bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Accelerating language learning in young children
Authors: Roth Froma P. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTTo examine the effects of direct intervention on language learning, 18 children ranging in age from 3;6 to 4;6 were systematically taught linguistic structures still beyond their developmental grasp. Four types of relative clause sentences were trained, using a toy manipulation task. Solid improvement was found in the performance of subjects in the two experimental conditions between the Pre- and Post-test Phases. No significant improvement was demonstrated by the control condition subjects. This successful outcome is viewed as demonstrating that the language learning process is somewhat independent of cognitive development. In addition, error response analyses indicated that the First Noun strategy accounted for the majority of errors, providing support for the canonical–sentoid hypothesis.
On the development of the expression of causativity: a syntactic hypothesis
Authors: Figueira Rosa Attié 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTPrevious studies on the acquisition of causative verbs have analysed the deviations noticed in children's speech as resulting from the child's overgeneralized hypothesis about the morphological configuration of causative verbs. These studies are based on one type of deviation – the use of a non-causative verb for a causative verb. In this paper, longitudinal data are presented on the development of the lexical expression of causativity by one child learning Portuguese as her first language. Not only are non-causatives used for causatives, but causatives are also used for non-causatives. The latter type of deviation provides evidence for an analysis according to which the child takes into account the syntactic structure where causative verbs occur.
Young children's use of prosody
Authors: Furrow David 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examined the relationship between prosodic variables in children's spontaneous speech and aspects of children's social behaviour while speaking. Twelve children aged 1; 11 to 2; 1 were videotaped in free play with an adult. Two hundred spontaneous utterances were sampled, and each utterance was psychophysically rated on loudness, pitch, and pitch range. These measurements were aggregated in a single measure of prosody for each utterance, which was related to whether or not children (a) made eye contact, (b) showed other social behaviours, or (c) showed no interactive behaviour with adults when an utterance was made. Results showed that utterances made while maintaining eye contact were on average louder and higher and more variably pitched. Such a finding indicates that children use prosodic elements of speech for communicative purposes.
The acquisition of gone and the development of the object concept
Authors: Gopnik Alison 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe relationship between the acquisition of gone and the development of the object concept is investigated. Children acquire gone at the same time that they solve serial invisible displacement tasks, in a transitional period in the development of the object concept. According to a ‘neo-piagetian’ account of the object concept, children move from using specific rules to predict the reappearance of objects, to using a general theory of object movements during this period. The children's uses of gone suggest that gone encodes the fact that the child does not perceive an existing object. This concept is an essential component of the new theory of objects developed in this period. Children seem to acquire gone when they are in the midst of developing the concept that gone encodes, which may explain why they acquire the word in this period. In this case, conceptual development does not precede semantic development; rather, conceptual and semantic development appear to proceed simultaneously.
Learning to stress: a case study
Authors: Klein Harriet B. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTA repertoire of polysyllabic words, produced by an approximately 2-year-old child, was analysed for primary stress application. A general rule for stress application did not emerge from the data. Instead, much variability existed among tokens of individual lexical items (which were imitative and/or spontaneous) and among different lexical items with the same stress contour, regarding the placement of primary stress. Intraword and interword variation suggested the existence of four groups of words treated differently with respect to primary stress placement. The word groups were separated by their characteristic stress contours, which were (1) conventional primary stress, (2) misplaced stress, (3) level stress, and (4) undetermined stress. In general, consistent application of conventional stress was related, significantly, with lexical items represented by primarily spontaneous tokens. Results support a view of lexical primacy during early stages of learning word stress.
Adverbial connectivity in conversations of children 6 to 12
Authors: Scott Cheryl M. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTNatural language samples of 114 children aged 6 to 12 years are analysed for instances of discourse connectivity via adverbial conjuncts and disjuncts. Conjunct use is just emerging at 6 and is limited to the encoding of a subset of possible logical relations with only one lexical item per relation (transitional now, inferential then, result so and concessive though). Developmental progress takes the form of increasing use of the same conjuncts, plus additional logical relations and an increasing repertoire of lexical items per relation. Disjunct use is rare at all ages and largely limited to really and probably. Developmental interactions between form, content and use (discourse context) are probed. The 12-year-old child falls far short of an adult rate of production but is learning a similar set of connectivity forms.
