Written and Spoken Language Development across the Lifespan: Essays in Honour of Liliana Tolchinsky

369 Pages·2015·7.83 MB·English

by  Joan Perera

Literacy Studies: Perspectives from Cognitive Neurosciences,
Linguistics, Psychology and Education
Joan Perera
Melina Aparici
Elisa Rosado
Naymé Salas Editors
Written and
Spoken Language
Development
across the Lifespan
Essays in Honour of Liliana Tolchinsky
Literacy Studies
Volume 11
Series Editor
R. Malatesha Joshi, Texas A&M University, USA
Editorial Board
Linnea Ehri, CUNY Graduate School, USA
George Hynd, Purdue University, USA
Richard Olson, University of Colorado, USA
Pieter Reitsma, Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Rebecca Treiman, Washington University in St. Louis, USA
Usha Goswami, University of Cambridge, UK
Jane Oakhill, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Philip Seymour, University of Dundee, UK
Guinevere Eden, Georgetown University Medical Center, USA
Catherine McBride Chang, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
While language defi nes humanity, literacy defi nes civilization. Understandably,
illiteracy or diffi culties in acquiring literacy skills have become a major concern of
our technological society. A conservative estimate of the prevalence of literacy
problems would put the fi gure at more than a billion people in the world. Because
of the seriousness of the problem, research in literacy acquisition and its breakdown
is pursued with enormous vigor and persistence by experts from diverse backgrounds
such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and education. This, of
course, has resulted in a plethora of data, and consequently it has become diffi cult
to integrate this abundance of information into a coherent body because of the
artifi cial barriers that exist among different professional specialties. The purpose of
this series is to bring together the available research studies into a coherent body of
knowledge. Publications in this series are of interest to educators, clinicians and
research scientists in the above-mentioned specialties. Some of the titles suitable for
the Series are: fMRI, brain imaging techniques and reading skills, orthography and
literacy; and research based techniques for improving decoding, vocabulary,
spelling, and comprehension skills.
More information about this series at h ttp://www.springer.com/series/7206
Joan Perera • Melina Aparici
Elisa Rosado • Naymé Salas
Editors
Written and Spoken
Language Development
across the Lifespan
Essays in Honour of Liliana Tolchinsky
Editors
Joan Perera Melina Aparici
Departament de Didàctica de la D epartament de Psicologia Bàsica,
Llengua i la Literatura Evolutiva i de l’Educació
U niversitat de Barcelona U niversitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Barcelona , Spain Barcelona , Spain
Elisa Rosado Naymé Salas
D epartament de Didàctica de la D epartament de Didàctica de la Llengua
Llengua i la Literatura i la Literatura, i de les Ciències Socials
Universitat de Barcelona Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Barcelona , Spain Barcelona , Spain
ISSN 2214-000X ISSN 2214-0018 (electronic)
Literacy Studies
ISBN 978-3-319-21135-0 ISBN 978-3-319-21136-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-21136-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015957060
Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
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Photo courtesy of Eduardo Landsmann

