The CLAL Current Activities:
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- CLAL houses language acquisition data from children
acquiring language in more than 20 languages and cultures
across the world. Every developmental stage is sampled,
from first words to complex syntactic structures,
in audio and/or video data, from children across these languages.
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- Students from Linguistics and Developmental Psychology as
well as Computer Science, including native speakers from these
languages, analyze these data from children at every stage of
language development and work to determine a universal course of
language acquisition and language specific variations on this
universal course of development.
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- Combined with linguistic theories regarding the nature of
language (e.g., the theory of Universal Grammar proposed by
Chomsky) and studies of language typology, students and faculty
use these data to develop an explanatory theory for language
acquisition.
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- Hypotheses generated by these theories are used to guide
brain imaging studies regarding the neuroscientific foundations
for language acquisition in the human species.
- New data are continually collected. For example, individual
experimental studies are designed, and in connection with these,
students do experiments with children in local schools and
day care centers to test specific hypotheses regarding language
acquisition, and to test questions regarding development of
specific linguistic structures.
- Currently several experiments are also testing hypotheses
regarding children's acquisition of more than one language at a
time, multilingualism, and the effects of this on cognitive
development.
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- Numerous student Honors Theses, Masters theses, and Doctoral
theses are conducted annually by individual students, involving
collection of new data with regard to new hypotheses or analyses
of existing data.
- Working with Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library, procedures
are being developed to preserve and disseminate the existing
language acquisition data from the CLAL through a "Library of
Words of the World's Children."
- Courses are regularly given at Cornell to teach
interdisciplinary students about language acquisition. These
courses incorporate the materials and research of the CLAL.
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- A "hands-on" lab course is given regularly at Cornell,
introducing students at Cornell to realities and methods of
empirical research in the area of language acquisition.
- Currently, members of the CLAL are working to create the
Virtual Center for Language Acquisition and the materials of a
Virtual Linguistics Lab connected with it.
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