bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A morphemic measure of early language development: data from modern Hebrew
Authors: Dromi Esther , Berman Ruth A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTGiven the nature of Hebrew as a highly synthetic language with rich bound morphology, an attempt was made to establish a measure corresponding to the MLU for a language such as English. The method of calculating MPU (morpheme-per-utterance) which is described here was tried out on 38 Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;0 to 3;0, and measured for internal consistency against different types of elicitation procedures, and for validity by comparison with the subjects' performance on a specially-devised measure of syntactic–semantic development. The results clearly indicate that the MPU is a useful developmental index of the linguistic proficiency of two- to three-year-old Hebrew speakers. Implications of this finding for intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic evaluation are then discussed.
The pragmatics of subordinating conjunctions: a second look
Authors: Scholnick Ellin Kofsky , Wing Clara S. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTSome subordinating conjunctions reveal whether speakers believe the propositions the conjunctions connect and how speakers believe propositions are connected. Because and although express belief; if + indicative and unless uncertainty, and if + subjunctive, disbelief. Because, if + indicative and if + subjunctive express a positive entailment relation between clauses while although and unless express negative entailment. To validate this analysis a comprehension task was administered to 96 subjects divided among 9-, 11- and 19-year-olds. Nine-year-olds understood although and because while adults also comprehended unless and if + indicative. Generally the more positive beliefs the conjunction embodied, the easier its comprehension. The order of difficulty was because, although, if + indicative, unless, and if + subjunctive. Older subjects more often confused if + subjunctive with if + indicative. Understanding of the uncertainty conveyed by if + indicative and unless was linked to performance on a task of detecting uncertain outcomes.
Talking backward: exceptional speech play in late childhood
Authors: Cowan Nelson , Leavitt Lewis A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe game of ‘talking backward’, invented independently by two boys aged 8; 10 and 9; 11, is studied with reference to the role of speech play in linguistic, cognitive, and social development. Case reports from 27 adult backward talkers suggest a lower limit of about 7 years for the onset of this ability. The backward speech of the two children illustrates how either phonology or orthography can be used as a basis for backward speech, and demonstrates the boys' knowledge of phonemic units and letter-to-sound correspondences. Talking backward belongs to a larger class of ‘secret’ language games that may be cognitively and pragmatically well suited to children of this age.
Adapting syntax in writing to varying audiences as a function of age and social cognitive ability
Authors: Rubin Donald L. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTFourth-, eighth-, twelfth-graders and expert adults each wrote persuasive messages to three audiences arrayed along a dimension of intimacy to writer. Measures of social cognitive ability were also obtained. Scripts were analysed for (1) fluency, (2) subordination, (3) clause length, (4) logical adverbial clauses, and (5) conjunctions of conclusion. In addition to general developmental trends, results indicated effects of audience adaptation and of mediation of social cognitive ability. Findings support the view that evidence of later language development must be interpreted in light of communicative demands of tasks and subjects' rhetorical skills.
Style and stability in mother conversational behaviour: a study of individual differences
Authors: Olsen-Fulero Lynda 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis paper explores differences in conversational style among mothers. Although previous research suggests that many aspects of mother speech to the child covary in a way which serves the underlying intention of the mother, it was unclear whether such clusters of conversational behaviour would prove useful in characterizing stylistic differences among mothers across time. An analysis of the functionally-coded speech of 11 mothers showed statistically significant variability among mothers, especially in those behaviours most closely associated with intention. Further, mothers showed stability in these behaviour patterns across two sessions. A typology of mother style, based on the intentions of mothers to direct or converse with their children, is suggested and illustrated by individual cases.
The speech of two- and three-year-olds to infant siblings: ‘baby talk’ and the context of communication
Authors: Dunn Judy , Kendrick Carol 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAdjustments in speech made by 2- and 3-year-old children when talking to their 14-month-old siblings are described and compared with those made by mothers addressing their babies. ‘Clarification’ adjustments were made by all the children, but there were marked individual differences in the frequency of questions and ‘affective-expressive’ features – differences related to the quality of the relationship between the siblings. The pattern of speech adjustments reflected the social contexts in which the children addressed their siblings; within these contexts (prohibitory and playful) children as young as 2 make appropriate use of communicative devices. The individual differences between the children indicate two sources of influence on the adjustments made – pragmatic and emotional.
