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PubMed1993

Naming as a function of linguistic form-class and object categories.

We examined whether children rely on linguistic information (i.e. mass vs. count nouns) or object category information (i.e. objects vs. substances) when they name things. A grinder test was used, in which substances (e.g. water) maintain identity through transformation but objects (e.g. a cup) do not. Thirty children aged three through six were asked if the same name could be used for the same item after transformation. The items included pairs of amorphous substances and discrete objects (e.g. water--a cup), perceptually similar discrete objects (e.g. chalk--a crayon), and food items (e.g. corn--a bean). Children accepted the same name for food, ignoring linguistic information, and for objects, relying on linguistic information. In Experiment 2, 32 children aged five through eight were asked if the same name could be used for unfamiliar hardware and food items after transformation when they were labelled by nonsense mass and count nouns. Children tended to use the same name for food, relying on perceptual information. These results are discussed in terms of the active conceptualization about names of objects in relation to object characteristics.

Child↗
PubMed1993

Phonological and morphological analysis skills in young children.

Twenty-two normally developing five-year-olds were asked to judge, identify, repair and explain phonological and morphological errors. All of the errors involved the addition, substitution or omission of a single phoneme, which in the morphological task, was also an inflectional morpheme. Stimuli were controlled for type of error (omission, addition, substitution), location of the error (word final) and word status of the resulting error (word, non-word). Children performed significantly better on the phonological task than on the morphological task. It is proposed that the results are due to differences in the type and location of linguistic information to be analysed and to differences in memory demands in the tasks.

Child Language↗
PubMed1996

Re-introduction of referents in Italian children's narratives.

In this study we investigate the re-introduction of referents in the Frog stories told by Italian children aged 4-10 (N = 100). We found that for every age group full nouns are the most frequent forms used for reference re-introduction. Null forms, such as clitic pronouns or person/number inflection on the verb, are the second most frequent forms. A detailed analysis of null forms shows that children of different ages exploit different properties of the verbal and non-verbal context which can make a referent predictable. Compared to preschoolers, elementary school children are more likely to use null forms when the semantic content of the verb, or the structure of the preceding text make referents inferrable. On the other hand, preschoolers tend to exploit the importance of a character in the story plot, or the visual availability of the referent in the non-verbal context, as properties that make an entity salient enough to prevent the speaker from using overt linguistic forms such as full nouns. Our study confirms results of previous research, showing that elementary school children are more competent than preschoolers in integrating the semantic content of the current utterance into the context generated by previous discourse.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1994

The development of infinitives from three to five.

This study investigated the form of infinitival sentences produced by young children and their knowledge of the control properties of this sentence form. Twenty-five children between the ages of 3;7 and 5;4 participated in a story completion task designed to elicit infinitive sentences and in an act-out comprehension task. Although the infinitive form was productive for even the youngest children in this study, development of this form was not complete even for the five-year-olds, nor did any child demonstrate adult knowledge of control. In addition, two competing claims regarding order of acquisition (that of Limber, 1973, and Hyams, 1985) were evaluated.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1995

Relative clauses are barriers to wh-movement for young children.

Two studies are described which investigate preschool children's sensitivity to relative clauses as barriers to the movement of wh-questions. The children were presented with short stories followed by questions in which the wh-word had two possible sites of interpretation, the ungrammatical option being inside a relative clause. A cross-sectional study with 23 children aged 3;1 to 6;1, and a longitudinal study over the course of one year with 12 children aged 3;1 to 4;1 at the start, found young children refused to extract wh-questions from the ungrammatical site inside a relative clause. This confirms other findings that children's early grammars are sensitive to universal constraints on movement. In addition, the children differentiated between wh-complements and relative clauses in their tendency to mistakenly answer the medial wh-complementizer but not the wh-relative pronoun. Explanations for the latter are framed in terms of children's initial assumptions about the attachment of complements.

Child↗
PubMed1995

Weird past tense forms.

It is often assumed that children go through a stage in which they systematically overapply irregular past tense patterns to inappropriate verbs, as in wipe-wope, bring-brang, trick-truck, walk-has walken. Such errors have been interpreted both as reflecting over-use of minor grammatical rules (e.g. 'change i to a'), and as reflecting the operation of a connectionist pattern associator network that superimposes and blends patterns of various degrees of generality. But the actual rate, time course, and nature of these errors have never been documented. We analysed 20,000 past tense and participle usages from nine children in the CHILDES database, looking for overapplications of irregular vowel-change patterns, as in brang, blends, as in branged, productive suffixations of -en, as in walken, gross distortions, as in mail-membled, and double-suffixation, as in walkeded. These errors were collectively quite rare; children made them in about two tenths of one per cent of the opportunities, and with few stable patterns: the errors were not predominantly word-substitutions, did not occur predominantly with irregular stems, showed no consistency across verbs or ages, and showed no clear age trend. Most (though not all) of the errors were based closely on existing irregular verbs; gross distortions never occurred. We suggest that both rule-theories and connectionist theories have tended to overestimate the predominance of such errors. Children master irregular forms quite accurately, presumably because irregular forms are just a special case of the arbitrary sound-meaning pairings that define words, and because children are good at learning words.

Child↗
PubMed1995

Reference states and reversals: undoing actions with verbs.

