Biomedical subjects

Elena Nicoladis

Publications and source records attributed to Elena Nicoladis.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

When answer-phone makes a difference in children's acquisition of English compounds.

Over the course of acquiring deverbal compounds like truck driver, English-speaking children pass through a stage when they produce ungrammatical compounds like drive-truck. These errors have been attributed to canonical phrasal ordering (Clark, Hecht & Mulford, 1986). In this study, we compared British and Canadian children's compound production. Both dialects have the same phrasal ordering but some different lexical items (e.g. answer-phone exists only in British English). If influenced by these lexical differences, British children would produce more ungrammatical Verb-Object (VO) compounds in trying to produce the more complex deverbal (Object-Verb-er) than the Canadian children. 36 British children between the ages of 3;6 and 5;6 and 36 age-matched Canadian children were asked to produce novel compounds (like sun juggler). The British children produced more ungrammatical compounds and fewer grammatical compounds than the Canadian children. We argue that children's errors in deverbal compounds may be due in part to competing lexical structures.

Canada↗

PubMed2006

Is the Chinese number-naming system transparent? Evidence from Chinese-English bilingual children.

Chinese-speaking children have been shown to have an advantage over English-speaking children in a variety of mathematical areas, including counting. One possible explanation for the advantage in counting is that the Chinese number-naming system is relatively transparent, compared to English, in that number names typically are directly indicative of base-10 structure (e.g., 12 is named "ten-two" rather than "twelve"). To determine whether the transparency of the Chinese number-naming system influences counting in bilingual children, we tested 25 Chinese-English bilingual children between the ages of 3 and 5 years, both in English and in Chinese. Children were asked to count as high as they could (abstract counting) and also to count objects in small, medium, and large arrays (object counting). No evidence was found for transparency or for transfer from one language to the other. Instead, relative proficiency in the two languages influenced counting skill. These results are discussed in terms of linguistic and cultural variables that might account for cross-linguistic differences in counting.

Alberta↗

PubMed2005

Large constituent families help children parse compounds.

The family size of the constituents of compound words, or the number of compounds sharing the constituents, has been shown to affect adults' access to compound words in the mental lexicon. The present study was designed to see if family size would affect children's segmentation of compounds. Twenty-five English-speaking children between 3;7 and 5;9 were asked to explain the meaning of existing compounds with constituents of varying family size to an alien puppet. The results showed that children were more likely to mention the modifier of compounds if they came from large constituent families than if they came from small constituent families. Other variables were also shown to have some, but smaller effects on children's parsing, including the frequency of the constituent words and the compounds, whether the compounds were already known, and age. These results suggest that children's segmentation of compounds might be facilitated by analogy with other compounds already in their vocabularies.

Child Language↗

PubMed2003

What compound nouns mean to preschool children.

Compound nouns have multiple meanings in English. The purpose of this study was to explore when children know that compound nouns refer to two objects, one ideally interacting with the other (e.g., "fish shoes" are shoes with fish on them, not next to them). Thirty-five English-speaking three- and four-year-old children participated in this study. They were given both a production and comprehension task with novel compound nouns. The results showed that the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds were equally likely to produce compounds to name two interacting objects. However, the three-year-olds were less likely than the four-year-olds to understand that a compound referred necessarily to two objects. These results demonstrate that children's knowledge of the meaning of compound nouns is still developing in the preschool years. Three possible interpretations of the mismatch in comprehension and production are discussed: (1). there are modality differences in processing by children, (2). the meaning tapped by production and comprehension is not identical, and (3). the tasks differed in complexity.

Child Language↗

PubMed2002

What's the difference between 'toilet paper' and 'paper toilet'? French-English bilingual children's crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns.

Bilingual acquisition can shed light on the cues children used in acquiring language. The purpose of this paper was to examine whether frequency, ambiguity or language dominance could explain crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns. Crosslinguistic transfer would appear in the form of compound reversals. 25 monolingual English children between the ages of three and four years and 25 age-matched French-English bilingual children were asked to create and indicate their understanding of novel compound nouns. In production, the bilingual children reversed compounds in English more often than the monolingual children but equally often in French and English. In comprehension, there were no differences between groups. These results cannot be explained by any previous explanation of transfer. Implications for the theory of language acquisition are discussed.

Child Language↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The cues that children use in acquiring adjectival phrases and compound nouns: evidence from bilingual children.

This study explores the cues used in acquisition of two semantically similar structures that are ordered differently in French and English: adjectival phrases and compound nouns. One possible prediction is that children attend primarily to meaning, so they should order both structures similarly. Another is that children attend primarily to structure, so they should learn these structures independently. Two kinds of data were obtained from eight 4-year old bilinguals: (1) spontaneous production and (2) experimental elicitation. The children were nearly perfect in their ordering of adjectival phrases, but less so in compounds. These results conform to neither prediction, leaving open the question of which cues children use in acquisition.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Level-ordering does not constrain children's ungrammatical compounds.

English-speaking children typically avoid using regular plurals in novel grammatical deverbal compounds as in rat eater but allow irregular plurals as in mice eater (Gordon, 19985). To explain these data, it has been argued that level-ordering model constrains the production of morphologically complex words, including those with which children have had little to no experience. If level-ordering can be supported, children should avoid regular plurals in their ungrammatical deverbal compounds like a breaker-bottle. Seventy-two English-speaking children were included in the present study, 36 from Britain and 36 from Canada. The results showed that 50% of the children who produced ungrammatical compounds included regular plurals in the compounds they produced. Conversely, none of the children who produced grammatical compounds included regular plurals. These results indicate that level-ordering does not constrain children's production of ungrammatical compounds. These results raise the possibility that level-ordering may not be a valid constraint of children's compounding in general.

Canada↗