bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The allative bias in three-year-olds is almost proof against task naturalness
Authors: Freeman N. H. , Sinha C. G. , Stedmon J. A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAn allative bias has been noted in children's comprehension of deictic verbs and directional prepositions. This study investigates the allative bias and its susceptibility to contextual modification. Three-year-olds were asked to act according to requests to move one object to or from another, and to identify where an object had come from or gone to. A reliable bias was found whereby ‘to’ was easier than ‘from’. Attempts to make the utterance more naturally related to the task, by using movement and fronted objects, modulated the bias to a small extent, but did not abolish it. An analysis of directional expressions in terms of the components SOURCE, PATH and GOAL is presented in relation to the task-demands.
Cognitive precursors of receptive vs. expressive language
Authors: Smolak Linda 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAlthough cognitive precursors of language production have received considerable attention, the relationship of cognitive development to language comprehension development remains unexplored. In the present research, the relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive, as well as expressive, language development was investigated in infants between 0; 9 and 1; 3. Results indicated that object permanence, classification, and parent–child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning. No prerequisite stage of object permanence functioning could be discerned. On the other hand, object permanence was more strongly related to language production than were classification and verbal interaction. Furthermore, it appeared that a minimum of Stage 5 object permanence functioning was necessary prior to the onset of language production.
Tagging after red herrings: evidence against the processing capacity explanation in child language
Authors: Todd Peyton 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTA case is reported of failure to supply negation in tag questions for a period of nearly two years. The duration of this error shows that it could not have been the result of limited processing capacity, and this provides reason to doubt this explanation for the similar case of children's failure to invert subject and auxiliary verb in wh-questions. It is argued that other cases which have been explained in terms of limited processing capacity are equally compatible with an explanation in terms of context-specific knowledge, which holds that a rule is simply not known for contexts other than those where it is expressed.
Children's use of lexical and non-lexical information in responding to commands
Authors: Wilcox Stephen , Palermo David S. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTTwo experiments are reported in each of which eighty children between the ages of two and six years of age were given a series of commands containing relational terms and similar commands in which the relational terms were replaced by nonsense. The results indicated that children are able to use information from a number of sources which help them to interpret such commands. Younger children, particularly, seemed to rely relatively little upon word meaning, per se. Evidence is offered that the children's responses were constrained by the non-linguistic context, by prior repetition of commands, and by information available from the linguistic context.
Doggerel: motherese in a new context
Authors: Hirsh-Pasek Kathy , Treiman Rebecca 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTFour master–dog dyads were studied to determine whether the language that is used in speaking to dogs (doggerel) resembles the language that is used in speaking to children (motherese). The structural properties of doggerel are strikingly similar to those that have been reported for motherese. Certain differences between motherese and doggerel may arise in functional and social areas. The similarities between the two language registers suggest that motherese is not elicited in response to either the linguistic level or the cognitive/intellectual level of the child. Rather, the social responsiveness of the listener may be sufficient to elicit the motherese register.
Words and plans: early language and the development of intelligent action
Authors: Gopnik Alison 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTMany early words encode aspects of plans, that is, actions performed in order to bring about events. Gone and down encode the fact that an action is intended to bring about a certain type of event. There and oh dear encode the success or failure of plans, no encodes the rejection of a plan. More encodes the repetition of a plan. It is argued that the concepts encoded by gone and down are like the concepts that underlie trial- and-error problem-solving and are developed after 12 months. The more abstract concepts encoded by there, oh dear, no and more are associated with the development of insight after 18 months. These early words are acquired because they are relevant to the child's cognitive problems.
Do children pick and choose? an examination of phonological selection and avoidance in early lexical acquisition
Authors: Schwartz Richard G. , Leonard Laurence B. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe influence of phonological selection and avoidance upon early lexical acquisition was examined within an experimental paradigm. During 10 bi-weekly experimental sessions, 12 children (1;0.21 to 1;3.15 at the outset) were presented with 16 contrived lexical concepts, each consisting of a nonsense word and four unfamiliar referents. For each child, eight words involved phonological characteristics which had been evidenced in production (in) and eight had characteristics which had not been evidenced in production or selection (out), in words were produced imitatively and non-imitatively in greater numbers and in earlier sessions than OUT words, providing evidence for the influence of selection and avoidance. The degree of phonetic accuracy of these two types of productions did not differ. These findings are discussed in terms of a proposal concerning early phonological representation and acquisition.
