bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Evaluating quantitative measures of grammatical complexity in spontaneous speech samples
Authors: Blake Joanna , Quartaro Georgia , Onorati Susan 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe 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.
Lexical and prosodic eues in the comprehension of relative certainty
Authors: Moore Chris , Harris Lisa , Patriquin Maria 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examined the development of children's comprehension of the use of intonation and belief verbs to mark the relative certainty with which a speaker makes a statement. Subjects were presented with a task in which they had to guess the location of an object hidden in one of two boxes over a series of trials. As clues to location, the children were presented with contrasting pairs of statements by two puppets. In the first experiment with 30 children at each of three, four, five and six years of age, statements in each pair differed either with respect to the belief term included – know, think or guess – or with respect to terminal pitch contour – rising or falling. Results showed that three-year-olds did not use any information reliably to determine the location of the object, four-year-olds treated falling pitch as a more reliable indicator of location than rising pitch, and older children responded on the basis of the belief terms but not on the basis of prosody. In Experiment 2, 40 children at each of three, four and five years heard statements which differed with respect to both belief verbs and prosody. In one condition falling intonation was paired with the more certain belief term in each pair, and rising intonation with the less certain pair. In a second condition, the pairings were reversed. Results showed that, while four-year-olds could tell the difference between know and think, they could not use intonation information to determine the location. Five-year-olds used both lexical and prosodic information, with prosodic eues modulating the effects of lexical. Taken together, these experiments show that prosodic and lexical cues start to be used by children to interpret relative speaker certainty at about the same time developmentally, but that lexical cues initially appear to dominate while prosodic ones modulate their effects. Finally, it is argued that children's understanding of prosody will be best revealed in contexts in which they are required to respond to the pragmatic function of verbal stimuli rather than to the lexical content.
Perfecting research techniques in an imperfect world: response to MacWhinney & Snow
Authors: Edwards Jane A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTEdwards (1992c) concerns data and data use rather than manuals. It presents principles to facilitate reliable archive research in an imperfect world. MacWhinney & Snow (1992) endorse the principles but disagree on important details, discussed in this response. M&S underrate the impact of corpus inconsistencies on substantive conclusions. Since acquisition research concerns events which often trickle in a few at a time, main findings often involve a handful of examples, so overlooking a single early variant can seriously skew results. Until archives become perfect, if they do, type-token listings can help in identifying variants before computer search and avoiding this hazard.
Children's phonological neighbourhoods: half empty or half full?
Authors: Dollaghan Christine A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTCharles-Luce & Luce (1990) found smaller phonological similarity neighbourhoods in five- and seven-year-old children's expressive lexicons than in an adult receptive lexicon, a finding they interpreted as evidence that children need not employ fine-grained auditory perceptual analyses in lexical processing. In the present investigation, neighbourhood sizes were calculated for an expressive lexicon derived from two vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;0 to 3;0 (Rescorla, 1989; Reznick & Goldsmith, 1989). Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbour; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbours. Very young children must have access to reasonably detailed phonological information in order to create and distinguish among such phonologically similar lexical entries.
Phonemic structures of delayed phonological systems
Authors: Gierut Judith A. , Simmerman Christina L. , Neumann Heidi J. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe phonemic inventories of 30 children (aged 3;4–5;7) with phonological delays were examined in terms of featural distinctions in order to address universal vs. individual accounts of acquisition. Phonetic inventories of these same children were also identified for comparison purposes. Across children, four hierarchical and implicationally related types of phonemic inventory were identified. The typology uniquely captured common distinctions maintained by all children, and at the same time, allowed for individual differences in the specific phonemic composition of each system. These cross-sectional results have theoretical implications for the longitudinal course of phonemic acquisition. In particular, children appear to have a number of linguistic choices that relate to the course, the specifics, and the mechanism of change in acquisition.
Diary vs. representative checklist assessment of productive vocabulary
Authors: Reznick J. Steven , Goldfield Beverly A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTTwenty-four infants were followed longitudinally from 1;2 to 1;10. Parents maintained diaries of the child's spoken words and at two-month intervals completed a representative checklist of words produced. There was good agreement across the two instruments and robust month-to-month correlations for both. However, the overall pattern of results suggests that the diary method is more effective during the early emergence of language and the representative checklist method is more effective late in the second year when vocabulary size becomes relatively large. Accurate longitudinal assessment of vocabulary may require a combination of the diary and checklist approaches.
