bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Play pen monologues: the interplay of words and babbles in the first words period
Authors: Elbers Loekie , Ton Josi 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTA case study is presented of the babbling monologues produced by a Dutch child in the six weeks following acquisition of the first word. The relationship between word and babbling development is investigated. There appears to be a continuous interplay between both aspects of speech development: new words may influence the character and the course of babbling, whereas babbling in turn may give rise to phonological preferences for selecting other new words. It is concluded that the analysis of concurrent babbling may provide clues for explaining the highly variable phenomena of early word production.
The determinants of baby talk: relationship to context
Authors: D'Odorico Laura , Franco Fabia 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the relationship between context and mothers' speech to prelinguistic infants. In the first phase, videorecordings of a mother talking with her infant were transcribed; in the second phase, 48 mothers were asked to select the utterance most apt for a series of drawings representing different contexts of mother–infant interaction. Data analyzed with respect to syntactic and semantic features revealed that the informational content of mothers' speech is different in relation to various contexts. Furthermore, different syntactic types are chosen in relation to different contents. Results are discussed in relation to a hypothesis assuming that mothers' speech is determined by particular interactive rules operating in the mother–infant dyad.
Children's knowledge of the presuppositions of know and other cognitive verbs
Authors: Abbeduto Leonard , Rosenberg Sheldon 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the development of knowledge about the presuppositions of cognitive verbs that take sentential complements. The verbs included factives, which presuppose the truth of their complements, and nonfactives, which carry no such presupposition. Three tasks assessed children's ability to (a) assign truth values to complements according to the presuppositions of the main verbs; (b) select verbs to describe people's mental states; and (c) state the presuppositions of the verbs in definitions. The results indicated that the presuppositions of the factives know, forget, and remember and the nonfactive think are not learned until age 4. Believe, which has factive and nonfactive properties, is mastered after age 7. The children's performance differed across tasks due to variations in processing requirements.
Intonation comprehension in ten-year-olds
Authors: Cruttenden Alan 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe comprehension of nine intonational contrasts involving different intonation-groupings, different nucleus placements, and different tones, was examined in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults. Fewer ten-year-olds than adults answered correctly on almost all tasks. Initial hypotheses concerning the order of acquisition among the three systems (grouping, nucleus placement, and tone) were in general not confirmed. But the distinction between context-wide and context-limited tonal meanings was predictive of acquisition; and a similar distinction based on local meanings rather than on the intonation patterns themselves is likely to apply to groupings and nucleus placements.
‘I beg your pardon?’: the preverbal negotiation of failed messages
Authors: Golinkoff Roberta Michnick 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis longitudinal study of how preverbal infants communicate with their mothers utilized the situation in which the infant was seated in a highchair at lunchtime. This situation predisposed infants to use communication as a means, since they were often unable to achieve their goals without assistance. It was found that infants' communicative attempts were often unsuccessful; the present study focussed on how infants and mothers worked to establish the infants' intents after communication failures. In the preverbal negotiation of failed messages infants direct communicative behaviours to their mothers which their mothers fail to comprehend immediately, NEGOTIATIONS occur when mothers help infants make their intents clear. Negotiation episodes have four components: the infant's initial signal, the mother's comprehension failure, infant repairs and episode outcome. Changes in these components provide much information about how infants' communicative skills evolve during the transition to a linguistically based communication system. Negotiation episodes are contrasted with episodes called IMMEDIATE SUCCESSES in which the mother readily comprehends the intent behind the infant's signal, and MISSED ATTEMPTS in which the mother fails to pick up on the infant's signal. Taken together these three types of communicative episode reveal a degree of persistence and creativity on the part of the preverbal infant that is surprising in the light of prior research. Such episodes further reveal that the course of preverbal communication is NOT smooth.
Again and again: reduplication in child phonology
Authors: Schwartz Richard G. , Leonard Laurence B. , Wilcox M. Jeanne , Folger M. Karen 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe role of a strategy of reduplication in phonological acquisition and behaviour was examined in terms of: (1) the relationship between adoption of this strategy and children's failure to produce nonreduplicated multisyllabic forms and final consonants when attempting corresponding adult models; and (2) the role of the process of reduplication in production constraints. Comparisons of the phonologies of six children (1; 3–1; 9) classified as reduplicators and six children (1; 5–2; 0) classified as non-reduplicators revealed that the adoption/nonadoption of this strategy was closely related to the extent of production of nonreduplicated multisyllabic forms. Analyses of attempted words produced as reduplications revealed that this process served primarily to constrain multisyllabic productions. To a lesser degree, reduplication appeared to serve in conspiracies to constrain final consonant production.
