Bias, innateness and domain specificity.
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Bayes Theorem↗
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When children reach beyond their grasp: why some children make pronoun case errors and others don't.
This research addresses the question of why some children are disposed to making a large number of pronoun case errors and others are not. The answer proposed is that when pronoun paradigm building outstrips the development of INFL, children become especially vulnerable to erring in the choice of pronominal word form, resulting in pronoun case error. On the other hand, when pronoun paradigm building proceeds more conservatively, the risk of error is reduced. The spontaneous sentence production of children observed in naturalistic caregiver--child interaction from a cross-section of 44 children (2;0-4;0) is used to support this proposal. The data show that pronoun case error was minimal among children who had strong INFL. However, among children with weak INFL there was a wide range of variation, some children making many errors and others making none. Analysis of variance confirmed that this variation was strongly related to the dispersion of production attempts across an extended pronoun paradigm, such that, the fewer cells attempted, the lower the error rate. These findings show that pronoun case errors are not an inevitable result of grammatical development, but may conceivably be avoided altogether if paradigm building proceeds at a rate commensurate with the child's development of INFL.
Caregivers↗
A comparison of homonym and novel word learning: the role of phonotactic probability and word frequency.
This study compares homonym learning to novel word learning by three- to four-year-old children to determine whether homonyms are learned more rapidly or more slowly than novel words. In addition, the role of form characteristics in homonym learning is examined by manipulating phonotactic probability and word frequency. Thirty-two children were exposed to homonyms and novel words in a story with visual support and learning was measured in two tasks: referent identification; picture naming. Results showed that responses to homonyms were as accurate as responses to novel words in the referent identification task. In contrast, responses to homonyms were more accurate than responses to novel words in the picture-naming task. Furthermore, homonyms composed of common sound sequences were named more accurately than those composed of rare sound sequences. The influence of word frequency was less straightforward. These results may be inconsistent with a one-to-one form-referent bias in word learning.
Acoustic Stimulation↗
Beginning and end in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian.
The goal of this research is to determine the relevant factors that aid in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian. Results confirm the findings of previous research, which say that aspect is not learned as a uniform category, but rather interrelates with the acquisition of Aktionsarten. This study focuses on the factors responsible for the difference in the rate of the acquisition of two complementary Aktionsarten in the perfective aspect: telic verbs (verbs including a result/goal of the denoted event) and ingressive verbs (verbs including the beginning of the event). Since the usage of Aktionsarten strongly depends on the surrounding discourse, two experiments that varied in their discourse complexity were conducted. One study looked at the production of isolated utterances (thirty-nine children aged 3;0 to 6;11) and the other study focused on complex texts (fifty-two children aged 3;0 to 6;11). It was found that while telics are used independently of discourse context, ingressives depend strongly on contextual information. These results suggest that discourse complexity and narrative competence define the acquisitional process for ingressives, yet are irrelevant in the acquisition of telics.
Age Factors↗
Early noun plurals in German: regularity, productivity or default?
The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0. Analyses of correct responses showed that the highest scores were obtained with -e plurals, followed by the plural markers -e + U, -er + U, -s and -(e)n. The lowest score was observed for pure Umlaut (U) plurals. Analyses suggested an impact of productivity on the number of correct scores: fully productive and productive plural patterns obtained higher correct scores than weakly productive and non-productive ones. The results of the study support our productivity scale and are compatible both with single-route models and with a race-model variant of the dual-route view.
Adult↗
Children's individual approaches to the organization of narrative.
This paper investigates the similarities and differences observed in individual approaches to the linguistic organization of narrative. Twenty subjects in each of five age groups (four, six, eight, ten years and adult) were asked to relate a narrative elicited from a picture book. All references to the animate characters in the book were coded for form (nominal/pronominal), and function (switch versus maintenance). Individual analyses of the narratives indicated that a variety of strategies were used across all age groups. Strategies identified included thematic subject, nominal and anaphoric. When the narrative was divided into segments based on the referential load of each segment, it was found that there was an interaction between the strategy adopted in the first segment, the age of the subject and the referential load of subsequent segments. A variety of strategies was adopted by all age groups although there were preferential trends observable within each group. The ability to maintain a strategy across the varying referential load of the narrative increased with age. Five developmental stages were identified from the analysis which enabled certain tentative predictions to be made about the way children approach a complex narrative task, suggesting that children pass through a number of stages which reflect their ability to organize the referential content of the narrative at differing speech levels.
Adult↗
Acquisition of variable rules: a study of (-t, d) deletion in preschool children.