Experimental evidence for agent–patient categories in child language
Authors: Angiolillo Carl J. , Goldin-Meadow Susan 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTEvidence provided by contrastive word order for agent and patient semantic categories in young children's spontaneous speech is confounded. Agents (effectors of the action) tend to be animate; patients (entities acted upon) tend to be inanimate. In an experiment designed to circumvent this confounding and to test young children's linguistic sensitivity to the role an entity plays in the action, nine children (2; 4·0–2; 11·5) described actions involving animate and inanimate entities playing both agent and patient roles. Four linguistic measures were observed. On every measure agents were treated differently from patients. For the most part, these agent–patient differences persisted when animate and inanimate entities were examined separately. These results provide evidence for the child's intention to talk about the role an entity plays, independent of its animateness, and also suggest that the child uses role-defined linguistic categories like AGENT and PATIENT to communicate these relational intentions.
Up front: the acquisition of a concept and a word
Authors: Levine Susan Cohen , Carey Susan 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThirty-six 2- to 3-year-old children were given linguistic and non-linguistic tasks in order to determine whether the words front and back introduce the concept of ‘front–back’ orientation or whether the concept precedes the words. Contrary to prediction, a complex disjunctive concept of ‘front–back’ orientation was found to precede any knowledge of the words front and back. Results of the linguistic task show that the word back is comprehended before front, and further that children at an intermediate state of lexical knowledge interpret front as if it means back.
Acquisition of epistemic and deontic meaning of modals
Authors: Hirst William , Weil Joyce 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTModal auxiliaries have an epistemic and deontic sense and range in strength, e.g. must propositions are stronger than may propositions. Children (ages 3; 0–6; 6) heard two contradictory modal propositions of varying strength. In the epistemic condition, the propositions concerned the location of a peanut. In the deontic condition, they were commands by two teachers about what room a puppet should go to. The child was to indicate which command should be followed. The general acquisitional rule was: the greater the difference in the strength of the two modal propositions the earlier the difference was appreciated. Since the acquisitional history was similar across conditions, the two senses probably arose from a single lexical entry.
Mothers' speech to prelingual infants: a pragmatic analysis
Authors: Penman Robyn , Cross Toni , Milgrom-Friedman Jeannette , Meares Russell 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTFunctional and referential changes in maternal speech were investigated in a developmental study of nineteen mother–infant dyads, using video recordings of their free play at three and six months. The role of the infant in influencing speech adjustments was investigated by analysing the relationships between different types of maternal speech and different infant behavioural modes. Three general modes were differentiated – Communicative, Praxic and Other – and, regardless of infant age, mothers were found to make some modifications to their speech style as a function of infant mode. Speech style also was found to change, at a pragmatic level, from three to six months. Both findings support the conclusion that maternal speech is influenced by non-linguistic behavioural ‘feedback’ from infants. However, a finding that affect-oriented speech is more sensitive to infant behaviour than informative speech supports Brown's (1977) contention that the maternal speech register is shaped by two relatively independent interpersonal functions – the affective and communicative components. It is argued that a fuller account of maternal conversational adjustments to prelingual infants requires both a dialogic and a monologic explanation.
The relationship of pragmatic dimensions of mothers' speech to the referential-expressive distinction
Authors: Corte Maria Della , Benedict Helen , Klein Diane 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTA 50-utterance corpus for each of sixteen mothers during caretaking situations (diapering, dressing, bathing) was extracted from in-home tape recordings obtained over a three-day period. The children ranged from 1; 3.15 to 1; 7 and were classified according to Nelson's referential-expressive distinction. A coding scheme consisting of three categories – communicative intent, focus of attention and evaluation – was employed to characterize the mothers' speech. Mothers of referential children produced a greater number of utterances per caretaking incident, more description and less prescriptives than did mothers of expressive children. The findings suggest that Nelson's referential-expressive distinction in child's speech is related to differences in mothers' pragmatic speech characteristics.
Children's judgements of the functional acceptability of referential communications in discourse contexts
Authors: Ackerman Brian P. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study determined whether young children are sensitive to the contextual influence of previous discourse on judgements of the adequacy of referential communications. Four- and six-year-old children were read short stories containing terminal referential communications that were either ambiguous or informative relative to a perceptual display of candidate-referential objects. Contextual information was given in the story prior to the terminal communication that was irrelevant to the ambiguous communications or that made these communications functionally informative. The subjects were required to say whether the listener in the story could identify one unique referent. The results showed that the judgements of both groups of children were sensitive to the discourse context of the communications. The children discriminated between the functionally informative and ambiguous communications.