SVO comprehension strategies reconsidered: the evidence of individual patterns of response
Authors: Bridges Allayne 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTSeveral researchers (e.g. Bever 1970, Strohner & Nelson 1974) have suggested that young children commonly employ a word-order strategy of the form: ‘the first mentioned participant is agent’ when interpreting active and passive sentences. Pre-school children (aged 2; 6–5; 0) were presented with reversible active and passive sentences in four comprehension test settings (two acting-out tasks, a selection task and a verification task). Their responses were analysed not in terms of the percentage correct responses for each group of subjects, as has been the usual practice, but in terms of each individual child's pattern of responses. The results revealed age-related changes in the type of response patterns found. The response pattern associated with the word-order strategy was not a frequent occurrence. The most common patterns were those accounted for by extralinguistic cues such as the relative proximity, mobility or position of the referents. The significance of early interpretation rules of this sort for any characterization of young children's language comprehension processes is discussed.
Children's judgements of correct and reversed sentences with ‘if’
Authors: Emerson Harriet F. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTJudgements of grammatical acceptability were made for correct and reversed ‘Y if X’ and ‘If X, Y’ sentences. Children aged 4; 10–8; 7 judged sentences ‘sensible’ or ‘silly’ and modified the sentences to make them ‘silly’ or ‘sensible’. Children failed to differentiate correct and reversed-order sentences prior to age 7 or 8. There was no evidence of an order-of-mention response strategy, but ‘If X, Y’ and ‘If Y, X’ sentences were easier to judge than ‘Y if X’ and ‘X if Y’, suggesting that children prefer sentences in which stated order parallels temporal order. The strategies used to modify the sentences changed with age from content changes to order reversals. The modifications suggested that contingency becomes a component of the meaning of if before the child assigns unidirectional event order as a component of if.
Aspects of a theory of language acquisition
Authors: Erreich Anne , Valian Virginia , Winzemer Judith 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a hypothesis-testing theory of syntax acquisition. The first section presents our model. We claim that: (1) children learn a transformational grammar, including a set of phrase structure and transformational rules; (2) linguistic universals and Occam's razor constrain the initial hypothesis space available to the device; (3) hypotheses tested by the device consist of candidate phrase structure and transformational rules; (4) linguistic evidence confirms or disconfirms hypotheses. Specific examples of incorrect phrase structure and transformational hypotheses are presented.The second section briefly surveys other approaches to language acquisition – both syntactic and non-syntactic – and compares them to our model. In the third section, we address several methodological issues: (1) the relevance of linguistic theory to the model; (2) how the model is tested; (3) the domain of the theory.
Unravelling competence, performance and pragmatics in the speech of young children
Authors: Limber John 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTInferences about linguistic competence in children are typically based on spontaneous speech. This poses a problem since we know that other factors are also involved in speech production. Children who may use complex object and adverbial NPs do not use complex subject NPs. Is this a competence deficit, a performance problem, or simply a reflection of pragmatic factors? Evidence presented here suggests that children probably do not need complex subjects. An extensive use of pronouns in subject but not object position indicates that pragmatics may account for the distribution of clauses in their speech. A similar pattern in adult speech indicates there is no warrant to conclude children's lack of subject clauses reflects anything more than the nature of spontaneous speech.
Do children interpret ‘marked’ comparative adjectives as their opposites?
Authors: Townsend David J. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTChildren aged 2;6–4;0 were asked questions containing comparative and superlative forms of adjectives from pairs designated as unmarked/marked or simply positive/negative. Children's answers required a choice of one out of five objects. Differences in frequency of correct responses were generally greater between unmarked/marked pairs than between simple positive/negative pairs, but the response of ‘greatest extent’ to marked adjective questions was seldom a significantly common error. Linguistic arguments for the unmarked/marked distinction in comparative adjectives are reviewed, and it is concluded that there is no linguistic or behavioural evidence for a marking explanation of children's difficulty with ‘marked’ comparative adjectives.
Lexical development and overextension in child language
Authors: Barrett Martyn D. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTA common assumption underlying the semantic feature and the functional core hypotheses of lexical development is that attributes abstracted from the referents of a word are sufficient to determine the extension of that word. The present paper begins by challenging this assumption. A contrastive hypothesis is instead advanced to explain the early lexical development of children, and the predictions of this hypothesis are shown to be consistent with available data on overextension. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the semantic feature and the functional core hypotheses in which it is shown that neither of these hypotheses can account for the data on overextension.