Early grammatical and prosodic marking of utterance modality in French: a longitudinal case study
Authors: Bassano Dominique , Mendes-Maillochon Isabelle 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe study investigates how basic communicative functions expressed by utterance modalities (declarative, exclamative, injunctive, interrogative) emerged in the early language of a French child, and examines whether and how morphosyntactic and prosodic devices were used to mark these contrasts. A longitudinal corpus of naturalistic productions was collected between the ages of 1;2 and 1;9, and 960 utterances were subjected to functional, prosodic and grammatical analyses. Declarative, exclamative and injunctive utterances were found from 1;2, and first interrogatives appeared at 1;6. Intonation contours varied as a function of utterance modality and were largely in accordance with the patterns in French: declaratives and exclamatives were falling, interrogatives rising and injunctives split between falling and rising contours depending on their specific functions. A quarter of the productions involved an elementary grammatical marking of utterance modality such as interjections, imperative or indicative verbal forms, or interrogative morphemes. These findings indicate an early and complementary use of prosodic and grammatical devices in the child's construction of the linguistic system.
The development of infinitives from three to five
Authors: Eisenberg Sarita L. , Cairns Helen S. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis 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.
Overextensions in comprehension and production revisited: preferential-looking in a study of dog, cat, and cow
Authors: Naigles Letitia G. , Gelman Susan A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study investigated overextensions in comprehension and production using a new method (the preferential-looking paradigm) in which children (N = 99, mean age (younger) = 1;9, mean age (older) = 2;3) were asked to find the referent that matched the label they were given. Both Real Referent (in which there was a match) and Anomalous (in which there was no match) trials were included, as well as nonverbal control trials. During the Real Referent trials, all children significantly preferred the matching puppet. During the Anomalous trials, children showed no preference with two of the labels (dog and cat); however, they did show a preference when ‘cow’ was requested but not available. There were no differences based on prior overextension performance in production. It is concluded that overextensions in production are not diagnostic of children's underlying semantic representations, and that anomalous trials in comprehension provide useful information concerning young children's lexical entries.
Children's understanding of homonyms
Authors: Backscheider Andrea G. , Gelman Susan A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTPrevious tasks have shown that preschool and early elementary school-children typically have trouble learning and identifying homonyms (Peters & Zaidel, 1980; Mazzocco, 1989). It is possible that a one-to-one mapping assumption or a lack of metalinguistic skills makes homonym learning and identification particularly difficult. In three experiments we examined a total of 60 three-year-olds' ability to pick out homonym pairs, and the extent to which they realize that although homonyms share a common label, they represent two different categories. In Experiment 1 subjects were asked to identify homonym pairs. In Experiment 2, homonym pairs and non-homonym pairs were labelled, then children were asked whether the pairs had the same name, and whether they were the same kind of thing. In Experiment 3 children were shown one-half of each of several homonym and non-homonym pairs, then asked to identify a name match and a category match from a set of pictures. From these experiments we conclude that children have the metalinguistic skills necessary to identify homonym pairs; moreover, they realized that homonyms represent two different categories. Finally, if children have a one-to-one mapping assumption, it is not strong enough to prevent them from acquiring homonyms.
Children's ambiguous utterances: a re-examination of processing limitations on production
Authors: Surian Luca 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe ability to convey the optimal amount of information during conversation is a fundamental aspect of language use. In this study the relationship between children's failures to produce unambiguous utterances and the mental effort demands of the communication task was investigated. Five-, six-, seven- and nine-year-old children performed a message production task and a finger-tapping task both separately and simultaneously. The decrease in finger-tapping frequency during the simultaneous performance was used as an estimate of effort demands of the message production task. Working memory capacity was assessed by means of a spatial memory test and an object features identification task. Children's intuitions about message adequacy were recorded in two message evaluation tasks. By age six children proved to be able to select the relevant information when they were explicitly asked to do so, indicating that effort demands of the communication task did not exceed their computational resources. However, results suggested that the relative effort requirements of the communication task decrease with increasing age. These findings support a performance theory of communication development in which effort demands are a determinant of children's message adequacy.
Relevance and Definition
Authors: Watson Rita 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe study examined whether the use of superordinate terms in children's definitions was predicted by relevance theory. Two hundred and six children aged five to ten years gave definitions for 16 basic-level words and four superordinate words from natural kind and artefact semantic domains. Superordinate terms were used more frequently when they supported more inferences. This was evidenced by their more frequent use in natural kind than in artefact domains, and more frequent use when the superordinate was itself defined by a semantically complex expression. When used, superordinates also usually occurred at the beginning of the definitional expression. It is argued that these findings reflect the speaker's intention to achieve optimal relevance, that is, to achieve maximum contextual effects with the least processing effort.
