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Patterns of acquisition in the emerging mental lexicon: the case of to and for in English.

A corpus analysis of 32 English-speaking children's first usages of the prepositions to and for (which have similar properties semantically and grammatically) was undertaken for the purpose of tracking intralexemic sense acquisition and lexical organization in an often neglected word class. The earliest senses used by these children do not reflect historical patterns of semantic extension. Diachronically, concrete, spatial, and semantically transparent usages emerged before more abstract, nonspatial, and opaque usages. Developmentally, frequency of use in the child's linguistic environment and co-occurrence in collocations with favored verbs or other useful expressions proved to be the major determinant of early production, suggesting that external rather than internal/cognitive factors play the major role in lexical development.

Child↗
PubMed1996

The nature and development of nonverbal implicit memory.

The study investigated the course of developmental changes in performance on nonverbal implicit and explicit memory tests and examined the degree to which implicit memory performance is dependent upon the storage of specific perceptual information. Four-, 5-, and 10-year-old children were required to name fragmented pictures of common objects or to name and answer general knowledge questions about complete versions of the same pictures. After a 48-h retention interval, all subjects were presented with a fragmented picture identification task containing pictures identical to those present during encoding (old), pictures which were from the same basic category as the study items but which varied in their perceptual similarity to those items (same), and novel pictures which were visually and semantically unrelated to the study items (new). The amount of visual information needed to name each item (picture identification threshold) was recorded. Following identification, subjects were asked whether or not they had been shown the picture previously. All age groups showed significant priming such that the picture identification threshold for the old items was lower than that of the new pictures. A smaller but significant priming effect was obtained for the same-name items. This effect was maximized when the same-name items were perceptually similar to the study items. The magnitude of these priming effects did not vary as a function of age, but greater priming was found for those children who identified picture fragments during the study phase. In contrast, the sensitivity of recognition memory performance increased from 4 to 10 years of age. These results suggest that the processes that subserve pictorial repetition priming and recognition memory develop at different rates and that such priming is dependent upon access to specific perceptual representations of studied objects.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1989

When grammar wins over sense: children's judgments of extraposed relatives.

A sentence judgement task was used to test 4- to 5-year-old children's knowledge of coreference possibilities for extraposed relatives. The overall pattern of children's performance in the first experiment reported here is similar to that of a control group of adult subjects and is consistent with knowledge of the linguistic constraints that restrict extraposition in the adult grammar. Performance on a follow-up experiment argues against a nongrammatical explanation of the results of the first experiment. Children's performance on the judgement task shows that they are capable of abstracting away from the pragmatics of the immediate situation in making judgments and can be construed as evidence that children construct mental representations for the sentences they judge in which an NP over NP S structure is constructed for relative clauses at a level distinct from the surface structure string. The comparative lack of response patterns found in some previous work is discussed in the context of models of sentence processing.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Selectively prompting speech repairs in stages I to V: a technique for investigating early metalinguistic abilities.

When children aged from 1;6 to 3;6 made errors in relation to targeted morphemes within grammatically obligatory contexts, a prompt of "Pardon?" was given. Morpheme repair rates increased with linguistic proficiency, and with target morpheme mastery. The selective use of prompted repairs appears to be a useful technique for assessing rudimentary abilities to monitor grammatical form within very young children.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1990

A computational learning model for metrical phonology.

One of the major challenges to linguistic theory is the solution of what has been termed the "projection problem". Simply put, linguistics must account for the fact that starting from a data base that is both unsystematic and relatively small, a human child is capable of constructing a grammar that mirrors, for all intents and purposes, the adult system. In this article we shall address ourselves to the question of the learnability of a postulated subsystem of phonological structure: the stress system. We shall describe a computer program which is designed to acquire this subpart of linguistic structure. Our approach follows the "principles and parameters" model of Chomsky (1981a, b). This model is particularly interesting from both a computational point of view and with respect to the development of learning theories. We encode the relevant aspects of universal grammar (UG)--those aspects of linguistic structure that are presumed innate and thus present in every linguistic system. The learning process consists of fixing a number of parameters which have been shown to underlie stress systems and which should, in principle, lead the learner to the postulation of the system from which the primary linguistic data (i.e., the input to the learner) is drawn. We go on to explore certain formal and substantive properties of this learning system. Questions such as cross-parameter dependencies, determinism, subsets, and incremental versus all-at-once learning are raised and discussed in the article. The issues raised by this study provide another perspective on the formal structure of stress systems and the learnability of parameter systems in general.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1993

Basic-level individuals.

In this experiment, 4-year-old children interpreted a novel count noun taught ostensively for an unfamiliar object as referring to a basic-level kind (such as PERSON or DOG) rather than to a kind that individuates its members by type of situation (such as PASSENGER or PUPPY). Because ostension does not distinguish a basic-level kind from a situation-restricted kind, this finding suggests that children assume, as a default, reference to a basic-level kind rather than to a situation-restricted kind when they hear a count noun applied to an unfamiliar object in an ostensive definition. The experiment shows that the assumption guides children's interpretation only if the object is unfamiliar, and if no specific information is available calling for a situation-restricted kind interpretation. The proposed word-learning assumption is critical to an understanding of the psychologically privileged manner of individuation, and therefore, of quantification (e.g., counting) involving objects.

