Carla L Hudson Kam
Biographic Data
| ID | 822514 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Carla L Hudson Kam |
| GIVEN NAMES | Carla L Hudson |
| FAMILY NAME | Kam |
| SIGNATURE | KAM C L H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7638-3656 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Thinking About Shin & Miller (2022)’s Step 1
Based on findings from a variety of research, Shin and Miller (Citation2022) propose a 4-step process that children go through as they learn sociolinguistic variation. Their proposal raises many interesting questions that should inspire future research. Here, I discuss their Step 1 – the stage in which, according to their proposal, children produce only a single variant, and so appear to be (temporarily) regularizing – and suggest this may not be…
Evaluating English-language morphological awareness assessments
Many studies have shown that morphological knowledge has effects on reading comprehension separate from other aspects of language knowledge. This has implications for reading instruction and assessment: it suggests that children could have reading comprehension difficulties that are due to a lack of morphological knowledge, and thus, that explicit instruction of morphology might be helpful for them, indeed for all children. To find children who m…
Measuring lexical and structural conventionalization in young sign languages
Compounding, as a nearly universal word-formation process that is very useful in emerging languages, might be expected to conventionalize early in a language’s history. However, a recent study focusing on novel compounding in ISL and ABSL found that this may not be the case, and moreover, that the two languages appear to differ in how compounding is conventionalizing ( Tkachman & Meir 2018 ). In this paper, we follow up on their findings, using s…
Iconicity and interpretability in language emergence
The iconic potential of sign languages suggests that the establishment of a conventionalized set of form-meaning pairings should be relatively easy. However, even an iconic form has to be interpreted correctly for it to conventionalize. In sign languages, spatial modulations are used to indicate real spatial relationships (locative) and grammatical relations. The former is a more-or-less direct representation of how things are situated with respe…
Learning speech-internal cues to pronoun interpretation from co-speech gesture
This study explores whether children can learn a structural processing bias relevant to pronoun interpretation from brief training. Over three days, 42 five-year-olds were exposed to narratives exhibiting a first-mentioned tendency. Two characters were introduced, and the first-mentioned was later described engaging in a solo activity. In our primary condition of interest, the Gesture Training condition, the solo-activity sentence contained an am…
The Emergence of the Allophonic Perception of Unfamiliar Speech Sounds
In human languages, different speech sounds can be contextual variants of a single phoneme, called allophones. Learning which sounds are allophones is an integral part of the acquisition of phonemes. Whether given sounds are separate phonemes or allophones in a listener's language affects speech perception. Listeners tend to be less sensitive to acoustic differences between sounds that are allophones. This study investigated the mechanisms behind…
Introducing the Infant Bookreading Database (IBDb)
Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0–36 months who answered questions about the English-language books they most commonly read to their children.…
Children's use of gesture in ambiguous pronoun interpretation
This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7–8 years of age) but not younger (4–5 years) children integrate co-referential gestures into their interpretation of pronouns. This is …
The impact of conditioning variables on the acquisition of variation in adult and child learners
Natural human languages often contain variation (sociolinguistic or Labovian variation) that is passed from one generation of speakers to the next, but studies of acquisition have largely ignored this, instead focusing on aspects of language that are more deterministic. Theories of acquisition, however, must be able to account for both. This article examines variation from the perspective of the statistical learning framework and explores feature…
First and second graders’ interpretation of Standard American English morphology across varieties of English
While African American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE) share many features, there are also differences that could affect comprehension. This article examines how 1st and 2nd grade AAE- and SAE-speaking children interpret sentences containing shared lexical and morphological (i.e., plural –s) forms as compared to sentences containing forms that do not regularly occur in AAE (past tense –ed, 3rd person present –s, future contracte…
The problem of conventionality in the development of creole morphological systems
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Getting it right by getting it wrong
Some cues are stronger than others
This article describes two experiments examining how 6- and 7-year-old Standard American English-speaking children interpret 3rd person present —s as a tense marker, as compared to lexical items and past tense —ed. Because —s corresponds to multiple meanings, unlike —ed, it may result in later acquisition. Using an offline picture-choice task (Experiment 1), the study found that while all children successfully comprehended —ed, only the 7-year-ol…
The use of uh and um by 3- and 4-year-old native English-speaking children
The delay markers (DMs) uh and um are often used by adult English speakers to indicate that an upcoming pause is due to a speech disruption, not the end of a conversational turn. Moreover, uh and um indicate different degrees of disruption (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002). Thus, it appears that children must learn how to use DMs appropriately. In the current study we examined DM use in elicited speech samples from 24 3- and 4-year-old children. We found …
Regularizing Unpredictable Variation
In this article we investigate what learners acquire when their input contains inconsistent grammatical morphemes such as those present in pidgins and incipient creoles. In particular, we ask if learners acquire variability veridically or if they change it, making the language more regular as they learn it. In Experiment 1 we taught adult participants an artificial language containing unpredictable variation in 1 grammatical feature. We manipulat…
Where have all the children gone
Preview this article: Where have all the children gone?, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.20.2.09hud-1.gif
The Lexical Competence Hypothesis
Preview this article: The Lexical Competence Hypothesis: A Cognitive Account of the Relationship Between Vernacularization and Grammatical Expansion in Creolization, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.18.1.02hud-1.gif
The impact of conditioning variables on the acquisition of variation in adult and child learners
