bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
How do children describe spatial relationships?
Authors: Cox M. V. , Ryder Richardson T. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTH. Clark's hypotheses regarding the acquisition of spatial terms were tested using a task designed to elicit subjects' descriptions of different object arrangements. Children from 3 to 10 years and a group of adults were tested. There was some support for Clark's prediction that the perceptual difficulty of each dimension will affect the order of acquisition of the associated linguistic terms, in that the terms followed the predicted order (1) vertical, (2) horizontal-frontal, (3) horizontal-lateral, in the early years. However, it was concluded that since the horizontal-frontal terms lagged behind the others in later childhood and adulthood, perceptual difficulty alone was not an adequate explanation. In addition, no support was found for Clark's notion that linguistic terms associated with the ‘positive’ end of each spatial dimension will be acquired earlier than those associated with the ‘negative’ end.
Topic and communicative intent in mother–child discourse
Authors: Wanska Susan K. , Bedrosian Jan L. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examined topic discourse skills in 30 pre-operational level children interacting with their mothers in a free play situation. For each interaction, topic initiations/shadings were analysed for here-and-now, fantasy, and displacement topics. All turns (initiations, shadings and maintenance) involving these topic categories were also coded for communicative intent. Results indicated that children initiated/shaded more fantasy topics than their mothers, who initiated/shaded more displacement topics. Topic maintenance was significantly greater for fantasy and here-and-now topics than for displacement. Mothers initiated/shaded and maintained topics primarily by requests for all three topic categories. Children used more informatives to initiate/shade these topics, and maintained fantasy and displacement topics primarily by responses to mothers' questions. The results suggested a complex picture of children's management of discourse as it relates to topic and mothers' continuing role in facilitating their children's discourse skills.
The episodic structure of maternal speech to young children
Authors: Messer David J. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAn investigation was made of the episodic structure of maternal speech to young children during a free-play session. The findings indicate that maternal speech was organized so as to provide a high degree of redundancy with regard to the referential component of speech. The beginning of episodes, in which the same object was repeatedly referred to, was clearly marked; furthermore speech inside episodes with a common referent was highly repetitive. All this suggests that maternal speech is organized in a way that increases the predictability in the child's language environment.
A phonetic analysis of consonantal devoicing in children's speech
Authors: Smith Bruce L. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTA number of phonologists have observed the frequent occurrence of ‘devoiced’ obstruents in word-final position in children's utterances. Although such transcription-based accounts have provided evidence of the phenomenon, physical phonetic properties of devoiced consonants have not been described. Therefore, characteristics of voicing control for ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ stops produced by five English-speaking children aged 2; 6–3; 0, five aged 4; 0–4; 6, and five adults were investigated in terms of (1) the percentage of all stop productions evidencing ‘devoicing’ during consonant closure, and (2) in the case of devoiced stops, the proportion of consonant closure evidencing voicing. Both groups of children revealed substantial amounts of consonantal devoicing when compared with the adults; in addition, the proportion of stop closure evidencing voicing was considerably less for the children than for the adults. It was also observed, however, that the children's ‘devoiced’ stops revealed significantly more voicing than their phonemically ‘voiceless’ stop productions.
Verbal and nonverbal aspects of mothers' directives
Authors: Schaffer H. R. , Hepburn Anne , Collis G. M. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTMaternal directives to children aged 10 and 18 months were analysed with respect to both verbal and concomitant nonverbal aspects. The findings emphasize the multimodal nature of mothers' communicative messages and draw attention to the way in which language occurs in an action context and not as an isolated output. No indication was found for this age range that verbal devices come to replace nonverbal ones. At both ages most utterances were accompanied by some form of nonverbal behaviour; the precise nature of the association, however, gives little support to the idea of parallel coding. The child's own behaviour is also shown to form part of the context in which maternal speech takes place.
Feedback to first language learners: the role of repetitions and clarification questions
Authors: Demetras M. J. , Post Kathryn Nolan , Snow Catherine E. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe conclusion that information regarding the grammatically of children's speech is unavailable in parental input has recently been challenged (Moerk 1983 a, b, Hirsh-Pasek, Treiman & Schneiderman 1984). The present study expanded on this research by broadening the definition of ‘negative feedback’ and by describing individual styles of mother–child dialogues. The purpose was to investigate whether mothers of four 2-year-old children responded differentially to their children's well-formed or ill-formed utterances with explicit and implicit feedback. The middle-class, English-speaking, mother–child dyads were recorded in a naturalistic context at home during play and eating activities. Explicit and implicit feedback were different in terms of the proportion of responses available to the child and their relation to well-formed and ill-formed utterances. The style of response was similar for most analyses across the four mothers.
