Bolanle Elizabeth Arokoyo
@unilorin.edu.ng
Professor, Faculty of Arts
Head, Others
University of Ilorin
RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS
Language and Linguistics, Arts and Humanities
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Paulina Aravena-Bravo, Alejandrina Cristia, Rowena Garcia, Hiromasa Kotera, Ramona Kunene Nicolas, Ronel Laranjo, Bolanle Elizabeth Arokoyo, Silvia Benavides-Varela, Titia Benders, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan,et al.
Informa UK Limited
With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to work on language development, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/ Winter School on Language Acquisition, a free 5-day virtual school for early career researchers. In this paper, we describe the school, our experience organizing it, and lessons learned. The school had a diverse organizer team, composed of 26 researchers (17 from under represented areas: Subsaharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Central and South America); and a diverse volunteer team, with a total of 95 volunteers from 35 different countries, nearly half from under represented areas. This helped world-wide Page 5 of 5 promotion of the school, leading to 958 registrations from 88 different countries, with 300 registrants (based in 63 countries, 80% from under represented areas) selected to participate in the synchronous aspects of the event. The school employed asynchronous (pre-recorded lectures, which were close-captioned) and synchronous elements (e.g., discussions to place the recorded lectures into
Bolanle Elizabeth Arokoyo
Australian International Academic Centre
This paper studied null arguments in the early speech of the Yoruba child. We examined whether null subjects are more prominent than null objects and whether the usage of null subjects decreases with language development in the early utterance of the Yoruba child. We also examined the relationship between argument ellipses and finiteness. Minimalist Programme was adopted as the theoretical framework because of its provision for minimality in the processes of language acquisition. The database was made up of longitudinal naturalistic speech output of three Yoruba-speaking children between 15and 36 months of age. We discovered the preponderance of null argument-NPs at the initial stage; subjects-NPs were easily omitted while object-NPs were hardly omitted; the three Yoruba-speaking children began to make use of overt argument-NPs from fifteen months and gradually, null argument-NPs gave way. We found no direct relationship between the acquisition of finiteness and the end of null arguments.
Bolanle Elizabeth Arokoyo
Australian International Academic Centre
This paper examines the lexicon of the Yoruba child at the initial stage. We examined the composition of the early lexicon of the Yoruba child and how they are acquired. The research is couched in the Minimalist Programme which believes that language acquisition is a matter of learning vocabulary and determining lexical idiosyncrasies. A quantitative analysis of the data is carried out. The database consisted of longitudinal studies of three children, Damilare, Temiloluwa and Tola, between the ages of fifteen (15) and thirty-six (36) months. We found that there were few lexical items which were gradually built up by the children. We also discovered that the first sets of words to be acquired are verbal items, followed by nominal items. The presence of transitive and intransitive verbs is noted in the utterances of the children and we conclude that the children make use of verbs related to actions and events that they or those around them are involved in.