Lydia White (born 1946) is a Canadian linguist and educator in the area of second language acquisition (SLA). [1] She is James McGill Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at McGill University. [2] [3]
Lydia White (born 1946) is a Canadian linguist and educator in the area of second language acquisition (SLA). [1] She is James McGill Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at McGill University. [2] [3]
She received her BA in Moral Sciences and Psychology from Cambridge University in 1969 and PhD in linguistics from McGill University in 1980. [3] [4]
Her PhD dissertation, published in book form as Grammatical Theory and Language Acquisition, concerns the theoretical problem of first language acquisition from the perspective of generative grammar. Her 1989 survey of SLA research, Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition, has become a standard textbook in many university level SLA courses. [5] The book puts particular emphasis on research which explores the implications that the theory of linguistic universals (the Universal Grammar theory) has had upon second language acquisition approaches. In 2003, Lydia White published the book Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, which extends the claims that the process of second language acquisition is guided and constrained by Universal Grammar.
In 2010 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the Academy of Arts and Humanities. [6] In 2012, she received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. [7]
She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Language Acquisition, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, and Second Language Research . [3] Together with Roumyana Slabakova, she is also co-editor of the book series Language Acquisition and Language Disorders. [3] [5]
A Festschrift in her honor, Inquiries in Linguistic Development, was published in 2006. [8]
Lydia White has edited special issues of several leading journals in the field, and authored many articles in Language Learning, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Second Language Research , and Language Acquisition. [9] Some notable examples include the following:
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare. It is a matter of empirical investigation to determine precisely what properties are universal and what linguistic capacities are innate.
A heritage language is a minority language learned by its speakers at home as children, and difficult to be fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment. The speakers grow up with a different dominant language in which they become more competent. Polinsky and Kagan label it as a continuum that ranges from fluent speakers to barely-speaking individuals of the home language. In some countries or cultures which determine a person's mother tongue by the ethnic group they belong to, a heritage language would be linked to the native language.
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is regarded by some but not everybody as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education.
In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked; the other, secondary one is marked. In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.
The term Cartesian linguistics was coined by Noam Chomsky in his book Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). The adjective "Cartesian" pertains to René Descartes, a prominent 17th-century philosopher. As well as Descartes, Chomsky surveys other examples of rationalist thought in 17th-century linguistics, in particular the Port-Royal Grammar (1660), which foreshadows some of his own ideas concerning universal grammar.
The generative approach to second language (L2) acquisition (SLA) is a cognitive based theory of SLA that applies theoretical insights developed from within generative linguistics to investigate how second languages and dialects are acquired and lost by individuals learning naturalistically or with formal instruction in foreign, second language and lingua franca settings. Central to generative linguistics is the concept of Universal Grammar (UG), a part of an innate, biologically endowed language faculty which refers to knowledge alleged to be common to all human languages. UG includes both invariant principles as well as parameters that allow for variation which place limitations on the form and operations of grammar. Subsequently, research within the Generative Second-Language Acquisition (GenSLA) tradition describes and explains SLA by probing the interplay between Universal Grammar, knowledge of one's native language and input from the target language. Research is conducted in syntax, phonology, morphology, phonetics, semantics, and has some relevant applications to pragmatics.
The critical period hypothesis or sensitive period hypothesis claims that there is an ideal time window of brain development to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further language acquisition becomes much more difficult and effortful. It is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in their 1959 book Speech and Brain Mechanisms, and was popularized by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 with Biological Foundations of Language.
Nina Hyams is a distinguished research professor emeritus in linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Martha Young-Scholten is a linguist specialising in the phonology and syntax of second language acquisition (SLA).
Anne Vainikka was a Finnish-American linguist specialising in the syntax of Finnish and in the syntax of second language acquisition (SLA).
Heritage language learning, or heritage language acquisition, is the act of learning a heritage language from an ethnolinguistic group that traditionally speaks the language, or from those whose family historically spoke the language. According to a commonly accepted definition by Valdés, heritage languages are generally minority languages in society and are typically learned at home during childhood. When a heritage language learner grows up in an environment with a dominant language that is different from their heritage language, the learner appears to be more competent in the dominant language and often feels more comfortable speaking in that language. "Heritage language" may also be referred to as "community language," "home language," and "ancestral language".
Second Language Research is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of linguistics, concerned foremost with second language acquisition and second-language performance. Each year, one special issue is published, devoted to some current topic. It was established in 1985 and is published quarterly by SAGE Publications. The current editors-in-chief are Silvina Montrul and Roumyana Slabakova.
The main purpose of theories of second-language acquisition (SLA) is to shed light on how people who already know one language learn a second language. The field of second-language acquisition involves various contributions, such as linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and education. These multiple fields in second-language acquisition can be grouped as four major research strands: (a) linguistic dimensions of SLA, (b) cognitive dimensions of SLA, (c) socio-cultural dimensions of SLA, and (d) instructional dimensions of SLA. While the orientation of each research strand is distinct, they are in common in that they can guide us to find helpful condition to facilitate successful language learning. Acknowledging the contributions of each perspective and the interdisciplinarity between each field, more and more second language researchers are now trying to have a bigger lens on examining the complexities of second language acquisition.
Silvina Montrul is a linguist specializing in generative approaches to second language acquisition. She is currently Professor of Linguistics and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, as well as Second Language Acquisition, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Heather Goad is a Canadian linguist. Her research explores areas of phonology and language acquisition, especially investigating the shapes of phonological systems, including contrasts in English, French, Korean, Portuguese, Italian and Nepali, as well as the developmental paths of acquiring speech sounds by first and second language learners.
Marit Kristine Richardsen Westergaard is a Norwegian linguist, known for her work on child language acquisition and multilingualism.
Jacquelyn E. Schachter was professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Oregon. She received her Ph.D. in 1971 from UCLA, with a dissertation entitled, "Presuppositional and Counterfactual Conditional Sentences."
Roumyana Slabakova is a linguist specializing in the theory of second language acquisition (SLA), particularly acquisition of semantics, and its practical implications for teaching and studying languages.
Shanley E. M. Allen is a professor of linguistics working at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. Her research is primarily in the area of psycholinguistics and language acquisition, studying both monolingual and multilingual speakers. She is also a specialist on the Inuktitut language.
Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction is a linguistics book about the concept of universal grammar as proposed by Noam Chomsky. First published in 1988, its third edition was authored by Vivian Cook and Martin Newson and released in 2007.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)McGill University. James McGill / William Dawson Programme. McGill University, Associate Provost (Planning and Budgets). Retrieved on April 19, 2009
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