LINGUIST List 21.2802 Sun Jul 04 2010 Calls: Language Acquisition, Psycholing, Discourse Analysis/Germany Editor for this issue: Elyssa Winzeler <elyssalinguistlist.org> LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3! Directory         1.    Dagmar Bittner, Referential Expressions and Text Coherence at the Onset of School Age Message 1: Referential Expressions and Text Coherence at the Onset of School Age Date: 01-Jul-2010 From: Dagmar Bittner <bittnerzas.gwz-berlin.de> Subject: Referential Expressions and Text Coherence at the Onset of School Age E-mail this message to a friend Full Title: Referential Expressions and Text Coherence at the Onset of School Age Short Title: Referential Expressions Date: 23-Feb-2011 - 25-Feb-2011 Location: Göttingen, Germany Contact Person: Dagmar Bittner Meeting Email: bittnerzas.gwz-berlin.de Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics Call Deadline: 01-Sep-2010 Meeting Description: 'Referential Expressions and Text Coherence at the Onset of School Age' Organizers: Dagmar Bittner and Nadja Kühn (ZAS, Berlin) Workshop organized as part of the Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) to be held in Goettingen, Germany, February 23-25, 2011 Call for Papers When starting school, children are expected to produce and comprehend complex texts. Psycholinguists, however, argue that children have not fully acquired the target range and functions of discourse cohesive means up to the age of 8 or even later. Considerably consistent claims have been made on when children acquire which knowledge and capabilities. At the same time, we are faced with great variation in the types of investigated discourse and research methods. Considering referential expressions (RE), there is, for instance, a debate on when and how children comprehend the discourse functions of definite vs. indefinite noun phrases. Experimental research (e.g. Schafer & de Viliers 2000) and studies of narrative data (e.g. Hickmann 2003) report an overuse of definite noun phrases until the age of 7. In contrast, studies of spontaneous speech do not report replacement of indefinite by definite noun phrases. Furthermore, experimental and narrative studies propose that children up to age 5 do not make anaphoric use of RE (e.g. Karmiloff-Smith 1981, 1985). According to these studies, definite noun phrases and demonstrative pronouns are used only deictically. This is mainly explained by deficits in theory of mind: young children are not able to take into account perspective and knowledge of their communication partners. Contrary to this, studies of pre-linguistic children (Tomasello 2009, Carpenter 2009) and early spontaneous speech (Matthews et al. 2006, Bittner 2007) found that children, to some extent, build a representation of their partner's cognitive status and interact appropriately. Focusing on RE, the workshop aims at discussing how to integrate the different results and perspectives with a realistic picture of children's knowledge on means of text coherence at the onset of school time. We invite studies dealing with production and comprehension of RE in mono- and multilingual acquisition up to the age of 6, and especially encourage work focusing on: - Same type(s) of RE in different types of discourse, e.g. longitudinal vs.experimental data - Same type(s) of RE investigated by different research methods, e.g. types of experiments - Consistency or change of oppositions between RE in different types of discourse. Papers should contribute to answering the following questions: - Which knowledge on RE do children process at which developmental stage? - Which system of RE do they have at the onset of school age? - What is the impact of different types of discourse (including context situation) on the treatment of RE? - Are there 'complexity' limits for processing the full knowledge on a RE? - Of what type are such limits? Bittner, D. 2007. Early functions of definite determiners and DPs in German first language acquisition. In: Stark, E., E. Leiss & W. Abraham (eds.), Nominal determination. Typology, context constraints and historical emergence. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins, 215-240. Carpenter, M. 2009. Just how joint is joint action in infancy? Topics in Cognitive Science, 1, 380-392. Hickmann, M. 2003. Children's discourse: person, space and time across languages. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press Karmiloff-Smith, A. 1981. The grammatical marking of thematic structure in the development of language production. In W. Deutsch (ed.), The child's construction of language. London: Academic Press. Karmiloff-Smith, A. 1985. 'Language and cognitive processes from a developmental perspective.' Language and Cognitive Processes 1: 61-85. Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. 2006. The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expression. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 403-422. Schafer, R. & J. de Villiers. 2000 Imagining Articles: What a and the can tell us about the emergence of DP. BULD 2009. Somerville: Cascadilla press. Tomasello, M. 2009. Why We Cooperate. Cambridge, Mas.: MIT Press Abstracts: Please send your abstract to one of the organizer's email address. The abstract should not extend one single A4 page (12pt fond, single spaced, one empty line between title and text) including references, figures etc. Please enclose an extra page with title; name and affiliation of the authors. Dagmar Bittner; bittnerzas.gwz-berlin.de Nadja Kühn, kuehnzas.gwz-berlin.de Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 04-Jul-2010       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.