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PubMed1993

Vowel dominance in overregularizations.

When children produce regularizations like comed, not all verbs are equally likely to be regularized. Several variables (e.g. lexical frequency) have been shown to be relevant, but not all the variability between verbs is understood. It is argued here that one predictor is which vowels are present in the base form vs. the past tense form. Using a notion of recessive vs. dominant vowel (where recessive vowels are more likely to be replaced by dominant vowels than vice versa) based on adult phonological processing, it is predicted that regularizations should be likely when the base vowel is dominant and unlikely when the past tense vowel is dominant. Data from 17 children reported in the literature, aged 1;6-5;6, show that this prediction is correct. Implications for the role of phonological variables in the processing of irregular past tense forms are discussed.

Child↗
PubMed1993

On the origins of denial negation.

These are the principal questions of this study: are the early functions of negation, such as REJECTION, and the later emerging DENIAL no developmentally related? And when do children start to deny? So far, evidence for the questions at hand has been almost exclusively observational. We decided on a simple elicitation procedure instead, asking 48 children (ages between 1;1 and 2;7) easy yes/no-questions. The most likely age range for the appearance of denial no was 1;8-2;1. Its error-free acquisition supports the continuity theory of negation development, which holds that essentials of denial no carry over from the earlier functions of no. Finally an attempt is made to account for the beginnings of denial in terms of semantics and the representational theory of child cognition.

Child Development↗
PubMed1994

Exploring the boundary between syntax and pragmatics: relevance and the binding of pronouns.

This paper explores the interface between syntax and pragmatics, focusing on the binding of pronouns and the pragmatics of the paradigms used to test this aspect of syntactic knowledge. Reinhart's (1986) version of Binding Theory (which accords a specific role to pragmatics in processes of pronoun resolution) and Sperber & Wilson's (1986) Theory of Relevance are used to examine the syntax and pragmatics of pronoun interpretation. A set of predictions based on Relevance Theory are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. The paper concludes that Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge and argues that pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge.

Child↗
PubMed1993

Evaluating quantitative measures of grammatical complexity in spontaneous speech samples.

The validity of MLU and a measure of syntactic complexity were tested against LARSP on spontaneous speech samples from 87 children, ranging in age from 1;6 to 4;9. Change in some LARSP clausal measures was found across MLU stages up to MLU 4.5. For the measure of syntactic complexity, no such ceiling was found for the clausal connectivity score in LARSP or for average clausal complexity in LARSP. Neither MLU nor the measure of syntactic complexity indexed LARSP phrasal complexity. It is concluded that MLU is a valid measure of clausal complexity up to 4.5 and that our measure of syntactic complexity is more valid at more advanced stages.

Child Language↗
PubMed1993

The past conditional verb form in French children: the role of semantics in late grammatical development.

As shown by Bowerman (1986), it has proved remarkably difficult to find clear-cut interpretations of why children face problems with conditionals. The present study reassesses a part of this puzzle by analysing four- to eight-year-old French children's acquisition of conditional verb forms. Relevant data in the literature and results of an experiment designed to gain information on the temporal meaning of young children's past conditional verb forms are presented and discussed. Among others, they are shown to provide weak support for interpretations stressing the role of conceptual problems and related mapping problems. Meeting one of Slobin's (1985) proposals, an interpretation is suggested that views the lateness of the past conditional verb form as due to an unexpected juxtaposition of 'possibility' and 'non-possibility' in its semantic representation. It is argued that such a juxtaposition cannot be achieved on the sole basis of cognitive development and that it requires the preliminary mastery of the conditional verb form.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1994

The unintelligibility of speech to children: effects of referent availability.

Speech addressed to children is supposed to be helpfully redundant, but redundant or predictable words addressed to adults tend to lose intelligibility. Word tokens extracted from the spontaneous speech of the parents of 12 children aged 1; 10 to 3; 0 and presented in isolation to adult listeners showed loss of intelligibility when the words were redundant because they had occurred in repetitions of an utterance (Experiment 1) or referred to an entity which was physically present when named (Experiment 2). Though children (N = 64; mean age 3; 5, S.D. 6.1 months) recognized fewer excerpted object names than adults (N = 40), less intelligible tokens appeared to induce child listeners to rely on the word's extra-linguistic context during the recognition process (Experiment 3), much as such tokens normally induce adults to rely on discourse context. It is proposed that interpreting parental utterances with reference to non-verbal context furthers linguistic development.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Child English pre-sentential negation as metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation.

This paper presents a study of the spontaneous pre-sentential negations of ten English-speaking children between the ages of 1;6 and 3;4 which supports the hypothesis that child English nonanaphoric pre-sentential negation is a form of metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation. A detailed discourse analysis reveals that children's pre-sentential negatives like No Nathaniel a king (i) are characteristically echoic, and (ii) typically express objection and rectification, two characteristic functions of exclamatory negation in adult discourse, e.g. Don't say 'Nathaniel's a king'! A comparison of children's pre-sentential negations with their internal predicate negations using not and don't reveals that the two negative constructions are formally and functionally distinct. I argue that children's nonanaphoric pre-sentential negatives constitute an independent, well-formed class of discourse negation. They are not 'primitive' constructions derived from the miscategorization of emphatic no in adult speech or children's 'inventions'. Nor are they an early derivational variant of internal sentence negation. Rather, these negatives reflect young children's competence in using grammatical negative constructions appropriately in discourse.

Child Language↗
PubMed1995

Young children's treating of utterances as unreliable sources of knowledge.

In two investigations (N = 62 and 59), three- and four-year-old children sometimes disbelieved what they were told about the unexpected contents of a deceptive box, even when they had seen the adult speaker look inside the box before s/he told them what s/he saw, and despite being able to recall the utterance: utterances were treated as unreliable sources of knowledge compared with seeing directly. Those who did believe the utterance were no better at recalling their prior belief about the box's contents (now treated as false), than those who saw inside the box. However using a narrative procedure, we replicated Zaitchik's (1991) result that children are more likely to acknowledge another's belief when they are told about reality, than when they see reality for themselves. We argue that these children were acknowledging alternative rather than false belief.

Child Language↗