers were tested for their extension of new nouns to referents that shared shape, substance and/or functional properties with the initial referent. English- and Spanish-speaking subjects performed differently from Korean-speaking children. Korean speakers …
Word meaning biases or language-specific effects? Evidence from English, Spanish and Korean
This study examines the hypothesis that children learning distinct languages will show differential adherence to proposed word- meaning biases. English-, Spanish-, and Korean-speaking pre schoolers were tested for their extension of new nouns to referents that shared shape, substance and/or functional properties with the initial referent. English- and Spanish-speaking subjects performed differently from Korean-speaking children. Korean speakers g…
The early acquisition of Spanish verbal morphology
This paper examines the earliest uses of verbal morphology in aninflectional language, Spanish . Stringent criteria are applied to data from two children to determine what inflections are used productively. Analyses reveal that there is little productive command of verbal morphology at early ages and that subjects begin with a single form per verb. When elements of the verb paradigm do begin to become productive, they do so in a very gradual, pie…
What's in a noun? Welsh-, English-, and Spanish- speaking children see it differently
This paper examines young children's abilities to interpret new words as referring to collections. Two experiments examine English-, Spanish-, and Welsh-speaking children's interpretations of novel nouns that could refer either to a single object or to a collection. Experiment 1 tested 53 3- and 4-year-olds; Experiment 2 tested 30 2- to 3-year-olds and 30 4- to 5-year-olds. As early as two years of age, children's responses to new nouns differ ac…
Function as a criterion for the extension of new words
Four experiments examine the child's ability to draw on functional information to predict the similarity of function across exemplars and to extend new words from an initial exemplar to one of two others. Experiments 1 and 2 tested 16 three- and four-year-olds each (mean ages: 4;5 and 4;4, in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively) and reveal that three- and four-year-olds are able to predict similarity of function and to extend new words on the basis…
Negative commands in Spanish-speaking children
In a recent commentary, Grinstead (2000) argues against Bates & Goodman's (1999) claims that the development of grammar is contingent on developments in the lexicon, and that, therefore, there is no need for an independent grammar domain. Citing data on the acquisition of negative commands in Catalan and Spanish, Grinstead argues that beyond grammatical elements that are linked with lexical items, there must also exist independently a computation…
The Emergence of Linguistic Person in Spanish-Speaking Children
Data from 3 children (2 male, 1 female) acquiring Spanish are explored for the development of linguistic person in an inflectional language. Contrastive use of person, tense, and number and the presence of overt subjects and overt objects are examined. Recent claims that person emerges before tense and number and that the latter license overt subjects are not supported. Each of the 3 children follows a different route in the development of person…
Introduction to Special Issue
This special issue focuses on evidence bearing on the specific ways in which linguistic differences across languages may affect what is learned early (or late) in language and to what extent language-specific structures interact with cognition. The ultimate question is whether or not development follows a universal course or is influenced by the linguistic system being acquired. Of particular interest in the linguistic realm are data exploring wh…
Categorizing collections of objects
This study examines the effect of collective nouns in Welsh on children's processing. Welsh- and English-speaking children aged 4, 8 and 11 were tested in a categorization and a recognition task. Results show significant effects of number of objects and numbers of collections in displays, as well as of the syntax used in presenting novel words, on participants' categorization. The most robust finding was that Welsh-speaking participants took sign…
Special Issue
Miami and North Wales, So Far and Yet So Near
This paper proposes a constructivist account of the development of morphosyntax in bilinguals, based on an examination of two populations – English–Spanish bilinguals in Miami and English–Welsh bilinguals in North Wales. Despite sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences across these groups, the development of bilinguals in the two groups reveals core commonalities. These core commonalities are posited to be a by-product of normal processes of…
Children's productive command of grammatical gender and mutation in Welsh
This paper examines Welsh-speaking children's productive command of mutation — a set of morphophonological changes, conditioned by lexical and syntactic environments, that affect the initial consonants of words. In Welsh, grammatical gender is marked by mutations, and the mapping between mutation and gender is opaque. Using a Cloze-type procedure, Experiment 1 presented children between the ages of 4 1 /2 and 9 years with a distant gender-marked …
Designing a Normed Receptive Vocabulary Test for Bilingual Populations
The purpose of this paper is to propose an applied model for the assessment of bilingual children's language abilities with standardised tests. We discuss the purposes of such tests, especially in relation to vocabulary knowledge, and potential applications of test results for each of those purposes. The specific case to be examined here is that of Welsh vocabulary, but the principles are relevant to any other bilingual population and any other a…
Bilingual first-language development
This study explores the extent to which bilingual speakers in stable bilingual communities become fully bilingual in their two community languages. Growing evidence shows that in bilingual communities in which one language is very dominant, acquisition of the dominant language may be quite unproblematic across sub-groups, while acquisition of the minority language can be hampered under conditions of reduced input. In Wales, children are exposed t…
Cognitive effects of bilingualism
This study explores the extent to which a bilingual advantage can be observed for executive function tasks in children of varying levels of language dominance, and examines the contributions of general cognitive knowledge, linguistic abilities, language use and socio-economic level to performance. Welsh–English bilingual and English monolingual primary school age and teenage children were tested on two executive function tasks, a tapping task and…
Interactive influences in bilingual processing and development
I wish to send my extreme gratitude to all of the reviewers who assisted in the review of the articles submitted for this special issue. Their work added immeasurably, through their constructive feedback to the authors, to the quality of the work presented here. I am grateful also to Colin Baker for taking on the editing role for the last article, by myself and colleagues, and for his unfailing support and good humor in the preparation of this sp…
The invisible gorilla of piecemeal, lexically-specific acquisition
Preview this article: The invisible gorilla of piecemeal, lexically-specific acquisition, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/lab.4.3.05gat-1.gif
Linguistics (35 obras) · Psychology (34 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (22 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Computer Science (15 obras) · Reading and Literacy Development (14 obras) · Cognition (13 obras) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (11 obras) · Cognitive psychology (10 obras) · Neuroscience of multilingualism (8 obras)