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PubMed2001

Form and function of negation in early developmental Cantonese.

This study investigated the interface of form and function in the acquisition of negation in Cantonese-speaking children. The data, from the Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus, were longitudinal spontaneous samples of eight children aged 1;5 to 3;8. The main issues of the study were the sequence of emergence of negative markers mou5, m4 and mei6 and the acquisition trend of 11 semantic categories of negation in children's expressive language. The acquisition trend of the semantic categories matched Bloom's (1970, 1991a) finding that Non-existence preceded Rejection and Denial.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1983

Gestural communication in deaf children: noneffect of parental input on language development.

Young deaf children who were unable to acquire oral language naturally and who had not been exposed to a conventional manual language were found to use spontaneously a gesture system that has some of the structural characteristics of early child language. The structural aspects of this gesture system appeared to be neither modeled for the child by the gestures of an adult nor shaped by the responses of an adult. These findings suggest that the child may contribute to structural aspects of the system.

Child Language↗
PubMed2000

Early intervention and language development in children who are deaf and hard of hearing.

OBJECTIVE: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between age of enrollment in intervention and language outcomes at 5 years of age in a group of deaf and hard-of-hearing children. METHOD: Vocabulary skills at 5 years of age were examined in a group of 112 children with hearing loss who were enrolled at various ages in a comprehensive intervention program. Verbal reasoning skills were explored in a subgroup of 80 of these children. Participants were evaluated using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and a criterion-referenced measure, the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument, administered individually by professionals skilled in assessing children with hearing loss. A rating scale was developed to characterize the level of family involvement in the intervention program for children in the study. RESULTS: A statistically significant negative correlation was found between age of enrollment and language outcomes at 5 years of age. Children who were enrolled earliest (eg, by 11 months of age) demonstrated significantly better vocabulary and verbal reasoning skills at 5 years of age than did later-enrolled children. Regardless of degree of hearing loss, early-enrolled children achieved scores on these measures that approximated those of their hearing peers. In an attempt to understand the relationships among performance and factors, such as age of enrollment, family involvement, degree of hearing loss, and nonverbal intelligence, multiple regression models were applied to the data. The analyses revealed that only 2 of these factors explained a significant amount of the variance in language scores obtained at 5 years of age: family involvement and age of enrollment. Surprisingly, family involvement explained the most variance after controlling for the influence of the other factors (r =.615; F change = 58.70), underscoring the importance of this variable. Age of enrollment also contributed significantly to explained variance after accounting for the other variables in the regression (r = -.452; F change = 19.24). Importantly, there were interactions between the factors of family involvement and age of enrollment that influenced outcomes. Early enrollment was of benefit to children across all levels of family involvement. However, the most successful children in this study were those with high levels of family involvement who were enrolled early in intervention services. Late-identified children whose families were described as limited or average in involvement scored >2 standard deviations below their hearing peers at 5 years of age. Even in the best of circumstances (eg, early enrollment paired with high levels of family involvement), the children in this study scored within the low average range in abstract verbal reasoning compared with hearing peers, reflecting qualitative language differences in these groups of children. CONCLUSIONS: Consistent with the findings of Yoshinaga-Itano et al,(1) significantly better language scores were associated with early enrollment in intervention. High levels of family involvement correlated with positive language outcomes, and, conversely, limited family involvement was associated with significant child language delays at 5 years of age, especially when enrollment in intervention was late. The results suggest that success is achieved when early identification is paired with early interventions that actively involve families.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2000

Case, inflection and subject licensing in child Catalan and Spanish.

The development of specified tense and number morphology in child Catalan and Spanish is found to correlate with the onset of overt subject use. The data come from four monolingual child Catalan-speakers (from the Serrà & Solé corpus) and one monolingual child Spanish-speaker (from the Linaza corpus) who were studied longitudinally from 1:0 to 3;6, approximately. The simultaneous emergence of tense and number morphology on one hand and overt subjects on the other in the children's speech is taken as evidence that a particular aspect of Universal Grammar, Case Theory, determines the possible co-occurrences of verbal inflections and subject types in developing grammatical systems. Parallels in verbal inflectional development are found in other child languages, while such parallels are not found in regard to subject use. Possible modifications to Case Theory, which would allow a unified account of the cross-linguistic developmental patterns of subject use, are considered. The possibility of explaining the early absence of overt subjects in these null subject languages as the result of an early sentence processing deficit is explored and rejected. The children's knowledge of whether their language is a null subject or overt subject language even before acquiring adult-like verbal inflection is taken as further evidence for what has been called 'early convergence' on parameter settings.

Child Language↗
PubMed2002

Grammatical morpheme production in 4-year-old children.