Natural human languages often contain variation (sociolinguistic or Labovian variation) that is passed from one generation of speakers to the next, but studies of acquisition have largely ignored this, instead focusing on aspects of language that are more deterministic. Theories of acquisition, however, must be able to account for both. This article examines variation from the perspective of the statistical learning framework and explores feature…
The Lexical Competence Hypothesis
Preview this article: The Lexical Competence Hypothesis: A Cognitive Account of the Relationship Between Vernacularization and Grammatical Expansion in Creolization, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.18.1.02hud-1.gif
Regularizing Unpredictable Variation
In this article we investigate what learners acquire when their input contains inconsistent grammatical morphemes such as those present in pidgins and incipient creoles. In particular, we ask if learners acquire variability veridically or if they change it, making the language more regular as they learn it. In Experiment 1 we taught adult participants an artificial language containing unpredictable variation in 1 grammatical feature. We manipulat…
Where have all the children gone
Preview this article: Where have all the children gone?, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.20.2.09hud-1.gif
The use of uh and um by 3- and 4-year-old native English-speaking children
The delay markers (DMs) uh and um are often used by adult English speakers to indicate that an upcoming pause is due to a speech disruption, not the end of a conversational turn. Moreover, uh and um indicate different degrees of disruption (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002). Thus, it appears that children must learn how to use DMs appropriately. In the current study we examined DM use in elicited speech samples from 24 3- and 4-year-old children. We found …
Getting it right by getting it wrong
Some cues are stronger than others
This article describes two experiments examining how 6- and 7-year-old Standard American English-speaking children interpret 3rd person present —s as a tense marker, as compared to lexical items and past tense —ed. Because —s corresponds to multiple meanings, unlike —ed, it may result in later acquisition. Using an offline picture-choice task (Experiment 1), the study found that while all children successfully comprehended —ed, only the 7-year-ol…
The problem of conventionality in the development of creole morphological systems
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
First and second graders’ interpretation of Standard American English morphology across varieties of English
While African American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE) share many features, there are also differences that could affect comprehension. This article examines how 1st and 2nd grade AAE- and SAE-speaking children interpret sentences containing shared lexical and morphological (i.e., plural –s) forms as compared to sentences containing forms that do not regularly occur in AAE (past tense –ed, 3rd person present –s, future contracte…
Children's use of gesture in ambiguous pronoun interpretation
This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7–8 years of age) but not younger (4–5 years) children integrate co-referential gestures into their interpretation of pronouns. This is …
The impact of conditioning variables on the acquisition of variation in adult and child learners
Natural human languages often contain variation (sociolinguistic or Labovian variation) that is passed from one generation of speakers to the next, but studies of acquisition have largely ignored this, instead focusing on aspects of language that are more deterministic. Theories of acquisition, however, must be able to account for both. This article examines variation from the perspective of the statistical learning framework and explores feature…
Introducing the Infant Bookreading Database (IBDb)
Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0–36 months who answered questions about the English-language books they most commonly read to their children.…
The Emergence of the Allophonic Perception of Unfamiliar Speech Sounds
In human languages, different speech sounds can be contextual variants of a single phoneme, called allophones. Learning which sounds are allophones is an integral part of the acquisition of phonemes. Whether given sounds are separate phonemes or allophones in a listener's language affects speech perception. Listeners tend to be less sensitive to acoustic differences between sounds that are allophones. This study investigated the mechanisms behind…
Learning speech-internal cues to pronoun interpretation from co-speech gesture
This study explores whether children can learn a structural processing bias relevant to pronoun interpretation from brief training. Over three days, 42 five-year-olds were exposed to narratives exhibiting a first-mentioned tendency. Two characters were introduced, and the first-mentioned was later described engaging in a solo activity. In our primary condition of interest, the Gesture Training condition, the solo-activity sentence contained an am…
Measuring lexical and structural conventionalization in young sign languages
Compounding, as a nearly universal word-formation process that is very useful in emerging languages, might be expected to conventionalize early in a language’s history. However, a recent study focusing on novel compounding in ISL and ABSL found that this may not be the case, and moreover, that the two languages appear to differ in how compounding is conventionalizing ( Tkachman & Meir 2018 ). In this paper, we follow up on their findings, using s…
Iconicity and interpretability in language emergence
The iconic potential of sign languages suggests that the establishment of a conventionalized set of form-meaning pairings should be relatively easy. However, even an iconic form has to be interpreted correctly for it to conventionalize. In sign languages, spatial modulations are used to indicate real spatial relationships (locative) and grammatical relations. The former is a more-or-less direct representation of how things are situated with respe…
Thinking About Shin & Miller (2022)’s Step 1
Based on findings from a variety of research, Shin and Miller (Citation2022) propose a 4-step process that children go through as they learn sociolinguistic variation. Their proposal raises many interesting questions that should inspire future research. Here, I discuss their Step 1 – the stage in which, according to their proposal, children produce only a single variant, and so appear to be (temporarily) regularizing – and suggest this may not be…
Evaluating English-language morphological awareness assessments
Many studies have shown that morphological knowledge has effects on reading comprehension separate from other aspects of language knowledge. This has implications for reading instruction and assessment: it suggests that children could have reading comprehension difficulties that are due to a lack of morphological knowledge, and thus, that explicit instruction of morphology might be helpful for them, indeed for all children. To find children who m…
Linguistics (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Language Development and Disorders (10 works) · Cognitive psychology (8 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (5 works) · Mathematics (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (4 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (4 works)