Cognitive bases of lexical development: object permanence and relational words
Authors: Tomasello Michael , Farrar Michael Jeffrey 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe hypothesis that there is a close relationship between object permanence and early language acquisition has not been supported by most previous research. McCune-Nicolich (1981), however, performed a detailed theoretical analysis and, as a result, found a close relationship between stage 6 object permanence development and the use of relational words. Unlike previous studies which used mostly quantitative measures of language, McCune-Nicolich related object permanence to the semantic content of the child's early words. She concluded that relational words enter the child's lexicon ‘as a group’ during stage 6, due in part to the development of the cognitive abilities of that stage. The current study attempts to make this claim more specific and consequently more accurate. Relational words requiring the conceptualization of the visible displacement of objects should emerge during stage 5, those involving invisible displacements during stage 6, and those referring to more complex spatial displacements only later during the pre-operational period. Data from a longitudinal study of six 1-year-olds corroborate this more specific account.
Higher pitch in BT is not universal: acoustic evidence from Quiche Mayan
Authors: Ratner Nan Bernstein , Pye Clifton 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAlthough higher pitch has been described as a universal feature of babytalk (BT) registers worldwide, analysis of a sample of three Quiche Mayan-speaking mothers addressing their infant children indicated that their BT register does not utilize this feature. Quiche mothers either make no pitch distinction in speech to young children, or actually lower pitch slightly in comparison with their Adult–Adult interaction style. A comparison group of American mothers raised pitch 35–70 Hz when addressing infants of the same age and language maturity. We posit that pitch-raising strategies may be sociolinguistically determined and may serve different functions across languages.
Productivity and memory for newly formed words
Authors: Clark Eve V. , Cohen Sophia R. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe first word-formation devices children should learn, we proposed, are the most productive ones, that is, those that have the fewest structural constraints on their use and that appear most frequently in the formation of new words. Four- and five-year-old children who were asked to recall novel words with English agentive suffixes recalled the most productive suffix (-er) well and its less productive companions (-ist and -ian) very poorly. Other children who were asked to recall as agentive suffixes the non-agentive -ly (about equal in frequency to -er) together with -ist and -ian, did poorly on all three. They also substituted agentive suffixes (including -er) for the non-agentive -ly, with greater reliance on more productive forms. These data, together with previous observations, support the hypothesis that productivity affects the order in which children master word-formation devices.
The association between comprehension of spoken sentences and early reading ability: the role of phonetic representation
Authors: Mann Virginia A. , Shankweiler Donald , Smith Suzanne T. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTWhen repeating spoken sentences, children who are good readers tend to be more accurate than poor readers because they are able to make more effective use of phonetic representation in the service of working memory (Mann, Liberman & Shankweiler 1980). This study of good and poor readers in the third grade has assessed both the repetition and comprehension of relative-clause sentences to explore more fully the association between early reading ability, spoken sentence processing and use of phonetic representation. It was found that the poor readers did less well than the good readers on sentence comprehension as well as on sentence repetition, and that their comprehension errors reflected a greater reliance on two sentence-processing strategies favoured by young children: the minimum-distance principle and conjoined-clause analysis. In general, the pattern of results is consonant with a view that difficulties with phonetic representation could underlie the inferior sentence comprehension of poor beginning readers. The finding that these children place greater reliance on immature processing strategies raises the further possibility that the tempo of their syntactic development may be slower than that of good readers.
Children's interpretation of referential ambiguities and pragmatic inference
Authors: Bredart Serge 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe verbal responses of 22 second graders, 24 fourth graders and 22 sixth graders to ambiguous and clear messages were recorded. Children's referential choices were analysed. After the ambiguous messages, children (from the age of seven years) chose preferentially a referent with only the feature described in the message rather than a referent with this feature plus another one. The results support the Jackson & Jacobs' hypothesis (1982) that children use an interpretative strategy based on a presupposition about the speaker's co-operation. But the results may also support a hypothesis that children use an information-processing rule not necessarily related to a presupposition about the speaker's co-operation.
Facilitation of early syntax through discourse structure
Authors: Schwartz Richard G. , Chapman Kathy , Prelock Patricia A. , Terrell Brenda Y. , Rowan Lynne E. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe effect of an adult–child discourse structure on children's production of word combinations was examined. Seventeen children at the singleword utterance level (1; 5–2; 1) served as subjects. An experimental group of six children were engaged in vertical structures over 10 sessions, while the remaining children served as a control group. Pre-tests and post-tests revealed a significant difference in the number of spontaneous and elicited multiword productions for the experimental group, but no difference for the control group.