Twin talk: manifestations of twin status in the speech of toddlers
Authors: Malmstrom Patricia M. , Silva Marilyn N. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTWith the expectation that an examination of language between toddler twins in their home environment would reveal characteristics unique to the subjects' twin status, 31 hours of crib-talk between identical twin girls and diary records of their speech were examined. It was found that the subjects developed conventional syntax and vocabulary, but adapted them in ways which appropriately expressed their twin status. Three salient examplesinclude their use of a double name for themselves as a team, their use of singular verbs in reference to themselves together, and their use of the singular pronoun me in pronominal reference to themselves as a team.
The early acquisition of spatial adjectives: a cross-linguistic study
Authors: Harris Paul L. , Morris Jeremy E. , Terwogt Mark Meerum 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTIn two experiments, the early acquisition of spatial adjectives is examined. In Experiment 1, 3- to 4-year-old and 4- to 5-year-old English children were tested for their comprehension of big, tall and long. In general, comprehension of all three adjectives improved with age, but in confirmation of Maratsos (1973) there was a sharp increase with age in one particular type of error: when asked to select the bigger of two objects, older children frequently chose the taller but smaller member of the pair. Further analysis showed that those older children who understood the word tall were especially likely to make this error. In Experiment 2, Dutch children of the same age were tested for their comprehension of groot (meaning ‘big’) and lang (meaning both ‘tall’ and ‘long’). Dutch children were also prone to choose the taller of two objects when asked to point to the bigger one, although Dutch does not possess a spatial adjective such as tall that refers exclusively to the vertical dimension. The implications of the findings for the acquisition of spatial adjectives, and for theories of semantic development are discussed.
Perceptual strategies in prelingual speech segmentation
Authors: Goodsitt Jan V. , Morgan James L. , Kuhl Patricia K. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTPrevious work has suggested that infants may segment continuous speech by a BRACKETING STRATEGY that segregates portions of the speech stream based on prosodic cues to their endpoints. The two present studies were designed to assess whether infants also can deploy a CLUSTERING STRATEGY that exploits asymmetries in transitional probabilities between successive elements, aggregating elements with high transitional probabilities and identifying points of low transitional probabilities as boundaries between units. These studies examined effects of the structure and redundancy of speech context on infants' discrimination of two target syllables using an operant head-turning procedure. After discrimination training on the target syllables in isolation, discrimination maintenance was tested when the target syllables were embedded in one of three contexts. Invariant Order contexts were structured to promote clustering, whereas the Redundant and Variable Order contexts were not. Thirty-six seven-month-olds were tested in Experiment I, in which stimuli were produced with varying intonation contours; 36 eight-month-olds were tested in Experiment 2, in which stimuli were produced with comparable flat pitch contours. In both experiments, performance of the three groups was equivalent in an initial 20-trial test. However, in a second 20-trial test, significant improvements in performance were shown by infants in the Invariant Order condition. No such gains were shown by infants in the other two conditions. These studies suggest that clustering may complement bracketing in infants' discovery of units of language.
Phonological devices in poems by English and Italian children
Authors: Dowker Ann , Pinto Giuliana 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTPoems were elicited from 133 English children between two and six and 171 Italian children between three and seven, using a similar technique, and the results were compared. Both groups produced large numbers of poems. There were great similarities and some differences. The majority of poems in both samples contained phonological devices (mostly rhyme and alliteration) and the proportion was higher (87%) in the Italian sample than in the English sample (59%). The proportion of poems that contained rhyme was close to 45% in each sample, with no consistent age difference in either sample. About one-third of Italian poems and just over a fifth of English poems contained alliteration. The frequency of alliteration declined with age in the English sample but not in the Italian sample. Possible reasons for the differences between the samples are considered. It is argued that the similarities are more important, and their theoretical implications are discussed.
