Biomedical subjects

E V Lieven

Publications and source records attributed to E V Lieven.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1997

Lexically-based learning and early grammatical development.

Pine & Lieven (1993) suggest that a lexically-based positional analysis can account for the structure of a considerable proportion of children's early multiword corpora. The present study tests this claim on a second, larger sample of eleven children aged between 1;0 and 3;0 from a different social background, and extends the analysis to later in development. Results indicate that the positional analysis can account for a mean of 60% of all the children's multiword utterances and that the great majority of all other utterances are defined as frozen by the analysis. Alternative explanations of the data based on hypothesizing underlying syntactic or semantic relations are investigated through analyses of pronoun case marking and of verbs with prototypical agent-patient roles. Neither supports the view that the children's utterances are being produced on the basis of general underlying rules and categories. The implications of widespread distributional learning in early language development are discussed.

Age Factors↗

PubMed1993

Reanalysing rote-learned phrases: individual differences in the transition to multi-word speech.

The present study investigates the possibility that the previously documented relationship between referential-expressive and nominal-pronominal styles (Nelson, 1975) may be best explained not so much in terms of 'object-orientation' or 'noun-preference', as in terms of the direction from which different children break into structure, with some children tending to construct patterns by combining two or more items from their single-word vocabularies and others tending to develop patterns by gaining productive control over 'slots' in previously unanalysed phrases. In order to do so it makes use of a methodology for distinguishing between productive and unanalysed multi-word speech proposed in Lieven, Pine & Dresner-Barnes (1992) which is applied to observational and maternal-report data from a longitudinal study of seven children between the ages of 0;11 and 1;8. The results suggest not only that variation in children's early word combinations can indeed be explained in terms of different routes to multi-word speech, but also that, far from being atypical, a strategy involving the breaking down of originally unanalysed phrases may be used by all children, though to varying degrees.

Child Development↗

PubMed1992

Individual differences in early vocabulary development: redefining the referential-expressive distinction.

The existence of stylistic variation between children in the early stages of language acquisition has been most frequently studied using Nelson's (1973) referential-expressive distinction. While the use of this distinction has generated a great deal of interesting research, there are a number of major problems associated with it. The present study presents a simple scheme, based on formal categories, for coding stylistic variation in the early lexicon. When applied to the first 50 and 100 words of 12 children collected between 0;11 and 2;3, the major dimensions of difference are found to be the relative proportion of common nouns and the relative proportion of frozen phrases. Moreover, the proportion of frozen phrases is also found to be significantly positively related to children's early productivity, suggesting that, rather than being a 'dead-end' in early language development, the acquisition of frozen phrases may provide an alternative route into multiword speech.

Child Development↗

PubMed1990

Referential style at thirteen months: why age-defined cross-sectional measures are inappropriate for the study of strategy differences in early language development.

This study examines the relationship between cross-sectional measures of referential style taken at 1; 1 and measures based on the first 50 words in 12 first-born children. Since no significant relationship is found it is argued that age-defined cross-sectional measures are inappropriate for the study of strategy differences in early language development because they confound such differences with variation due to differences in development level.

Cross-Sectional Studies↗