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SUMMARY:Individual differences in native language attainment (with implica
 tions for language acquisition) - Ewa Dabrowska (Northumbria University)
DTSTART:20110428T160000Z
DTEND:20110428T173000Z
UID:TALK30919@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:George Walkden
DESCRIPTION:Most linguists assume\, either implicitly or explicitly\, that
  all native speakers of the same language have more or less the same menta
 l grammar.  It is\, of course\, well established that there are vast indiv
 idual differences in lexical knowledge and knowledge of archaic\, formal a
 nd literary grammatical constructions (e.g. _Little did I know that_...)\;
  all speakers\, however\, are thought to share the same 'core' grammar. \n
 \nIn this talk\, I summarise a number of recent studies showing that this 
 is not the case. The studies involved several different aspects of linguis
 tic knowledge\, including inflectional morphology\, passives\, quantifiers
 \, and a variety of more complex constructions with subordinate clauses. F
 or some of these constructions\, language learners attend to different cue
 s in the input and end up with different grammars\; for others\, some spea
 kers acquire only fairly specific\, 'local' generalizations which apply to
  particular subclasses of items while others extract more abstract rules.\
 n\nThese results are problematic for theories which assume that language a
 cquisition is largely predetermined by an innate Universal Grammar shared 
 by all members of our species. They also raise interesting questions about
  what we mean by "knowing a language":  if different members of a speech c
 ommunity have different grammars\, in what sense can they be said to speak
  the same language? Finally\, they add to the growing body of research on 
 the relationship between linguistic proficiency and educational success\, 
 and suggest that difficulties with language may be a major cause of school
  failure among children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds.\n
LOCATION:GR05\, English Faculty\, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
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