Pronoun case overextensions and paradigm building
Authors: Rispoli Matthew 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTPronoun 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 ist 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.
Scrutinizing reference: how gesture and speech are coordinated in mother-child interaction
Authors: Schmidt Chris L. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTMaternal estensive naming was investigated in a cross-sectional study of 12 children aged 0;10, 1;3 and 1;6, and a follow-up study of four children aged 1;3. Display, demonstration and pointing were coded with regard to whether and how co-occurring speech referred to gesture focus. Multivariate log-linear frequency analyses found that mothers' coordination of speech with gesture varied with age and the gesture used. Maternal naming of objects was most frequent with children aged 0; 10. Maternal gesture-speech coordination with children aged 1;3 and 1;6 differed in two related ways: (1) actions were named more frequently than objects; and (2) mothers often combined gesture with complementary speech referring, not to gesture focus, but to an action to be performed with the object indicated. At all ages, pointing was rarely used to name ostensively, and occurred most often in combination with complementary reference. Maternal input was found to be significantly correlated with children's reported receptive vocabulary.
Information level and young children's phonological accuracy
Authors: Goffman Lisa , Schwartz Richard G. , Marton Klara 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe influence of information level on the production accuracy of 20 children (22 to 28 months) was examined. The data were children's productions of nouns in sets of utterances referring to triplets of pictures representing noun-verb-noun utterances. In each triplet one noun remained the same, thus decreasing in information value from the first to the third picture (new, moderately old, and old information). Words representing new information were produced more accurately than words representing old information. The types of errors did not differ. Further evidence of this effect was provided by an examination of the duration of new versus old word productions by 12 of the children. Productions encoding new information were consistently longer on average than those encoding old information. The results provide experimental evidence of an effect observed in adults that indicates early sensitivity to information level. However, because of the children's young age, the effects are characterized as a speaker-internal process that only serendipitously corresponds to listener needs.
Re-introduction of referents in Italian children's narratives
Authors: Orsolini Margherita , Rossi Franca , Pontecorvo Clotilde 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTIn this study we investigate the re-introduction of referents in the Frog stories told by Italian children aged 4–10 (N = 100). We found that for every age group full nouns are the most frequent forms used for reference re-introduction. Null forms, such as clitic pronouns or person/number inflection on the verb, are the second most frequent forms. A detailed analysis of null forms shows that children of different ages exploit different properties of the verbal and non-verbal context which can make a referent predictable. Compared to preschoolers, elementary school children are more likely to use null forms when the semantic content of the verb, or the structure of the preceding text make referents inferrable. On the other hand, preschoolers tend to exploit the importance of a character in the story plot, or the visual availability of the referent in the non-verbal context, as properties that make an entity salient enough to prevent the speaker from using overt linguistic forms such as full nouns. Our study confirms results of previous research, showing that elementary school children are more competent than preschoolers in integrating the semantic content of the current utterance into the context generated by previous discourse.
Noun bias in maternal speech to one-year-olds
Authors: Goldfield Beverly A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examines the distribution of nouns and verbs in maternal speech to one-year-olds. Mothers and children were videotaped during toy play and non-toy play. Nouns and verbs in maternal speech were coded for frequency, sentence position and occurrence with grammatical inflections. maternal speech was also coded for utterances that prompted the child to produce a noun or a verb. Frequency of nouns and verbs varied with context. There were more noun types and tokens during toy play, and more verb types and tokens during non-toy play. Nouns occurred more often than verbs in shorter maternal sentences, in sentence-final position, and with fewer grammatical inflections. Mothers also more often prompted their children to produce nouns. There was a significant positive correlation between frequency of noun types and tokens during toy play, and the proportion of nouns in children's first 50 words.
When is communication a ‘meeting of minds’?
Authors: Golinkoff Roberta Michnick 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTDo infants and young children (two-year-olds) possess an implicit theory of mind which is revealed through their communicative interactions or are they simply treating their interlocutors as objects to manipulate in service to their own material ends? Shatz & O'Reilly (1990) criticized a paper by Golinkoff (1986) for claiming that infants were attempting to communicate as opposed to simply manipulate their listeners. This paper takes exception to that argument. It reviews additional evidence which indicates that infants in the second year of life are capable of communicating for the sake of the ‘meeting of minds’. The alternative – treating young children's communications as only the firing off of conversational routines for the purpose of attaining material ends – seriously underestimates infants' knowledge of the communicative process.