Child Language↗
PubMed1996

The use of multiple frames in verb learning via syntactic bootstrapping.

Following the original Syntactic Bootstrapping proposal of Landau and Gleitman (1985), this study investigated whether young 2-year-old children (mean age = 28 months) can use multiple syntactic frames, in addition to the extralinguistic scene, to help focus on the meaning of a novel verb. The multiple frames tested were combinations of transitive and intransitive frames in two alternation patterns, Causative and Omitted Object. By hypothesis, the Causative alternation would be more predictive of actions involving physical causation and the Omitted Object alternation more predictive of actions involving repeated physical contact without causation. Subjects were presented with videos depicting both actions, together with a novel verb. The actions were subsequently separated, and the children were asked to select which action was the referent of the novel verb. The novel verb was presented either in transitive and intransitive frames in the Causative alternation (CS: The duck is sebbing the frog, the frog is sebbing) or the Omitted Object alternation (OO: The duck is sebbing the frog, the duck is sebbing), or in intransitive frames only (IO: The duck is sebbing), or without a frame (FF: Sebbing!). In the CS, IO, and FF conditions, children preferred the causative action as the referent of the verb. However, the girls in the OO condition showed a significantly different preference, and looked more toward the contact actions than their peers in the other conditions did. This study thus provides the first experimental evidence that young 2-year-old children can use multiple syntactic frames to help determine the meaning of a novel verb.

Child Development↗
PubMed1996

What do children know about the universal quantifiers all and each?

Children's comprehension of the universal quantifiers all and each was explored in a series of experiments using a picture selection task. The first experiment examined children's ability to restrict a quantifier to the noun phrase it modifies. The second and third experiments examined children's ability to associate collective, distributive, and exhaustive representations with sentences containing universal quantifiers. The collective representation corresponds to the "group" meaning (for All the flowers are in a vase all of the flowers are in the same vase). The distributive representation implies a pairing (e.g., each flower paired with a vase for Each flower is in a vase). The exhaustive representation exhausts both sets (e.g., for The flowers are in the vases all the flowers are in vases and all the vases have flowers in them). Four- to 10-year-olds children had little difficulty restricting the quantifier all to the noun it modified in a task which required them to attend to the group feature of all. In contrast, only 9- and 10-year-olds were able to solve the task when the quantifier was each and the pictures showed entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. Children showed a preference for associating collective pictures with sentences containing all and distributive pictures with sentences containing each. The results suggest that between the ages of 5 and 10 years, children's semantic representations undergo less radical changes than others have proposed. Instead, developmental change may occur gradually as children acquire linguistic cues which map onto existing semantic representations.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1982

Phonological process development with MLU-referenced guidelines.

Sixty subjects between the ages of 21 and 48 months were placed into groups based on mean length of utterance (MLU) and chronological age (CA) to test Stampe's hypothesis about the development of phonological processes. The subjects were given the Phonological Process Analysis (Weiner, 1979), and a proportion score for each of sixteen phonological processes was derived for each subject. The use of the various phonological processes across MLU groups and age groups was analyzed by multiple regression correlation, three-way ANOVA, and Tukey's HSD tests. MLU was found to be the best classification for the subjects for describing the phonological processes. The results and discussions present MLU-referenced guidelines regarding the emergence, duration, elimination, and universality of the sixteen phonological processes.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1994

Developmental changes in narrative and non-narrative discourse in children with and without brain injury.

This study presents a set of narrative and non-narrative tasks and analytic procedures for examining the discourse development of children with perinatal brain injury and typically developing children. Three oral discourse genres were collected at ages 5, 6, and 7: script, picture description, and replica play narration. Genre performances were assessed for the presence of hypothesized genre features. Results suggest these tasks and procedures are able to characterize development in discourse abilities for both a normative group and for children with perinatal brain injury. The group of children with brain injury produced shorter discourse performance with more off-task talk. This group also showed difficulty in fully differentiating the various genre types and in creating integrated discourse performances. However, most of these children demonstrated considerable growth in control of genre features over this time period. The possible utility of these tasks and procedures for clinical assessment is discussed.

Brain Injuries↗
PubMed1998

How 2-year-old children learn novel part names of unfamiliar objects.

The present study examined whether 2-year-olds can learn a novel part name of an unfamiliar object when an adult demonstrates an action upon a part of the object. In the experiment, an experimenter pointed at, named, and acted upon a certain part (nut) of an unfamiliar object (a u-shaped bolt with a nut) or simply pointed at and named the part. Twenty-four Japanese 2-year-olds were asked to choose a referent for the given name in forced-choice tests. The results showed that children choose an isolated part (the nut) when the experimenter demonstrates an action upon the part. However, they choose a whole object of similar shape (a u-shaped bolt without a nut) when the experimenter does not demonstrate such an action. The study suggests that young children are able to 'override' the whole object assumption (Markman, E.M., Wachtel, G.F., 1988. Cognitive Psychology 20, 121-157) when they observe adults' actions on parts of objects.

Child Development↗