Affix processing strategies and linguistic systems
Authors: Weist Richard M. , Konieczna Emilia 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe relationship between affix processing and linguistic systems was evaluated through an analysis of prefixation and suffixation in the tense-aspect and locative systems of child Polish. For six children ranging in age from 1; 7 to 2; 6, the distinction between imperfective and perfective aspect was made more frequently by prefixation than by suffixation. Prefixation was found to be just as productive in the specification of locative distinctions as aspectual distinctions. We found no bias in affix processing which might have favoured suffixation, and no interaction of linguistic systems with affix processing. Furthermore, an inter-language comparison confirmed these intralanguage findings. Finally, we argued that affix processing involves a parallel analysis of patterns of stored information providing the motivation for selective attention.
Preschool children's sentence comprehension: strategies with respect to animacy
Authors: Lempert Henrietta 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTIn a between-subjects design, 105 children aged 2; 5–5; 5 enacted their interpretation of passive and inverted cleft (IC) sentences in which animacy was systematically varied. Two agent strategies were found at 3;0: dynamic agent and word order. For ICs, the word order strategy persisted at 4;0, but the dynamic agent approach was replaced by an animate agent strategy. For passives, 4-year-olds mostly used structural relations, either regardless of agent and patient animacy (50 % of children), or only for animate patients (30% of children). The latter finding is discussed in terms of topicalization priorities.
Spanish prepositions introducing adverbial constructions
Authors: Peronard Marianne 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the development of prepositions used in the expression of circumstances as adverbial adjuncts in the speech of three Spanish-speaking middle-class children. The study begins with the first appearance of one of these prepositions and the children are followed until age 4. In spite of the differences among the children concerning other aspects of their language development, what predominates in the present case is similarity. Both the forms and the meanings expressed turned up in much the same sequence in the speech of the three children. Yet when both form and meaning were seen together the results showed great variability; that is, each child began expressing a given circumstance by means of a different preposition. On the other hand, the circumstance most commonly expressed by means of new prepositions was place. The amount of polysemy increased with age, usually starting with a single meaning for each preposition. Expressions were found which seemed to represent intermediate stages between an early general category (co-occurrence) and the more specific semantic categories of space, instrument and company.
A naturalistic study of the production of causal connectives by children
Authors: McCabe Allyssa , Peterson Carole 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study analysed the naturalistic productions of because and so by 96 children, vaged 3; 6–9; 6, vwhile vnarrating real, vpersonal events. Few semantic errors could be construed as evidence of confused thinking; none is a confusion vdescribed by Piaget. Of the vsemantically correct causal uses, 81 % encode psychological causality, mostly statements of other people's intentions. Other analyses revealed: (1) many of the relationships encoded are highly predictable, (2) virtually all causality occurred prior to the time of narration, (3) age trends are remarkably absent, (4) because and so are used in significantly different ways even by the youngest children, (5) only eight sentences showed a vreversal of the appropriate order of cause and effect. The discrepancy between the last finding and many other laboratory studies vwhich find many such reversals may be due to the fact that children are causally linking strictly successive events only 32 % of the time; for the rest, they are encoding events that partially or completely overlap in time.
The emergence of pragmatic comprehension: a study of children's understanding of sentence-structure cues to given/new information
Authors: Paul Rhea 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThird- and fifth-grade children, who had passed pretests of comprehension for words and sentence types used in the experiment, were tested on their ability to assign given/new roles in active, passive and cleft sentences controlled for stress. The experimental task involved a best-fit judgement that required the child to decide which one of two context sentences was the first part of a story continued by the target sentence. There was a significant difference in response to passive and cleft sentences, as opposed to actives. Despite a strong statistical tendency to perform correctly on passives and clefts, there were a substantial number of subjects who performed near chance in all sentence conditions. Five individual patterns of response to the task are identified. Strategies used by subjects in responding to the task, and the implications of the results for functionalist theories of language acquisition are discussed.
Towards a theory of definition
Authors: Watson Rita 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTA brief theoretical statement on definition is advanced, followed by a study of the development of definition in children aged 5;0–10;0. The empirical findings suggest that the emergence of superordinate terms in definition cannot be adequately accounted for simply by appeal to changes in underlying knowledge, or to selectional restrictions on the structure of the definiens. Rather, the development of definition can best be characterized as the gradual articulation of a conventional definitional form out of the more general forms of ordinary oral discourse. It is suggested that definitions are expressions of word meaning that reflect the unique requirements of a literate register, and that the increasing dominance of superordinate terms in definitions reflects in part the adoption of this conventional form of expression.