The present study examined the pattern of deletion of final /t/ and /d/ in word final consonant clusters in sixteen three- and four-year-old children and their degree of mastery of phonological and grammatical constraints to answer the following questions: how and when is this variable rule acquired, and how does its acquisition relate to the learning of the categorical rule of past tense formation? Sixteen children were tape recorded in their South Philadelphia day care centre. In addition, eight of their mothers were interviewed in their homes for purposes of comparison. Results of the study revealed that children as young as three had, for the most part, mastered the phonological constraints on (-t, d) deletion. They matched the adult pattern including the constraint of following pause disfavouring deletion, the only one that has been shown to vary according to geographical dialect. The children also made a consistent and adult-like distinction between the grammatical forms of mono-morpheme and weak past tense. Their high rate of deletion in semi-weak verbs, which differs from adult patterns, suggests that the children are demonstrating rule acquisition based on an analysis of verbal inflection.
Age Factors↗
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↗
Longitudinal measurement of growth in definitional skill.
This study examines individual growth rates in definitional skill over a period of three to six years, for 68 low-income children. Children were asked to define words once a year at school, from kindergarten (youngest administration at 5:3) through fourth grade (oldest administration at 10:10). A plateau was observed between age nine and ten both for percent formal definitions (characterized by presence of a superordinate) and for the quality of formal definitions. The plateau was lower than the theoretical ceiling for these measures. However, the children appear to have attained 'adult levels' of definitional skill: forty-seven fourth-graders (aged 9:1 to 10:10) performed higher, on average, than their own mothers when giving definitions. These results support the notion that definitional skill is related to being part of an academic culture: low-income mothers, whose formal schooling is complete, generally do not give oral definitions to simple nouns as well as do their nine- to ten-year-old children.
Age Factors↗
Pragmatic directions and children's word learning.
The present study tested the hypothesis that children as young as two use what adults tell them about meaning relations when they make inferences about new words. 18 two-year-olds (mean age 2;2) and 18 three-year-olds (mean age 3;2) learned two new terms (a) with instructions either (i) to treat one term as a superordinate to the other, or (ii) to replace one term with another; and (b) with no instruction given about how two new words might be related. Children were attentive to both kinds of instructions or pragmatic directions, and made use of them in their word-learning. When they received no instruction relating the two new words, they resorted to a range of coping strategies to assign and relate meanings to each other. These findings support the view that children's learning of new word meanings is guided by the pragmatic directions adults offer.
Child Language↗
Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use.
This study investigated the extent to which the nature of verb input accounts for the order in which children acquire verbs. We assessed the nature of verb input using a combined sample of the speech of 57 mothers addressing their Stage I children. We assessed the order of verb acquisition using as our database a combined sample of those children's speech 10 weeks later and using as our measure of order of acquisition the frequency of verb occurrence. The first set of analyses established the validity of this measure of acquisition order by comparing it with order of acquisition data obtained from checklist and diary data. The second set of analyses revealed that three properties of the input were significant predictors of the order of acquisition of the 25 verbs that were the focus of this study. The predictive properties of input were the total frequency, final position frequency, and diversity of syntactic environments in which the verbs appeared. These findings suggest that the way verbs appear in input influences their ease of acquisition. More specifically, the effect of syntactic diversity in input provides support for the syntactic bootstrapping account of how children use structural information to learn the meaning of new verbs.
Age Factors↗
Acquiring the transitive construction in English: the role of animacy and pronouns.
Twenty-four children between 2;5 and 3;1 were taught two nonce verbs. Each verb was used multiple times by an adult experimenter to refer to a highly transitive action involving a mostly animate agent (including the child herself) and a patient of varying animacy. One of the verbs was modelled in the Two-Participants condition in which the experimenter said: 'Look. Big Bird is dopping the boat'. The other verb was modelled in the No-Participant condition in which the experimenter named the Two-Participants but did not use them as arguments of the novel verb: 'Look what Big Bird is doing to the boat. It's called keefing'. It was found that whereas many children produced transitive sentences with the Two-Participants verb, only children close to 3;0 produced transitive sentences with the No-Participant verb. This age is somewhat younger than previous studies in which young children were asked to produce transitive sentences with two lexical nouns for the two animate participants. Also, re-analyses of previously published studies in which children learned novel verbs in sentence frames without arguments found that the few transitive sentences produced by children under 2;6 involved either I or me as subject. One hypothesis is thus that as young children in the third year of life begin to construct a more abstract and verb-general transitive construction, this construction initially contains only certain types of participants expressed in only certain kinds of linguistic forms.
Child Language↗
Longer-term effects of corrective input: an experimental approach.
