...The purpose of this study was to compare the phonological skills in Spanish-speaking children with phonological disorders from two dialect groups in order to evaluate the impact of dialectal differences on the children’s phonological skills. The two dialect groups used in this study were Puerto Rican and Mexican. The study included 12 Spanish-speaking children with phonological disorders between the ages of 4 years, 4 months and 5 years, 6 months. A total of 6 children spoke the Mexican dialect and 6 spoke the Puerto Rican dialect. The method used for this study consisted of administering the Assessment of Phonological Disabilities-Spanish (ADP) to all children in order to assess their speech. The assessment consisted of single words containing...
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...Deconstructing Ubese - a Star Wars Conlang Extrapolation I don't know about you, but I was always intrigued by the language Boushh/Leia spoke in Return of the Jedi. There were only a few examples of it in the film: "Yatay, yatay, yotoh," supposedly meant "I have come for the bounty on this wookie." "Yotoh, yotoh" = "$50,000, no less." "Ey, yotoh" = C-3PO paraphrases this as "Because he's holding a thermal detenator!" "Yatoh, cha" = C-3PO paraphrases this as "He agrees." There is something else Boushh/Leia says after the business with Jabba is concluded but I can't really make it out. But the 'yatay yotoh' stuff is what fascinates me. After a bit of searching I discovered that it was called Ubese. After all this research into linguistics and blogging about conlangs, I thought it would be fun to explore an unknown language, and see if I can deconstruct it, and extrapolate on it. Of course, this would have to be a very simple language; but I've posted a few times about how important I think simplicity is. Ubese seems to be the ideal choice to examine and extrapolate on. How would you convey meaning with such seemingly limited and simple vocabulary? Such simplicity would imply, to me, that this is a very context-based language; that words mean many different things according to their context. If this is the case, repeating a word, or reduplication, alters, shifts, deepens, etc. the meaning. If this is the case, what could the sentences mean, if translated to English...
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...INTRODUCTION Children’s acquisition of language has long been considered one of the uniquely defining characteristics of human behaviour. Still today, it is the commonly held belief that children acquire their mother tongue through imitation of the parents, caregivers or the people in their environment. Linguists too had the same conviction until 1957, when a then relatively unknown man, A. Noam Chomsky, propounded his theory that the capacity to acquire language is in fact innate. This revolutionized the study of language acquisition, and after a brief period of controversy upon the publication of his book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, in 1964, his theories are now generally accepted as largely true. As a consequence, he was responsible for the emergence of a new field during the 1960s, Developmental Psycholinguistics, which deals with children’s first language acquisition. He was not the first to question our hitherto mute acceptance of a debatable concept – long before, Plato wondered how children could possibly acquire so complex a skill as language with so little experience of life. Experiments have clearly identified an ability to discern syntactical nuances in very young infants, although they are still at the pre-linguistic stage. Children of three, however, are able to manipulate very complicated syntactical sentences, although they are unable to tie their own shoelaces, for example. Indeed, language is not a skill such as many others, like learning...
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...INTRODUCTION Children’s acquisition of language has been considered one of the uniquely defining characteristics of human behavior. Still today, it is the commonly held belief that children acquire their mother tongue through imitation of the parents, caregivers or the people in their environment. Linguists too had the same conviction until 1957, when a then relatively unknown man, A. Noam Chomsky, propounded his theory that the capacity to acquire language is in fact innate. This revolutionized the study of language acquisition, and after a brief period of controversy upon the publication of his book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, in 1964, his theories are now generally accepted as largely true. As a consequence, he was responsible for the emergence of a new field during the 1960s, Developmental Psycholinguistics, which deals with children’s first language acquisition. He was not the first to question our so far mute acceptance of a debatable concept – long before, Plato wondered how children could possibly acquire so complex a skill as language with so little experience of life. Experiments have clearly identified an ability to discern syntactical nuances in very young infants, although they are still at the pre-linguistic stage. Children of three, however, are able to manipulate very complicated syntactical sentences, although they are unable to tie their own shoelaces, for example. Indeed, language is not a skill such as many others, like learning to drive...
Words: 7709 - Pages: 31