The purpose of these studies is to characterize children's conception of reversal and its relation to a reference state. A reversal is the move from one state to some prior state of affairs. For example, shoes that have been TIED can be UNTIED, parcels WRAPPED then UNWRAPPED, and dishes COVERED then UNCOVERED. The present studies were designed to find out how children (aged 1;0 to 5;0) describe reversals of action that restore objects to a prior, less constrained, state. In English, the prefix un- offers the most productive device for this, but, initially, children rely on a verb like open, on general purpose undo, and on particles like out and off. As they acquire un-, English-speaking children must learn that this prefix applies primarily to verbs for change-of-state, often for enclosing, covering and attaching. In German, there is no reversal prefix, but there are productive particles. German-speaking children also begin with a verb like open and then turn to verb particles on a course similar to that in English to express reversals.

Child Language↗
PubMed1989

Contextual information and temporal terms.

We report an experiment designed to identify how contextual information can influence children's performance on an experimental task involving temporal terms. Crain (1982) reported improved performance on a comprehension task when subjects were provided with contextual information, and he suggested that the improvement was due to satisfaction of presuppositions. However, this contextual information might have served to simplify task demands by providing prior information concerning an important aspect of the task. The present study distinguishes these factors by incorporating contextual information into the subordinate clause of the test sentences in a comprehension experiment (to satisfy presupposions) or into the main clause (to provide comparable prior information without satisfying presuppositions). We conclude that contextual information results in a significant improvement only when such information can be used to satisfy presuppositions.

Child Language↗
PubMed1991

A longitudinal analysis of young children's cohesion and noun specification in narratives.

The early production of nine cohesive devices during narration about personal experience was examined in an 18-month longitudinal study of 10 children between approximately age 2;0 and 3;6. The specification of noun phrases and types of noun errors were also explored. The number of cohesive ties increased with both age and MLU, due to increased pronominal reference and conjunctions (while clausal and verbal ellipsis decreased). Specific cohesive devices also were acquired at different MLU levels. Most noun phrases were non-problematic and errors declined with increasing age and MLU; specifically, noun omissions declined. However, when new nouns were introduced, approximately one out of five were ambiguous throughout the study. Thus, children's narratives become more comprehensible with age as cohesive links increase, and noun errors decrease, but at 3;6 children are still having difficulty properly managing the introduction of novel nouns.

Child Language↗
PubMed1991

On the ability to provide evaluative comments: further explorations of children's narrative competencies.

This study investigated the changing functions of evaluative devices in children's narratives. The evaluative devices included (a) references to 'frames of mind', particularly to emotions, (b) character speech, (c) 'hedges', (d) negative qualifiers, and (e) causal connectors. Narratives were elicited from a 24-picture story book. The subjects were three groups of native English-speaking Americans (12 per group): five- and nine-year-old children and college undergraduate students. A quantitative comparison revealed that (i) adults used evaluative devices three times as often as five-year-olds, and two-and-a-half times as often as the nine-year-old children; (ii) adults used significantly more references to 'frames of mind' and 'hedges' than the children; and (iii) whereas five-year-olds used each evaluative type equally often, nine-year-olds and adults used references to 'frames of mind' significantly more than the other four evaluation types. A second analysis, focusing specifically on the discourse functions of references to 'frames of mind' revealed that, early on, this particular device is used to express a local evaluative perspective on particular events, while with increasing age it is used to signal the hierarchial organization of the story events. These findings are discussed with regard to two non-linguistic developmental achievements, the formation of event schemas and the formation of a theory of mind.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

The who, when and where of early narratives.

To be well understood, narratives need to be embedded within appropriate contextual information. The early development of key orientation (participants, location and time) was traced with an 18-month longitudinal study of real-experience narratives produced by 10 children aged approximately 2-3;6. Listener knowledge or inference was required to decode most named participants and many were not specified at all. There was no developmental improvement. Orientation to WHEN was rare at first and involved formula words indiscriminately applied. There was steady developmental improvement in frequency as well as differentiation of time references. WHERE information was more common at all ages, particularly when the narrated events occurred away from home. It also showed developmental improvement, but only for away-from-home locations. Overall, very young children can produce narratives in an unscaffolded context to adults unfamiliar with their experiences. The potential role of parental scaffolding in teaching orientation skills is discussed.

Child Language↗
PubMed2002

German children's productivity with tense morphology: the Perfekt (present perfect).

Two nonce-word studies examined German-speaking children's productivity with the Perfekt (present perfect) from 2;6 to 3;6. The German Perfekt consists of the past participle of the main verb and an inflected form of an auxiliary (either haben 'have' or sein 'be'). In Study 1, nonce verbs were either introduced in the infinitival form, and children (seventy-two children, aged 2;6 to 3;6) were tested on their ability to produce the Perfekt, or introduced in the Perfekt, and children were tested on their ability to produce the infinitive. In Study 2 twenty-four children aged 3;6 were given the past participle form of nonce verbs to see if they could supply the appropriate auxiliary (based mainly on verb semantics). The results were that many children as young as 2;6 used past participles productively (more than used infinitival forms productively), but all children had much difficulty in supplying both auxiliaries appropriately. The current findings suggest that mastery of the Perfekt construction as a whole does not take place before the age of four and that frequency of exposure is an important factor in determining the age at which children acquire grammatical constructions.

Child Language↗