There is growing evidence that corrective input for grammatical errors is widely available to children (Farrar, 1992; Morgan, Bonamo & Travis, 1995). However, controversy still exists concerning the extent to which children can identify and exploit available negative input. In particular, very little is yet known about the longer-term effects of negative input. Performing a time series analysis on observational data, Morgan et al. (1995) conclude that corrective recasts are not related to future improvements in grammaticality. It is argued here, though, that the data sets analysed in this study are inherently ill-suited to the demands of time series analyses. The present study adopts an experimental approach in order to compare the effects of negative evidence versus positive input on the acquisition of irregular past tense verb forms. Twenty-six children (mean age 3;10) participated in a within-subjects design over a period of five weeks. It was found that improvements in the grammaticality of child speech were considerably greater in cases where negative evidence had been provided. Moreover, children's intuitions concerning the status of irregular and overregularized forms more closely approximated adult intuitions when corrective input was available.
Child Language↗
Patterns of pronoun case error.
This paper addresses the question of whether the rate and patterns of pronoun case error are influenced by the composition of an individual pronoun's paradigm. Twenty-nine children, aged 2;6 to 4;0 were audiotaped for two 1-hour sessions, interacting with their primary caregivers engaged in free play, book reading and family album viewing. It was found that her was overextended for she at a significantly higher rate than him for he and them for they, providing evidence of a 'double-cell' effect that increases the incidence of error in the feminine pronoun. It was also found that the overextension of nominative forms (e.g. he for him), were antagonistic to the more frequently occurring type of overextension, objective for nominative (e.g. him for he). These findings indicate that the composition of a pronoun's paradigm influenced the patterns of pronoun case error observed.
Child Development↗
The windmills of your mind: commentary inspired by Cervantes (1615) on Rispoli's review of Rethinking innateness.
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Child Language↗
Performance of African American preschool and kindergarten students on the expressive vocabulary test.
PURPOSE: To examine the validity of the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT; K. Williams, 1997) for assessing the expressive vocabulary skills of African American students. METHOD/RESULTS: One hundred sixty-five African American preschool and kindergarten students were administered the EVT. The mean EVT score for these African American students was 96.44 (SD = 11.42), which is not appreciably lower than the standardized mean of 100 (SD=15). CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Scores were normally distributed, indicating that the EVT is culturally fair and appropriate for use with some African American preschool and kindergarten children as part of an early screening battery. The importance of culturally fair vocabulary measures is discussed relative to this population.
Black or African American↗
Quick incidental verb learning in 4-year-olds: identification and generalization.
This study examined the abilities of young children to identify and generalize new verbs from an indirect teaching context. Forty 4-year-olds were shown a story that presented the following manner-of-motion verbs: frolic, saunter, scurry, strut, and trudge. The experimental group (N = 20) heard the label of each verb 13 times while viewing the story, whereas the control group (N = 20) did not hear the verbs' labels. The performances of these two groups were compared to each other and to a group of adults (N = 22) who did not view the story but presumably had prior knowledge of the verbs. The experimental group correctly identified the target verbs in their prototypical form significantly more often than the control group but less often than the adult group. Generalization measures were evaluated for the children in the experimental group who correctly identified more than half of the target verbs (N = 6), their age-matched control group peers (N = 9), and the adult group. The experimental subgroup and the adults correctly generalized the verb labels to actions in which unimportant motion features had been altered. However, unlike the adult group, the experimental subgroup responded inconsistently to generalization questions in which important movement features of the actions had been altered. These results suggest that, even in their initial representations of manner-of-motion verbs, young children are sensitive to the relative importance of the different movements that make up these actions.
Adult↗
The development of expressive elaboration in fictional narratives.
PURPOSE: This study analyzed the development of expressive elaboration in fictional narratives for school-age children. METHOD: The analysis was derived from high-point analysis, but it was tailored to capture the artful aspects of fictional storytelling. Narratives were elicited with a short picture sequence of a likely life event from 293 children whose ages ranged from 5 to 12 years. RESULTS: Results showed a significant age effect for expressive elaboration with narrative length controlled. For three age clusters (5-6 years, 7-9 years, and 10-12 years), the 13 types of expressive elaboration showed diverse patterns of acquisition in terms of presence, frequency, and developmental change. Appendages (introducer, abstract, theme, coda, ender) were lowest in both presence and frequency, and increased in presence with age. Orientations (names, relations, personality) were more common and increased in presence with age. Evaluations (modifiers, expressions, repetition, internal states, dialogue) were most frequent and showed age changes in both presence and frequency. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: This study provides an additional window on narrative competence. The analysis and results can guide narrative assessment and intervention.
Age Factors↗