Personal Tributes
The Human Print-Out Facility: A Tribute
to Liliana Tolchinsky-Landsmann
Annette Karmiloff-Smith
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development,
Department of Psychological Sciences
Birkbeck, University of London
London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
O n a lecture tour at Tel Aviv University in the late 1970s, I discovered an amazing,
trilingual doctoral student – Liliana Tolchinsky-Landsmann – who was subse-
quently to become a lifelong friend as well as a wonderful collaborator on what I
then called “the human print-out facility.” Unlike other species, humans use exter-
nal memory devices in the form of drawings, maps, diagrams, writing, and other
types of notation to leave an external trace of their internal representations, both as
an aid to their own memory and to communicate information to other social beings.
Liliana and I shared a deep interest in this issue (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979a, b, 1990,
1996; Tolchinsky-Landsmann, 1990, 1991; Tolchinsky-Landsman and Levin, 1985;
Levin and Tolchinsky-Landsmann, 1989), both epistemologically and psychologi-
cally, so it was a natural extension of our budding friendship also to become intel-
lectual collaborators with a strong commitment to developmental approaches.
We both recognized the importance of understanding very early precursors to
reading and writing – not more obvious factors like grapheme-phoneme mapping,
but how very young infants/toddlers process the rich world of notations that perme-
ate their environments. What do such young children know about those notational
environments, long before they start learning to read or write? Liliana and I shared
a fascination with such questions. The result was a postdoctoral visit by Liliana to
the UK in which we carried out a joint study showing how very young children are
already sensitive to the different constraints that hold for letter strings to be “good
vii
viii Personal Tributes
for reading” and numerical strings to be “good for counting” and how they differen-
tiate both from drawing – achievements that toddlers have well before they have
learned to read letters or numbers (Tolchinsky-Landsmann & Karmiloff-Smith,
1992, 1993). We made what I still consider to be a critical distinction between nota-
tions as domains of knowledge and notations as referential-communicative tools.
While children learn about the latter in school, the former constitutes part of their
spontaneous and very early exploration of their notational environments.
Liliana taught me so much about this rich domain of enquiry, which led me sub-
sequently to encourage one of my doctoral students to work in the fi eld of notational
development (Bolger and Karmiloff-Smith, 1990) and led me to further collabora-
tions with other researchers (Lee and Karmiloff-Smith, 1996a, b; Lee, et al. 1998).
And, of course, Liliana herself took the fi eld of the development of notational sys-
tems much further in her subsequent work in Barcelona (Tolchinsky-Landsmann
2001, 2003). Moreover, as the fi eld of developmental psychology becomes increas-
ingly interdisciplinary, we are now witnessing brain-imagining studies that corrobo-
rate at the neural level (Heimann et al. 2013) the intuitions that Liliana was
developing at the cognitive level over two decades earlier.
I t is my great pleasure and honor to have been invited to write this brief apprecia-
tion of the work of this exceptional scholar and very special personal friend, Liliana
Tolchinsky-Landsmann.
References
Bolger, F., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1990). The development of communicative competence: are
notational systems like language? Archives de Psychologie , 58 , 257–273.
H eimann, K., Umilta, M. A., & Gallese, V. (2013). How the motor-cortex distinguishes among
letters, unknown symbols and scribbles. A high density EEG study. Neuropsychologia, 51,
2833 – 2840.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979a). Problem-solving processes in children’s construction and represen-
tations of closed railway circuits. Archives de Psychologie , XVII, 3–59.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979b). Micro- and macro-developmental changes in language acquisition
and other representational systems. C ognitive Science, 3 (2), 91–118.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1990). Constraints on representational change: Evidence from children’s
drawing. C ognition , 34 , 1–27.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1996). Internal and external representational change: a developmental per-
spective. In D. M Peterson (Eds.), Alternative representations: An interdisciplinary theme in
cognitive science . Bristol: Intellect Books.
Lee, K., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1996a). The development of cognitive constraints on notations.
Archives de Psychologie , 64 , 3–25.
L ee, K., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1996b). Notational Development: The use of symbols. In E. C.
Carterette & M. P. Friedman (Eds.), H andbook of Perception, Vol. 13 Perceptual and Cognitive
Development (pp. 185–211). (R. Gelman & T. Au (Eds.)). New York: Academic Press.
Lee, K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Cameron, C.A., & Dodsworth, P. (1998). Notational adaptation in
children. C anadian Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 30 , 159–171.
L evin, I. & Tolchinsky-Landsmann, L. (1989). Becoming literate: Referential and phonetic strate-
gies in early reading and writing. International Journal of Behavioral Development , 1 2 (3),
369–384.
Personal Tributes ix
T olchinsky-Landsmann, L. (1990). Early writing development: Evidence from different ortho-
graphic systems. In M. Spoolders (Eds.), L iteracy acquisition. Norwood: Ablex.
Tolchinsky-Landsmann, L. (Ed.). (1991). C ulture, schooling and psychological development.
Norwood: Ablex.
Tolchinsky-Landsmann, L. (2001). D evelopmental aspects in learning to write. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic.
T olchinsky-Landsmann, L. (2003). T he cradle of culture and what children know about writing
and numbers before being taught. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Tolchinsky-Landsmann, L., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Children’s understanding of notations
as domains of knowledge versus referential-communicative tools. Cognitive Development , 7 ,
287–300.
Tolchinsky-Landsmann, L., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1993). Las restricciones del conocimiento
notacional. Aprendizaje y Infancia, 62/63 , 19–51.
Tolchinsky-Landsmann, L., & Levin, I. (1985). Writing in preschoolers: An age- related analysis.
Applied Psycholinguistics, 6 (3), 319 – 339.
Tribute to Liliana
Batia Seroussi
Levinsky College of Education
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
e-mail: [email protected]
I feel very honored and privileged to participate in this book and to be given the
opportunity to thank Liliana for her inspiration and innovative ideas that no doubt
contributed to shaping my identity as a clinician and a researcher.
A s a young speech and language clinician in the mid-1980s in Israel, I was very
lucky to hear Liliana’s pioneering lectures on emergent literacy. She literally
revealed a whole new world to me – the fascinating world of ideas, theories, and
conceptions that untutored children develop about writing before they begin formal
schooling. Years later in 2012, after the completion of my PhD, when Liliana agreed
to guide me and to accept me as a collaborator in her ongoing research, I had a feel-
ing that I was coming full circle.
During the years of my early professional career as a speech and language clini-
cian and later on, when I, a relatively “late bloomer,” entered into the academic
arena of psycholinguistics, Liliana’s publications guided me and served as a sort of
a frame of reference for me. These publications, including research articles, position
papers, books, and textbooks, both in English and in Spanish, demonstrate a wide
scope of domains of interest – in theory as well as practice, in early and later lan-
guage development, and on the interaction between literacy and other linguistic
areas. Liliana’s fi ngerprints are quite noticeable in the publications that I have read,
revealing deep psycholinguistic knowledge incorporated in a humanistic and well-
grounded point of view that integrates all aspects of linguistics. I will refer specifi -
cally to three publications that inspired me (in chronological order): the position
paper written with Dorit Ravid “Developing linguistic literacy: a comprehensive