If I were you and you were me: the analysis of pronouns in a pronoun-reversing child
Authors: Chiat Shulamuth 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAn investigation into the pronoun distribution of a pronoun-reversing child reveals inconsistencies both within production and between production and comprehension. This distribution is compatible with some analyses of normal pronoun development and pronoun reversal which have attributed non-adult person distinctions to the child. However, the data are also compatible with a quite distinct hypothesis which postulates that the child's pronouns are plurifunctional: the unreversed pronouns encode full adult distinctions, and are independent of the reversed pronouns, which function to shift perspective. The evaluation of these hypotheses and the questions they raise for normal and pathological pronoun development are discussed.
Children's comprehension of ‘before’ and ‘after’ reinvestigated
Authors: Trosborg Anna 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe present paper is concerned with establishing the relative difficulty involved in the acquisition of the temporal conjunctions before and after. It tries to control the influence on performance of the following variables: contextual support within a sentence (logically/arbitrarily ordered sequences), order of mention, syntactic complexity, task requirement variables, and memory load. In addition, experiments intended to throw light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying an understanding of these conjuctions are described. The concept of time is supposed to be spatial in origin. An understanding of relative time is dependent on ability to decentre and coordinate. Finally, it is suggested that reversible thinking (in a Piagetian sense) is involved in the process of making inverse sentence order agree with event order.
Assessing the role of experience on infants' speech discrimination
Authors: MacKain Kristine S. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTSeveral studies have investigated the effect of a particular linguistic environment on infants' discrimination of voicing for stop consonants. Exposure to contrasts phonemic for a community has been said to heighten preverbal infants' sensitivity to these contrasts.This paper argues that phonetic input cannot be specified and ‘experience’ cannot be defined in this context without knowing how infants perceptually structure speech input. Consequently, the discrimination paradigm provides no test for the effect of experience on infants' speech discrimination. The conditions to be met in order to conclude an effect of experience are outlined.
Origins of verbal logic: spontaneous denials by two- and three-year olds
Authors: Pea Roy D. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTChildren two to three years of age can spontaneously correct false statements and affirm true ones in a modified sentence verification paradigm. Such performances imply that very young children display knowledge of the rules of correspondence between language and reality (truth conditions) which are central to propositional logic, at an age when logical development in cognition has not been previously acknowledged.
The prosody of maternal speech: infant age and context related changes
Authors: Stern D. N. , Spieker S. , Barnett R. K. , MacKain K. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe speech of 6 mothers to their healthy infants was examined longitudinally during the neonatal period and at 4, 12, and 24 months in a semi-naturalistic setting. Features of speech analysed were: contour of fundamental frequency, repetitiveness, timing (durations of vocalizations and pauses), tempo and MLU. The neonatal period was characterized by elongated pauses. During the 4-month period the extent of pitch contouring and repetitiveness was greater than at earlier or later ages. By 24 months, the duration of vocalizations and length of MLU became markedly greater. The period of intense face-to-face interaction around the fourth month proved to involve more changes in certain prosodic features. Some of the possible functions of these changes during this phase are discussed.
Mothers' use of fantasy in speech to young children
Authors: Kavanaugh Robert D. , Whittington Sue , Cerbone Mark J. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examined mothers' use of fantasy in speech to young children. Observations of mothers in free-play interactions with their 12-to 27-month-old children formed the basis for an analysis of the frequency and type of fantasy relationships encoded in maternal speech. Results suggested that fantasy speech to roughly year-old children was relatively infrequent and restricted to descriptions of the feelings, actions, and functions of animate and inanimate objects. Speech to 1½-year-olds encoded essentially the same fantasy characteristics, but mothers of children in this age group introduced more distinct instances in their fantasy talk. A more notable change occurred in the fantasy utterances directed to 2-year-olds. Mothers of these children talked about non-existent imaginary objects, and often asked the child to extend a play episode by providing a new fantasy element. These findings were discussed in terms of the nature and function of the dyadic interactions in which mothers' fantasy talk occurred.