Despite the importance of grammatical morpheme (GM) production for both clinical decision-making and theoretical accounts of child language impairment, evidence concerning developmental expectations for GM use is inadequate. We studied grammatical morpheme production in 15-minute spontaneous language samples from a large (N = 100), sociodemographically diverse group of 4-year-olds. Substantial variability was observed in both the frequency of obligatory contexts (OCs) and in the percentage of correct usage of GMs. For only one morpheme did all 100 samples contain the minimum number of 3 OCs; for only 7 of the 14 GMs was an adequate number of OCs found in at least half of the 100 samples. Although mean percentages of production from samples with 3 or more OCs were high (> 85%), fewer than 25% of participants contributed to the "group" means for 6 of the 14 GMs. Results from the present investigation indicate a need for caution in interpreting information on GM production derived from samples of this nature from children at this age; the validity of using such data to identify deficits in inflectional morphology for either clinical or research purposes appears questionable.

Child Language↗
PubMed1994

Pronoun case overextensions and paradigm building.

Pronoun case errors, or overextensions, like *me want it are characteristic of English child language. This paper explores a hypothesis that the morphological structure of a pronoun influences the pattern of these errors. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) attempts to analyse English pronoun case forms into stems and affixes, but cannot because of their irregularity. Nevertheless the LAD extracts a phonetic core for each pronoun (e.g./m-/ for the 1st sg.,/h-/ for the 3rd masc. sg.). The phonetic core blocks the overextension of suppletive nominative forms like I and she. This hypothesis predicts strong differences in the frequency and types of errors between pronouns with suppletive nominatives and those without. Evidence for this hypothesis was found in a transcript database of twelve children, with data collected in one hour samples every month from 1;0 to 3;0. 20,908 pronouns were examined, 1347 of which were errors. Statistical analyses of these data provide support for this hypothesis.

Child Language↗
PubMed1999

[Language development: psychosocial requirements for communication].

This work describes the social and psychological characteristics of attachment adults. These features are considered as sociopsychological prerequisites for the child language development. The focus is put on the so-called no formal education, suitable for these attachment adults who are involved affectively and emotionally. Some educational strategies to be practised at home are also presented.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Can bilingual two-year-olds code-switch?

Sociolinguists have investigated language mixing as code-switching in the speech of bilingual children three years old and older. Language mixing by bilingual two-year-olds, however, has generally been interpreted in the child language literature as a sign of the child's lack of language differentiation. The present study applies perspectives from sociolinguistics to investigate the language mixing of a bilingual two-year-old acquiring Norwegian and English simultaneously in Norway. Monthly recordings of the child's spontaneous speech in interactions with her parents were made from the age of 2;0 to 2;7. An investigation into the formal aspects of the child's mixing and the context of the mixing reveals that she does differentiate her language use in contextually sensitive ways, hence that she can code-switch. This investigation stresses the need to examine more carefully the roles of dominance and context in the language mixing of young bilingual children.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Cross-linguistic studies of directionality in first language acquisition: the Japanese data--a response to O'Grady, Suzuki-Wei & Cho 1986.

Elsewhere we have argued on the basis of cross linguistic studies of directionality effects on anaphora in child language, that there is no universal 'forward directionality preference (FDP)'; rather such a preference is linked to languages with specific grammatical properties. Although such a preference has been attested in English acquisition, matched experimental designs in Japanese, Chinese and Sinhalese, for example, do not show this effect. In this paper we argue that current attempts to show that forward directionality effects can also be induced in Japanese acquisition do not succeed in supporting the FDP. Specifics of the design of stimulus sentences in these experiments vary previous cross-linguistic designs so as to favour forward directionality on independent grounds, and confound cross linguistic comparisons. They in fact support a universal structure dependence in children's hypotheses about directionality of anaphora.

Child Language↗
PubMed2001

Controversies about CP: a comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca's aphasia.

In both language acquisition research and the study of language impairments in Broca's aphasia there is an ongoing debate whether or not phrase-structure representations contain the Complementizer Phrase (CP) layer. To shed some light on this debate, I will provide data on German child language and on German agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Analyses of subordinate clauses, wh-questions, and verb placement indicate that early child grammars do not generate the CP layer yet, whereas the ability to project the CP layer is retained in agrammatism.

Aphasia, Broca↗
PubMed2004

[Individual and family factors influencing vocabulary development in toddlers].

OBJECTIVE: Many researchers have conducted studies on child language development and relevant risk factors, but most of these studies were about English-speaking children and few of them were on Chinese-speaking children, and less reports of studies on language development of infants or toddlers are available as compared to those on children above 3 years of age. The objective of this study was to assess the level of vocabulary development of healthy toddlers in urban Beijing and to investigate toddlers' physical and psychological development and socioeconomic status of toddlers' family so as to identify factors related to toddlers' language development and provide basis for instructing parents child-rearing. METHOD: This is a quantitative cross-sectional study. Using Chinese Communicative Development Inventory mandarin version, (CCDI) and related background questionnaire, a survey was conducted among the parents or care givers of 1056 healthy toddlers (16 approximately 30 months), randomly stratified and selected from two areas of four urban districts in Beijing. The children who were born prematurely, who had low birth weight, or who were deaf, dumb or with disability, were excluded from this study. The mothers who were deaf, dumb or having disability were not included in this study, either. Rank sum test was used to compare the vocabulary scores between boys and girls at the same age. Single and multiple factors analysis were used to find related factors. RESULTS: By 16 months of age, boys could speak about 22 words and girls 84 words on the CCDI. By 29 - 30 months of age, boys could speak about 725 words and girls 752 words on the CCDI. The level of vocabulary development of healthy toddlers in urban Beijing was higher than that reported in previous studies of English-speaking children. Girls had higher vocabulary scores than boys in a few different age groups. Single factor analysis showed that the ages of father and mother, income of father, the language used by care-givers and GDP of the families were factors related to families of toddlers and the age, gender, height, weight and the age at which the toddlers began to speak were factors related to individuals. Multiple factors analysis showed that higher education level of mothers, younger father, earlier beginning of children to speak, toddlers' amiable disposition and emotion, girls, toddlers' age and height positively correlated with toddlers' vocabulary score. CONCLUSION: The level of vocabulary development of healthy toddlers in urban Beijing is on the high side. Certain individual and familial factors may influence toddlers' language development. It is suggested that health workers should pay attention to the toddlers' language development. The toddlers' parents and caregivers should be taught how to interact with and talk to their children and how to promote children to develop healthy disposition and emotion.