Developmental production of utterances from a series of lexemes
Authors: Kail Michèle , Segui Juan 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACT51 children from 4; 11 to 8; 2 were given three words (a triplet made up of two nouns and one verb) and asked to produce an utterance with them. Words in the triplet were presented in every possible order. At all ages, the dominant responses to non-reversible triplets were utterances in which the animate noun served as the subject of the verb and the inanimate noun as its object, whatever the order of words within the triplet. Production of utterances in response to reversible triplets showed a clear differentiation with age (with the exception of responses to symmetrical triplets NVN for which the SVO structure is dominant at all ages). With non-symmetrical triplets (NNV or VNN), the strategy that assigns the function of subject to the first noun becomes progressively established. In the youngest children, a significant number of responses that preserve the order of stimulus elements is observed. This strategy results in attributing an identical grammatical function to the two nouns. As anticipated, isomorphism between stimulus structure and response structure diminishes with age.
Syntactic and semantic factors in the acquisition of before and after
Authors: Coker Pamela L. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTSixty kindergartners and sixty first graders were given three tasks to test their comprehension of the terms before and after. The results show that when temporal terms are acquired, they are first used as prepositions and then as subordinating conjunctions. When the child does not know the meaning of a temporal term, he frequently interprets it as meaning the next-event-in-time. There are two strategies (main-clause-first and order-of-mention) that the child may adopt when interpreting temporal terms used as subordinating conjunctions. The use of these strategies appears to be independent of the child's knowledge of the meanings of the terms. Contrary to previous research, it was found that before does not seem to be learned before after nor does there appear to be any stage where after is treated to mean before.
The development of vague modifiers in the language of pre-school children
Authors: Berndt Rita Sloan , Caramazza Alfonso 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTPre-school children's comprehension of the adverbial modifiers very and sort of, when combined with two pairs of polar dimensional adjectives (big/little and tall/short) was experimentally investigated in 64 children (three, four and five years of age). The task involved the choice of an item from a graduated array of nine objects in response to questions combining the modifiers and adjectives. Results suggested that comprehension of very begins in the third year and is understood consistently by the four- and five-year-olds in combination with all four adjectives. Sort of is not understood by the three-year-olds, but appears to be available to the four- and five-year-olds. Results are interpreted as a reflection of an early appreciation that linguistic categories are not well bounded.
A developmental study of factivity and negation in complex syntax
Authors: Hopmann Marita R. , Maratsos Michael P. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTTwo groups of preschoolers and one group of young grade-schoolers were tested for their comprehension of presuppositions and negation in complex syntax. Four types of sentences were presented to each child: affirmative and negative versions of sentences with factive main predicates, which presuppose the truth of the proposition of the complement clause, and nonfactive main predicates, which do not. A forced-choice design was used: the children chose the agent subject mentioned in the complement clause, thus affirming the complement; or the unmentioned agent, thus denying the complement. Five factive predicates and five non-factive predicates were used so as to permit a comparison within each group. Competence increased into the early school years: the oldest group of participants showed a fair mastery of the syntax-semantics of the predicates of the study. The younger children showed errors of two different kinds, described as the Overextended Negation Tendency and the Overextended Affirmation Tendency. Both of these errors decreased markedly in the oldest group. The non-unitary nature of the acquired competence is discussed. In particular, it is pointed out that (1) factivity is not a grammatically marked operation and as such leads to what appears to be a gradual acquisition pattern; (2) the test of factivity comprehension employed here demanded a competence beyond that of normal use.
The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children
Authors: Volterra Virginia , Taeschner Traute 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAnalysing the gradual learning process through which a child becomes bilingual from early infancy, three stages can be distinguished: (1) the child has one lexical system which includes words from both languages; (2) the child distinguishes two different lexicons but applies the same syntactic rules to both languages; (3) the child has two linguistic codes, differentiated both in lexicon and in syntax, but each language is exclusively associated with the person using that language. Only at the end of this stage, when the tendency to categorize people in terms of their language decreases, can one say that a child is truly bilingual.