Comprehending surface and deep structure subjects: children's understanding of implied vs. explicitly stated nouns
Authors: White Hedy 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTPrevious research indicates young children are likely to interpret the surface-structure subject of a sentence as the deep subject regardless of syntax, e.g. John is chosen as subject of both John is easy to please and John is eager to please. However, with one-noun sentences, the task required both recognizing a difference between the sentences and inferring an implied noun. Thus an inability to make an inference might be responsible for the children's consistency in choosing the surface subject. Two experiments compared kindergarteners' interpretations of one- and two-noun sentences. With two-noun sentences (i.e. John is easy for Jim to please), which explicitly stated the surface object, consistency in choosing the surface subject decreased.
Child responsiveness to mother questions of varying type and presentation
Authors: Olsen-Fulero Lynda , Conforti Jill 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTAlthough questions vary considerably with respect to the responses appropriate to them and the motivations intrinsic to them, little attention has yet been given to the potential effects of these factors on the power of questions to perform turn-allocating and response-eliciting functions. The present study attempts to clarify how such variables as motivation, constraint, difficulty and function may affect the child's responsiveness to mother questions. Results suggest that functionally defined question types are differentiable not only by their relative power to elicit a response from the child, but also by the manner in which they are presented. Implications of these results in the context of mother–child conversation and its effects are considered.
Linguistic experience modifies lexical stress perception
Authors: Allen George D. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTSensitivity to differences in lexical stress pattern was examined in 4- and 5-year-old monolingual French-, German- and Swedish-speaking children. For most stimulus discriminations, the 5-year-olds outperformed their 4-year-old comparison groups. For a discrimination involving a trisyllabic distinction not found in French, however, the French 5-year-olds performed worse than their 4-year-old compatriots, suggesting that the older children had ‘learned’ not to hear the trisyllabic distinction. In follow-up testing of the French 4-year-olds six months later, half of them showed a similar decrease in performance specific to the trisyllabic stimuli. These data support an ‘attunement’ theory of language acquisition, in which potentially relevant abilities that are already partially or fully developed at birth may become attenuated or completely lost if they are inappropriate or irrelevant for the child's language.
Turn the page please: situation-specific language acquisition
Authors: Snow Catherine E. , Goldfield Beverly A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe present paper investigates a strategy for language acquisition adopted by one child, and the usefulness of book-reading in supporting that strategy. Conversations between this child and his mother around picture-book reading were recorded and recurrent discussions of the same picture were analysed. A coding scheme was devised which identified each speaker's contribution to the exchange of information about a particular picture. By examining recurrent picture discussions, it was possible to trace the child's acquisition of the linguistic means for talking about a given picture. It was found that specific lexical items and constructions used to talk about a picture frequently recurred in subsequent discussions, and that the child learned many of these same items and constructions. Furthermore, he was most likely to acquire what he had heard his mother say about a picture if he had repeated it in an earlier discussion. The usefulness of routines for such situation-specific learning and the implications of the situation-specific approach for future investigations of input language are discussed.
Mothers' use of superordinate category terms
Authors: Shipley Elizabeth F. , Kuhn Ivy F. , Madden E. Colby 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTMothers' speech in an identification task was examined for ten mother–child pairs in which the child's age varied from 1; 9 to 4; 9. Stimuli were used from three domains, animals, clothes and furniture. These varied in familiarity, centrality (goodness of exemplar) and number of items. Basic-level category terms were found to be the most frequently used labels. Superordinate category terms were elicited by (a) an unfamiliar animal and (b) groups of items from the same domain. Information on category relations was provided in several ways: alternative labels, multiple labels and explicit statements of inclusion. Competencies required to learn the correct referent for category terms and differences among superordinate categories are discussed.
Imitations, interactions, and language acquisition
Authors: Stine Elizabeth Lotz , Bohannon John Neil 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe precise function of imitation in children's speech is still debated. Two hypotheses have been offered that focus on either the progressive nature of imitation to aid in the language acquisition process or the social, conversational role played by imitation in discourse. Support for these positions was sought in the imitations within the speech of a single child at ages 2; 8 and 3; 0. Evidence is presented for both roles of imitation in language acquisition. First, imitation aids in limiting the complexity (MLU) of the language environment. The effects of imitation in this role are compared and contrasted to the effects of the child's productions of what? Also, forms may appear in imitation prior to their appearance in spontaneous speech. A model is proposed in which imitation and what?-responses are overlapping phases of language acquisition which occur prior to spontaneous production of a given form.
