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M Shatz

Publications and source records attributed to M Shatz.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

When and how peers give reasons: justifications in the talk of middle school children.

The ability to justify one's beliefs or actions requires linguistic, social, and cognitive skills, including an understanding of the psychological states of others and the negotiation of a socially-sensitive discourse. The production of verbal justifications was examined both quantitatively and qualitatively in eight pairs of eight- to eleven-year-old children whose natural discourse was videotaped, transcribed and coded for justifications. Previous research has frequently studied justifications in conflicts; children in this study produced most of their justifications both in the context of elaborating on a previously asserted claim and in conflicts. The statement justified and the justifications themselves most frequently focused on facts, evaluations, actions, and habitual characteristics or occurrences. A majority of the justifications were produced to support a statement which had some negative valence to it. Although causal connectives have previously been often used as the means for determining justifications, the children in this study rarely used causal connectives and mental verbs in statements with justifications. A qualitative analysis of the discourse of the dyads revealed differences in conversational styles which produced very different types of justifications. Some dyads made frequent use of narratives and co-constructed justifications; other dyads generally produced very short, often isolated justifications.

Child↗
PubMed1997

Caregiver speech and children's use of nouns versus verbs: a comparison of English, Italian, and Mandarin.

This paper examines naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine if variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. It contrasts two PRO-DROP languages, Italian and Mandarin, with English. Naturalistic speech samples from six 2:0 English-, six 1:11 Italian-, and ten 1:10 Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. Adult-to-child speech was coded for the type frequency, token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs as well as the types and placements of syntactic subjects and the pragmatic focus of adult questions. Children's spontaneous productions of nouns and verbs and their responses to adult questions were also examined. The results suggest a pattern consistent with the children's spontaneous production data. Namely, the speech of English-speaking caregivers emphasized nouns over verbs, whereas that of Mandarin-speaking caregivers emphasized verbs over nouns. The data from the Italian-speaking caregivers were more equivocal, though still noun-oriented, across these various input measures.

Caregivers↗
PubMed1997

The effect of perceptual similarity and linguistic input on children's acquisition of object labels.

This study investigated whether and when children establish various semantic relations between old and new words. Fifty two-year-olds were taught labels for objects previously referred to by an overextended term. We found that children were more likely to learn a new label when (a) it referred to a new object that was perceptually dissimilar, rather than similar, to a known one, and (b) when linguistic information indicated it had an inclusion, rather than a mutually exclusive, relation to a known label. Children were more likely to interpret a new label as mutually exclusive to a known one when their referents were perceptually dissimilar. These findings are discussed in light of theories of lexical development, particularly with regard to conceptualizations of constraints on the acquisition of word meaning.

Child Language↗
PubMed1996

Colour term knowledge in two-year-olds: evidence for early competence.

It is commonly believed that colour terms are acquired unusually slowly. However, several recent studies suggest that preschoolers have more colour term knowledge than previously believed. In two studies, we investigated the colour term knowledge of 49 two-year-olds and the influence of schooling on their colour term acquisition. Both studies revealed considerable knowledge in such young children. A longitudinal comparison of children with and without school experience in Study 2 indicated that the higher performance of the school group could not be accounted for by differences predating that group's experience. In reviewing the evidence from the children's performance, we conclude that contemporary children's early and frequent experience with colour terms may account for this cohort's improved performance over previous generations of children.

Child Language↗
PubMed1991

Patterns of language learning-related behaviours: evidence for self-help in acquiring grammar.

Four kinds of language learning-related behaviours (LLRBs) were examined in the home conversations of six English children studied for six months from age 2;0 to 2;6. The speech of the children was coded for the number of times they participated in language lessons, language practice, metalanguage and revisions of prior language. All the children were active and frequent producers of LLRBs, with revisions being observed most commonly. Further analysis revealed that the majority of the revisions that the children initiated involved grammatical changes, with the revised utterances tending to be more grammatical than their predecessors. An auditory monitor is proposed as a partial explanation for revision behaviour, and is evaluated relative to other possible accounts of the findings.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

Conversational or communicative skill? A reassessment of two-year-olds' behaviour in miscommunication episodes.

Young children's competence in using and responding to clarification requests may reflect their desire to achieve goals through the direction of others rather than knowledge that messages must be understood by another mind. This possibility was addressed by examining miscommunication episodes between children aged 2; 6 and their parents in videotaped free play sessions. Although the children generally responded appropriately in form to parental clarification requests, they responded more often to and resolved successfully more of those following their own requests than those following their assertions. Thus, the results support the idea that young children are frequently motivated to repair their utterances when they have not achieved some overt behaviour desired from others. These findings are discussed in the light of the conversational experience two-year-olds bring to clarification situations.

Child Language↗
PubMed1990

Heuristics of reasoning and analogy in children's visual perspective taking.

We propose that children's reasoning about others' visual perspectives is guided by simple heuristics based on a perceiver's line of sight and salient features of the object met by that line. In 3 experiments employing a 2-perceiver analogy task, children aged 3-6 were generally better able to reproduce a perceiver's perspective if a visual cue in the perceiver's line of sight sufficed to distinguish it from alternatives. Children had greater difficulty when the task hinged on attending to configural cues. Availability of distinctive cues affixed on the objects' sides facilitated solution of the symmetrical orientations. These and several other related findings reported in the literature are traced to children's reliance on heuristics of reasoning.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Induction and the acquisition of English auxiliaries: the effects of differentially enriched input.

Children aged 2;0 to 2;6 participated in a longitudinal study examining their acquisition of the English auxiliary system following a six-week period in which they were exposed to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Groups of children received enrichment utterances with the auxiliary could either in first position in the sentence, in middle position, or in both positions. Children in the front position group were significantly advanced over the other experimental groups in acquiring modal auxiliaries but not non-modals. However, none of the experimental groups differed significantly from a baseline group which received no additional could input. The implications of these findings for understanding the mechanisms of auxiliary acquisition and the nature of children's grammatical categories are discussed.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1982

The acquisition of personal pronouns and proper names by an identical twin pair.

Twins have been reported to suffer both identity confusion and language delay as a result of their twinship. Evidence for such difficulties was sought by studying the acquisition of personal pronouns and naming conventions in one pair of identical twin boys from age 2:1 to 2:10. The twins' acquisition of personal pronouns was in accordance with nontwin norms. Their apparent delay in conventional proper name use was attributed to the invention of the word Gaga as a referent for self and other twin. As proper name use emerged, Gaga use declined, whereas personal pronouns remained relatively independent. We concluded that the twins gave no evidence of either an identity confusion or a genuine delay in naming. Rather, the difference in the acquisition of names between these twins and nontwins was the additional step of first naming the twinship before naming each twin, which nontwins would not have a reason to do.

Child Language↗