Phonological awareness in young second language learners
Authors: Bruck Maggie , Genesee Fred 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTEnglish-speaking children (N = 91) who were attending French schools (bilingual group) were given a battery of phonological awareness tests in kindergarten and in grade 1. At the time of kindergarten testing the mean age of the children was 5:9. Their performance was compared to age-matched English-speaking children (N = 72) attending English schools (monolingual group). The bilingual children showed heightened levels of phonological awareness skills in kindergarten in the area of onset-rime awareness. By grade 1, the pattern of group differences was more complex. The monolingual and bilingual children performed similarly on onset-rime segmentation tasks. The monolingual children had higher phoneme awareness scores than their French-schooled peers; this result is interpreted to reflect the role of literacy instruction on phoneme awareness development. In comparison, the bilingual children had higher syllable segmentation scores than their monolingual peers. This result is interpreted to reflect the role of second language input on phonological awareness.
Children's overregularization of English plurals: a quantitative analysis
Authors: Marcus Gary F. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper brings a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations (foots, mans) to bear on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children (aged 1;3 to 5;2) from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985, 1990) were analysed. The rate of noun overregularization is low, mean = 8·5%, demonstrating that children prefer correct to overregularized forms. Rates of noun overregularization are not significantly different from their rates of past tense overregularization, and noun plurals, like verb past tenses, follow a U-shaped developmental curve in which correct irregulars precede the first overregularized forms. These facts suggest that plural and past tense overregularizations are caused by similar underlying processes. The results pose challenges to connectionist models, but are consistent with Marcuset al.'s(1992) blocking-and-retrieval-failure model in which regulars are generated by a default rule while irregulars are retrieved from the lexicon.
Weird past tense forms
Authors: Xu Fei , Pinker Steven 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTIt is often assumed that children go through a stage in which they systematically overapply irregular past tense patterns to inappropriate verbs, as inwipe-wope, bring-brang, trick-truck, walk-has walken. Such errors have been interpreted both as reflecting over-use of minor grammatical rules (e.g. ‘changeitoa’), 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 inbrang, blends, as inbranged, productive suffixations of -en, as inwalken, gross distortions, as inmail-membled, and double-suffixation, as inwalkeded. 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 English pre-sentential negation as metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation
Authors: Drozd Kenneth F. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis 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.
Young children's treating of utterances as unreliable sources of knowledge
Authors: Robinson Elizabeth J. , Mitchell Peter , Nye Rebecca 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTIn 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.
Infant-directed speech facilitates lexical learning in adults hearing Chinese: implications for language acquisition
Authors: Golinkoff Roberta Michnick , Alioto Anthony 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTExperiments 1 and 2 examined the effects of infant-directed (ID) speech on adults' ability to learn an individual target word in sentences in an unfamiliar, non-Western language (Chinese). English-speaking adults heard pairs of sentences read by a female, native Chinese speaker in either ID or adult-directed (AD) speech. The pairs of sentences described slides of 10 common objects. The Chinese name for the object (the target word) was placed in an utterance-final position in experiment? (n= 61) and in a medial position in experiment 2 (n= 79). At test, each Chinese target word was presented in isolation in AD speech in a recognition task. Only subjects who heard ID speech with the target word in utterance-final position demonstrated learning of the target words. The results support assertions that ID speech, which tends to put target words in sentence-final position, may assist infants in segmenting and remembering portions of the linguistic stream. In experiment 3 (n= 23), subjects judged whether each of the ID and AD speech samples prepared for experiments ? and 2 were directed to an adult or to an infant. Judgements were above chance for two types of sentence: ID speech with the target word in the final position and AD speech with the target word in a medial position. In addition to indirectly confirming the results of experiments 1 and 2, these findings suggest that at least some of the prosodic features which comprise ID speech in Chinese and English must overlap.
Infants' sensitivity to word boundaries in fluent speech
Authors: Myers James , Jusczyk Peter W. , Nelson Deborah G. Kemler , Charles-Luce Jan , Woodward Amanda L. , Hirsh-Pasek Kathryn 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTInfants' sensitivity to word units in fluent speech was examined by inserting 1 sec pauses either at boundaries between successive words (Coincident versions) or between syllables within words (Noncoincident versions). In Experiment 1, 24 11-month-olds listened significantly longer to the Coincident versions. In Experiment 2, 24 four-and-a-half-and 24 nine-month-olds did not exhibit the preference for the Coincident versions that the 11-month-olds showed. When the stimuli were low-pass filtered in Experiment 3, 24 11-month-olds showed no preference for the Coincident versions, suggesting they rely on more than prosodic cues. New stimulus materials in Experiment 4 indicated that responses by 24 11-month-olds to the Coincident and Noncoindent versions did not depend solely on prior familiarity with the targets. Two groups of 30 11-month-olds tested in Experiment 5 were as sensitive to boundaries for Strong/Weak words as for Weak/Strong words. Taken together, the results suggest that, by 11 months, infants are sensitive to word boundaries in fluent speech, and that this sensitivity depends on more than just prosodic information or prior knowledge of the words.