Prefix versus suffix information processing in the comprehension of tense and aspect
Authors: Weist Richard M. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis research evaluated the Polish child's capacity to comprehend aspect and tense distinctions realized by either prefixation or suffixation. Ten 2; 6 and ten 3; 6 children were given a picture–sentence matching task. Aspect picture sets contrasted completed with incompleted situations and sentences contrasted perfective with imperfective verbs differing by a prefix or a suffix. Tense picture sets portrayed either ongoing vs. anticipated action or results of action vs. anticipated action contrasts. Again sentences differed in verb forms either by prefixes or suffixes. The results showed that young children can pay attention to the beginnings of words as easily as to the ends of words and can understand a wide range of aspect and tense distinctions.
The word order myth
Authors: Weist Richard M. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this research was to investigate the function of word order, inflections and discourse context in the sentence comprehension process. Ten 2; 6 and ten 3; 6 Polish children acted out sentences with toys. The target sentences were either inflected or uninflected, and given inflectional information sentences were ordered SVO or OVS. Context sentences established given information which was in initial or final position in the target sentences. When inflectional information was available, all the children used it effectively with very little interference from OVS and new–given arrangements. In spite of the fact that word order distributes given and new information in adult Polish, children could utilize word order to recover semantic functions with uninflected sentence problems.
The acquisition of Hebrew plurals: the case of the missing gender category
Authors: Levy Yonata 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTChildren's acquisition of noun pluralization patterns in Hebrew was studied longitudinally and cross-sectionally. The data show that, through the period of acquisition (age 2–3), children make maximal use of the available morphophonological clues for pluralization; they determine their choice of the plural morpheme according to the nature of the final syllable of the noun singular. They seem totally insensitive to the semantic notion of gender which governs the choice of plurals for animate nouns, as well as to a syntactic notion of gender which in Hebrew determines noun–adjective agreement.
A discourse analysis of deixis: pragmatic, cognitive and semantic factors in the comprehension of ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’
Authors: Tfouni Leda Verdiani , Klatzky Roberta L. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTChildren (mean age 3; 6) were tested as to the comprehension of the deictic words this, that, here and there in two conditions: as hearers–addressees and as hearers–spectators. It was hypothesized that comprehension of these words depends on the role the comprehender plays in the conversation, and that a spectator's role is more difficult than an addressee's. Comprehension in a pragmatic condition (with a pointing gesture accompanying the utterance) was contrasted with a semantic condition (without gesture), and the prediction was that the pragmatic use of the words would facilitate comprehension. It was also theorized that this and here are marked, whereas that and there are unmarked. Therefore, it was predicted that this and here would be more difficult to comprehend than that and there. All the initial predictions were confirmed by the analysis of variance. The results are discussed within recent theories of pragmatics, semantics and cognitive development.
Bierwisch's analysis as a test of the SFH
Authors: McDonald Geraldine 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThere has been continuing interest in the Semantic Feature Hypothesis (SFH) over the last ten years but there appears to have been no experimental study which explores a complete semantic field nor one which uses a cross-cultural sample. Eighty New Zealand children, Maori and non-Maori, aged between 4; 0 and 4; 11, were tested for word recognition of the spatial adjectives following Bierwisch's (1967) componential analysis. The study extended previous work on the SFH by comparing performance on feature recognition, and by examining effect of word context on ease of discrimination. Results supported the view that word meaning is learned in bits, but failed to support any other predictions based on SFH. There was difference between the samples in performance on word recognition but no difference on features. It is suggested that more attention should be given to the characteristics of individual words as agents for the acquisition of other words.
Asking children to ask; an experimental investigation of the pragmatics of relayed questions
Authors: Tanz Christine 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTChildren's apparent ‘errors’ in interpreting ask as tell, incidentally uncovered in C. Chomsky's research on syntactic development, and subsequently interpreted in terms of E. Clark's theory of semantic development, are re-interpreted in the framework of pragmatic development. An experiment is reported in which a single coherent discourse framework is imposed and one pragmatic factor is manipulated: children's knowledge of the answers to the questions they are supposed to relay. The results confirm the hypothesis that if the children do not know the information, they relay the question, i.e. ask. If they do know the answer, they supply it, i.e. tell. By literally asking, the children in the ‘don't know’ condition demonstrate that they are capable of decoding ask constructions semantically and syntactically. The tendency of the children in the ‘know’ condition to tell is then interpreted as revealing not semantic confusion but pragmatic skill. The children's responses are discussed in relation to three-person speech acts and indirect requests for information. Children's ability to interpret utterances non-literally has implications for conducting experiments with literal instructions and these are also discussed.