Language differentiation by the bilingual infant
Authors: Vihman Marilyn May 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper traces the process involved in the bilingual infant's gradual differentiation of his two languages, beginning with the acquisition of a dual lexicon. Word combination is at first based indiscriminately on this dual language source; function words account for a disproportionately large number of tokens used in mixed-language utterances. Universal principles of child syntax are at first applied; later, rules specific to each of the languages are developed separately. The development of self-awareness and sensitivity to standards in the second year provides the essential cognitive underpinning for the child to begin to avoid mixed-language utterances and to choose his language according to his interlocutor. At a still later point the bilingual older child may begin to make use of code-switching strategies appropriate to his or her bilingual community.
The emergence of present perfect verb forms: semantic influences on selective imitation
Authors: Johnson Cynthia J. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study investigates forms and functions of the perfect in 22 preschool children. Children retold and re-enacted two-sentence stories which modelled the perfect. Although the perfect appeared to be emerging in imitative speech, including certain ungrammatical forms, children varied in the extent to which they used it and appreciated its meaning of current relevance. Three factors were found to influence children's selective imitation and paraphrasing of the perfect: form of the verb (present perfect versus perfect progressive), semantic sense of the perfect, and duration of the lexical verb. Children's performance demonstrates the need to consider not only the developmental frequency of advanced, optional verb forms but the generality of their use and their relation to the child's lexicon.
Some contributions of mothers' speech to their children's syntactic growth
Authors: Hoff-Ginsberg Erika 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examined the relationship between mothers' speech and the rate of child syntax growth for 22 2½-year-old children whose speech was sampled at two-month intervals over a six-month period. The relations which appeared suggest that linguistic experience does contribute to syntax development, but that the relation between linguistic input and language growth is different for different domains of language and at different points in the course of development. The results further suggest that there are multiple bases to the benefit of input to language acquisition. One mechanism particularly suggested by the findings is that children analyse the distributional properties of the speech they hear and may induce linguistic structure from the relationship between the structural properties of adjacent utterances in discourse.
Colour-name versus shape-name learning in young children
Authors: Bornstein Marc H. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTVery young children perceive colour normally and possess the concept of colour, but it has been widely reported, on the basis of informal observation or normative assessment, that beginning colour naming is confused and that accurate and consistent colour naming is relatively retarded developmentally. A neutral test was devised to compare experimentally 3-year-olds' abilities to make colour-to-name versus shape-to-name associations. Children learned colour-label associates significantly more slowly than matched shape-label associates, and they committed more errors with colours than with shapes during learning. The design of this study eliminates several explanations often proposed to explicate retarded colour naming, including relative perceptual salience, differential experience, and immature cognitive development, and, in their stead, opens the possibility that the difficulty underlying beginning colour naming may reflect specific word-to-colour associations.
Five-year-olds' understanding of ‘savoir’ and ‘croire’
Authors: Bassano Dominique 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe interpretation of French statements involving the verbssavoir(‘to know’) andcroire(‘to think’) was studied in a group of children aged from 4; 1 to 1. The experiment consisted in asking subjects to attribute four sentences (‘I know that P’, ‘I know that not-P’, ‘I do not know if P’, ‘I think that P’) to fictitious speakers (dolls placed in various situations of knowledge). Results enable us to infer levels of understanding, to locate the main difficulties in the processing of each statement, and to bring out recurrent confusions between the expressions. These results are interpreted as the expression of the processes contributing to the elaboration of ‘modalization’ in the child.
Is the English present progressive unique
Authors: Mapstone E. R. , Harris Paul L. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe ‘problem of the error-free progressive’ (Brown 5973) was reexamined. It was hypothesized that young children make errors with the progressive as part of a developmental process. An experiment designed to elicit present-tense verbs is described, using 36 pictures, illustrating 9 process and g stative verbs. Twenty-two children (4; 2 to 6; 6) were tested: all responded mainly in the present tense, and 10 out of 22 produced over-generalizations of the progressive to stative verbs. It is argued that resistance to the progressive is based on a semantic distinction that is modified subsequently in accordance with adult use.