Conveners
Acquiring language
- Lieven Vandelanotte (Universite de Namur)
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Kristin Davidse (KU Leuven)12/12/25, 1:30 PM
Halliday’s (1975) study of the beginning of language in the human infant and the nature of that early language broke new ground in comparison with contemporary studies such as Brown (1973) and Bowerman (1973). Hitherto, the beginning of language had been equated with the acquisition of words recognizable as lexical items from the adult language around 12–18 months. The acquisition of syntax...
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Melissa Schuring (Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB))12/12/25, 2:00 PM
Background and aim | Cognitive sociolinguistics investigates the mental processes underlying the acquisition of socially-meaningful variation patterns (see e.g. Kristiansen & Dirven 2008). So far, studies focusing on children’s development have found mixed results regarding age patterns. For instance, Kristiansen (2010) investigated N=150 Spanish-speaking children (6-13 y/o) and found...
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Aybike Canan (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)12/12/25, 2:30 PM
Languages differ typologically in how they encode motion (Talmy, 1985), especially in boundary-crossing (BC) contexts. Özçalışkan (2015) demonstrated striking differences between Turkish and English in expressing path and manner of motion. English, a satellite-framed language, typically uses a manner verb and a path satellite. Turkish, a verb-framed language, uses a path verb and expresses...
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Sylvie De Cock (UCLouvain)12/12/25, 3:00 PM
Register variation is a crucial aspect of language production. Corpus-based explorations of language have raised awareness of register variation and have yielded valuable insights into linguistic patterns associated with different registers (Biber et al. 1999). While register has important implications for any type of language production, it is particularly relevant to explore in learner...
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