Twin language or phonological disorder?
Authors: Dodd Barbara , McEvoy Sandra 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe acquisition of language in the preschool years by multiple-birth children is often reported to be atypical. Some researchers have claimed that they use ‘twin language’, i.e. an autonomous language specific to a multiple-birth set. This claim was investigated by describing and comparing the phonological characteristics of the speech of 19 sets of two- to four-year-old multiple-birth children, and by measuring multiple-birth children's understanding of their twins' or triplets' context-free speech. The results indicated that multiple-birth children are prone to phonological disorder and consequently their speech is often unintelligible. Siblings' phonologies evidenced some similarities, although they were not identical. Multiple-birth children were better able to understand their siblings' mispronunciations than were other children of the same age, although that understanding was dependent on how closely the error form resembled the adult form. While these three factors conspire to give the impression that ‘twin language’ is common, none of these findings provided support for the claim that multiple-birth children use an autonomous language.
French concessive connectives and argumentation: an experimental study in eight- to ten-year-old children
Authors: Champaud Christian , Bassano Dominique 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAn experimental study examined the comprehension of sentences containing concessive connectives, considered from an argumentative-conclusive point of view, in eight- and ten-year-old French children (24 subjects in each age group). Two tasks were used; subjects had to choose between (1) opposite preceding contexts of sentences (context choice task), and (2) conclusions that could be drawn from the same sentences (conclusion choice task). Results indicated a clear developmental increase in performance. For all concessive items, except mais (‘but’), results of the context choice task were better than results of the conclusion choice task. Older children gave significantly better responses for mais in the conclusion choice task. The ambivalence of the connective mais is discussed; comparisons with production and crosslinguistic data are suggested.
When is a word a word?
Authors: Vihman Marilyn May , McCune Lorraine 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAlthough adult-based words co-occur in the period of transition to speech with a variety of non-word vocalizations, little attention has been given to the formidable problem of identifying these earliest words. This paper specifies explicit, maximally ‘inclusive’ identification procedures, with criteria based on both phonetic and contextual parameters. A formal system for evaluating phonetic match is suggested, as well as a set of child-derived functional categories reflecting use in context. Analysis of word use across two samples of 10 children each, followed from 0;9 to 1;4, provides evidence to suggest that context-bound words can be ‘trained’ by focusing on eliciting language, but that the timing of context-flexible word use remains independent of such training.
Symmetries and asymmetries in early lexical comprehension and production
Authors: Harris Margaret , Yeeles Caroline , Chasin Joan , Oakley Yvonne 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTSix children were visited in their homes every two weeks for 18 months from the age of six months in order to observe their developing comprehension and production of words. Controlled testing of the children's developing vocabulary was also carried out to provide a more detailed picture of the precise context in which a word was understood or produced. The results showed both similarities and individual differences among the children in patterns of early comprehension. For all six children there was a very close relationship between early production and comprehension of words: words that were contextually flexible in production tended also to be so in comprehension and words that were context-bound also tended to be so in both modalities although there was some evidence that the two types of word differed in the extent to which comprehension preceded production. All children were also similar in showing evidence of contextually flexible comprehension very early on. However, there were individual differences both in the rate at which comprehension developed and in the lag between comprehension and production. The significance of this pattern of development for accounts of lexical development is explored.
Conceptual perspective-taking and children's interpretation of pronouns in reported speech
Authors: Smyth Ron 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examines the role of cognitive development in children's use of pragmatic cues for anaphora resolution. Reported speech sentences likeMinnie told Dorothy that she knew Supermanare biased toward the matrix subject. This bias is claimed to depend on two conceptual shifts, first to the speaker's and then to the listener's perspective. 141 children aged 5;0–8;0 performed two tasks with biased and neutral sentences. In the Verbal task, they gave antecedent choices in response to a question (e.g.…that WHO knew Superman?). In the Puppet task, which prompts the perspective shift, they made a puppet say the reported speech portion (e.g.I/you know Superman). Violations of the pragmatic constraint decreased with age and task, consistent with the perspective-shift model. Parallel function effects in neutral sentences were weaker than in previous research on conjoined sentences, but similar to recent results for adults with these materials.