Speech discrimination in the language-innocent and the language-wise: a study in the perception of voice onset time
Authors: Eilers Rebecca E. , Wilson Wesley R. , Moore John M. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTDiscrimination of synthetically produced stimuli differing along the voice onset time continuum was assessed for infants and adults within the context of the Visually Reinforced Infant Speech Discrimination (VRISD) paradigm. English-learning infants' discrimination abilities were compared with two groups of English-speaking adults (a phonetically naive and a phonetically sophisticated group). Contrary to the predictions of the innateness hypothesis, English-learning infants showed evidence of discrimination only across the English phoneme boundary. Adults, on the other hand, were very successful in discriminating both across and within a range of phoneme boundaries. These results are discussed in terms of the presumed relationship between categorical perception and linguistic processing and in terms of synthetic speech continua.
Morphological development in Italian: connotation and denotation
Authors: Bates Elizabeth , Rankin Jane 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTBoth longitudinal and experimental evidence were used in an examination of the development of adjectives vs. inflections for the expression of size and value concepts in Italian children. The longitudinal speech production records for two Italian children suggest that the concepts of size and value are understood and expressed linguistically by 2 years. One child acquired both adjectival and inflectional expressions for size simultaneously, while the other used adjectives for size and value several months prior to the acquisition of corresponding inflections. However, both children demonstrated productive use of size inflections at around MLU 3·0. A subsequent experiment with 84 children, ranging from 2 to 6 years, suggests that comprehension of size and value inflections is restricted to a narrow, denotative set of meanings based predominately on a strict interpretation in terms of size. This pattern stands in marked contrast to adult patterns on the same experiment, in which size inflections are interpreted connotatively as well, with meanings based on positive and negative affect as well as size. The relative contribution of Connotative vs. denotative factors in the development of reference is discussed.
The acquisition of inflections in Portuguese: a study of the development of person markers on verbs
Authors: Simões Maria Cecilia Perroni , Stoel-Gammon Carol 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTLongitudinal data on the development of personal inflections in Portuguese are presented. Analysis of the data reveals that, initially, the subjects used a single inflection for all verbs, regardless of the intended subject. The first formal distinction to appear was between verbs bearing the unmarked ending and those inflected for first person singular. Analyses of the acquisition of the standard first person inflections are presented in the form of rules; overgeneralization of these rules is evident, especially in perfect tense verbs. Possible explanations for the use of the third person singular verb form as the unmarked form are discussed.
The comprehension of ‘here’ and ‘there’
Authors: Charney Rosalind 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTComprehension of words like here and there demands an ability to take the speaker as reference point whether or not his position agrees with one's own. Because children are known to have difficulty taking another person's viewpoint into account, it was hypothesized that children would be able to understand here and there with the speaker as reference point only after they were able to understand the terms with self as reference point. Fifty children age 2;6–3;6 were presented with two toys spaced a few feet apart and asked ‘Which one is over here/there?’ There were three conditions: E and S both sat next to (1) the same toy; (2) a different toy; and (3) E sat next to one toy while the other toy was near no-one. Contrary to the hypothesis, it was found that children did not comprehend the words with self as reference point first. Instead, the words appear to be understood first I with respect to an inconsistent reference point before children learn that the reference point is always the speaker.
Knowing what to say and wanting to say it: some communicative and structural aspects of single-word responses to questions
Authors: Rodgon Maris Monitz 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe interrelation of semantic and communicative factors was considered in three children's single-word responses to adult questions. Parents asked more yes/no than naming questions. Children were able to use yes and no appropriately, but did not always do so. The children seemed to have related the form of yes/no questions to the use of yes/no answers, but communicatively were not always willing or able to produce yes/no answers when required. Naming questions were more often followed by appropriate than by inappropriate utterances. The relation of these findings to the importance of naming in early language acquisition, and to the findings of Horgan (1977) and Steffensen (1977) was considered.
Maternal speech: strategy or response?
Authors: Smolak Linda , Weinraub Marsha 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe existing data concerning the effects of maternal speech on child language development are so conflicting that it is difficult to draw even tentative conclusions about this relationship. One potential contributor to this problem is our lack of information concerning the determinants of maternal speech. The present study was designed to separate those elements of maternal speech which are heavily influenced by child language levels from those that seem to represent the mother's consistent style or strategy for ‘teaching’ language. Syntactic, discourse, and communicative functions of mothers' speech were examined. Mothers of high-and low-level language children were compared when talking to their daughters and to another girl the same age as their daughter. Analysis indicated a striking amount of similarity and consistency in high vs. low mothers' speech to both their daughters and the other child. Those elements of maternal speech that did show differences tended to be features that are fairly easily monitored by mothers or are directly tied to child utterances.