Child Development↗
PubMed2004

A multiple process solution to the logical problem of language acquisition.

Many researchers believe that there is a logical problem at the centre of language acquisition theory. According to this analysis, the input to the learner is too inconsistent and incomplete to determine the acquisition of grammar. Moreover, when corrective feedback is provided, children tend to ignore it. As a result, language learning must rely on additional constraints from universal grammar. To solve this logical problem, theorists have proposed a series of constraints and parameterizations on the form of universal grammar. Plausible alternatives to these constraints include: conservatism, item-based learning, indirect negative evidence, competition, cue construction, and monitoring. Careful analysis of child language corpora has cast doubt on claims regarding the absence of positive exemplars. Using demonstrably available positive data, simple learning procedures can be formulated for each of the syntactic structures that have traditionally motivated invocation of the logical problem. Within the perspective of emergentist theory (MacWhinney, 2001), the operation of a set of mutually supportive processes is viewed as providing multiple buffering for developmental outcomes. However, the fact that some syntactic structures are more difficult to learn than others can be used to highlight areas of intense grammatical competition and processing load.

Child Language↗
PubMed1984

Gestural communication in deaf children: the effects and noneffects of parental input on early language development.

We previously reported that deaf children of hearing parents can develop a gestural communication system with some of the observed properties of early child language. In the present study, this phenomenon of gesture creation was replicated in four deaf children aged 1-4 to 3-1 at the time of the first interview. Each child, despite his atypical language-learning conditions (in particular his lack of usable conventional linguistic input, either oral or manual), developed a gesture system comparable in semantic content and structure (specifically, constructional ordering of elements, differential probabilities of production of elements, and recursive concatenation of semantic relations) to the gestural systems of the six deaf children of hearing parents in our original study and comparable as well to the spoken and sign systems of children acquiring conventional languages under typical learning conditions. This phenomenon suggests that the human child has strong biases to communicate in language-like ways. Nevertheless, it is possible that the deaf child's hearing parents, and not the child himself, were responsible for the emergence of the child's structured (yet idiosyncratic) gesture system. To investigate this possibility, we considered three possible parental influences on the child's sentence structures. First, we entertained the hypothesis that the children's sign sentences were merely imitations (perhaps even uncomprehending imitations) of a hearing adult's immediately preceding gestures. Second, we considered the possibility that the regularities underlying the deaf children's structured sign sentences were induced from their hearing parents' gestures taken in toto. Finally, we considered the possibility that the deaf children's sign sentences had been shaped by their parents' responses to those sentences. We found no evidence to support any of these hypotheses. The data reported in this series of studies confirm that deaf children lacking a conventional linguistic input can develop a gestural communication system that shows some of the structural regularities characteristic of early child language. The results suggest that communication with a number of language-like properties can develop in a markedly atypical language-learning environment, even without a tutor's modeling or shaping the structural aspects of the communication. The data are consistent with the hypothesis that the deaf child himself plays a seminal role in the emergence of the structural aspects of these communication systems.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2003

Identifying children at risk for language impairment: screening of communication at 18 months.

AIM: To investigate the possibility of identifying children at risk for language impairment based on a new screening instrument to assess communication and language skills at 18 mo of age. METHODS: At 18 mo, 58 children were assessed with a screening instrument for communication and language consisting of a professional assessment and a parents' questionnaire. Students of speech and language pathology, well trained in child language assessment, carried out the professional assessment, which was based on observations of play behaviour, interaction and expressive and receptive language skills. Of the 58 children, 43 attended a follow-up assessment of language skills at 54 mo of age. RESULTS: Nine children were considered to be at risk for language impairment at 18 mo and 10 children were evaluated as being at risk at 54 mo. A significant positive correlation was found between the professional evaluations at 18 mo and the language tests at 54 mo. Verbal comprehension and pretend play correlated significantly with the results on the language tests. CONCLUSION: A professional screening of communication and language at 18 mo of age is worthwhile for predicting problems in language development. The results further show that language comprehension and pretend play rather than expressive skills should be emphasized.

Communication↗