Children's comprehension of Italian comparative forms and the three-term problem solution
Authors: Gobbo Camilla , Agnoli Franca 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTChildren aged 7; 6 to 10; 0 were required to solve 2-term relational problems in order to explore developmental changes in the comprehension of Italian positive and negative comparatives. The results indicate that at first children spatially represent the two terms of the positive comparatives in a contrastive-positional way, while in the second phase children represent the terms relationally. Comprehension of negative comparatives is characterized by three phases: a contrastive-positional phase, a presuppositional phase and a relational representation. The older subjects were subsequently divided into two groups based on their previous performance, and required to solve 3-term series problems in order (a) to confirm and extend the result of the first experiment; (b) to examine whether the linguistic comprehension of the comparative was a sufficient and necessary prerequisite for solution of 3-term problems. The developmental sequence of comprehension of comparatives was confirmed. Furthermore, the results suggested how cognitive load in making transitive inferences is influenced by linguistic encoding. The data are discussed in the light of a linguistic model versus a spatial representation model. A developmental version of a spatial representation model is proposed to account for the results.
Talking about comparisons: a study of young children's comparative adjective usage
Authors: Gitterman Dena , Johnston Judith R. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study explores factors other than the concept of comparison which influence the learning of specific comparative adjective forms, namely, (a) the nature of the perceptual input, and (b) the nature of the event. Thirty subjects, age 4; 5 to 7; 9, were asked to describe objects reflecting various attribute differences in both multiple-object comparison and single-object, dynamic-change tasks. Children used comparative adjectives to talk about dynamic changes prior to static comparisons, and attributes based on visual or tactile input were easier than those based on both. These results are interpreted as indicating that perceptual cue redundancy and heterogeneity affects the learning of attribute dimensions, and that children first use the -er suffix in a non-comparative sense.
Non-segmental features in prelinguistic communications: an analysis of some types of infant cry and non-cry vocalizations
Authors: D'Odorico Laura 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTFour Italian infants' cry and non-cry vocalizations were recorded during laboratory sessions and grouped into different categories in relation to different situational contexts. Narrow-band spectrograms were taken of all infants' vocalizations in order to determine their non-segmental features. The results give evidence of differentiation of cry vocalization produced in different contexts, and similarity of cry and non-cry vocalization produced in the same context. The problem of assigning communicative intentions to prelinguistic children is discussed in a Piagetian perspective, assuming that infant vocalizations are schemes of interactions with the social world, developing in a similar way to sensorimotor schemes of action.
The role of maternal gesturing in conversations with one-year-olds
Authors: Schnur Elizabeth , Shatz Marilyn 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study explores the question of whether maternal gestures facilitate aspects of the linguistic or communicative behaviour of young children. Four children aged 1; 4 were videotaped playing with their mothers in an unconstrained free condition, and then again in an ungestured condition in which mothers were instructed not to use their hands while interacting with their children. Results from the two conditions of our study show that though children tended to produce attentive responses when they had observed a gesture, these reponses were not necessarily more appropriate to the interaction than responses not preceded by maternal gesture. We conclude that maternal gestures have more of a role in maintaining attention and the flow of interaction for young children than they do in providing specific cues to the grammar the child is acquiring.
The current status of the motherese hypothesis
Authors: Gleitman Lila R. , Newport Elissa L. , Gleitman Henry 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTPartially conflicting results from correlational studies of maternal speech style and its effects on child language learning motivate a comparative discussion of Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman (1977) and Furrow, Nelson & Benedict (1979), and a reanalysis of the original Newport et al. data. In the current analysis the data are from two groups of children equated for age, in response to the methodological questions raised by Furrow et al.; but, in line with the original Newport et al. analysis, linguistic differences between these age-equated children are handled by partial correlation. Under this new analysis the original results reported by Newport et al. are reproduced. In addition, however, most effects of the mother on the child's language growth are found to be restricted to a very young age group. Moreover, the new analysis suggests that increased complexity of maternal speech is positively correlated with child language growth in this age range. The findings are discussed in terms of a theoretical analysis of the Motherese Hypothesis; the conditions of both learner and environment in which ‘simplified’ data could aid a learner. Finally, the results of our past work, those of Furrow et al., and those of the present analysis, are discussed as they fit into, and add to, current theorizing about the language acquisition process.