Evaluating presuppositions and propositions
Authors: Scholnick Ellin K. , Wing Clara S. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTSome conjunctions simultaneously convey speakers' presuppositions about the validity of propositions uttered and assertions of particular interclausal relations. Because conveys belief, if + indicative, uncertainty and if + subjunctive, disbelief. While all three conjuctions assert positive entailment, unless, which like if + indicative presupposes uncertainty, asserts negative entailment or denial. The relationship between pragmatic knowledge and reasoning was explored by asking 12 males and 12 females at each of three ages (12, 15, adult) to solve written syllogisms containing the four conjunctions and evaluate single sentences for their pragmatic content. In the pragmatic task, belief was easier to detect than uncertainty or disbelief. Positive entailment was easier than negative entailment. Only entailment influenced syllogistic reasoning with unless harder than the positively entailed conjunctions. At each age linguistic comprehension of negative entailment was related to understanding valid implications in unless syllogisms. The relation between comprehension of pragmatic uncertainty and detection of uncertain conclusions in reasoning increased with age.
Discernible differences in the babbling of infants according to target language
Authors: Boysson-Bardies Bénédicte De , Sagart Laurent , Durand Catherine 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTSamples of babbling productions of 6-, 8- and 10-month-old infants from different language backgrounds were presented to adult judges whose task was to identify the infants from their own linguistic community. The results show that certain language-specific metaphonological cues render this identification possible when the samples exhibit long and coherent intonation patterns. The segmental indications that are present in the fully syllabic productions of canonical babbling do not allow the judges to identify the infants correctly from their own linguistic community. These results seem to support the hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of the metaphonological characteristics of the target language.
Brown & Hanlon revisited: mothers' sensitivity to ungrammatical forms
Authors: Hirsh-Pasek Kathy , Treiman Rebecca , Schneiderman Maita 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTBrown & Hanlon (1970) reported that parents' explicit approval or disapproval of their child's utterances was not contingent on the well-formedness of that utterance. Rather, parents seemed attuned to the semantic value of their child's speech. Using 40 mother–child dyads, 10 from each of four age groups, 2–5 years, we replicated these results. We expanded upon this earlier work, however, to suggest that parents are not totally indifferent to the grammatical form of their child's utterances. Focusing on repetitions, we found that mothers are more inclined to repeat ungrammatical than grammatical sentences generated by 2- year-old subjects. This indicates that the language learning environment does present subtle cues that distinguish between well-formed and ill-formed sentences. Whether the child is capable of capitalizing on these cues remains unanswered.
Children's capacity to correct grammatical violations in sentences
Authors: Pratt Chris , Tunmer William E. , Bowey Judith A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTPrevious studies of children's knowledge of grammatical well-formedness have typically involved eliciting acceptability judgements from children. In the present study, children were expected to employ their tacit knowledge of the rules of grammar to correct sentences containing grammatical rule violations. Two groups of children (mean ages of 5;5 and 6;4) were presented with ungrammatical sentences resulting from either word-order changes or morpheme deletions. The results indicated that both groups of children performed well when presented with ungrammatical sentences containing morpheme deletions; but the performance of both groups was lower for the word-order violations, with the difference between the two types being greater for the 5-year-olds. It is argued that these results reflect differences in the extent to which the two types of rule violations rendered the original sentences meaningless.
A developmental cross-linguistic study of adversative connectives: French ‘mais’ and German ‘aber/sondern’
Authors: Kail Michèle , Weissenborn Jürgen 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThis study concerns the acquisition of the meaning of adversative connectives in French and German children from 7; 8 to 9; 11. French mais has both a substitutive and a contrastive use which is expressed by two different connectives in German, i.e. sondern and aber. 36 French and 36 German children were tested in a completion and a judgement task. Two hypotheses are confirmed: (a) substitutive but is easier to process and hence is acquired earlier than contrastive but; (b) the interpretation of contrastive but-sentences depends on their inferential complexity relative to a given context. A third assumption about the facilitative effect of lexical differentiation in German was only partially supported by the data. This issue needs further investigation with more languages and younger children.
Expression of the part–whole semantic relation by 3- to 12-year-old children
Authors: Litowitz Bonnie E. , Novy Forrest A. 
Published: September 2008

ABSTRACTThe present study investigated the expression of the part–whole semantic relation by children 3 to 12 years of age. Controlling both task format (structured vs. open-ended) and dimensions associated with experimental stimuli (part-word vs. part-object; known whole vs. unknown whole), the verbal responses of two age groups of children were analysed. While results revealed the part–whole semantic relation expressible by even the youngest children, age-group comparisons indicated that the older children preferred its use significantly more often. The part–whole semantic relation was also observed to take several linguistic forms (partitive, spatial, possessive), the selection of which varied as a function of age, task format, and type of experimental stimuli. Findings are discussed relative to issues concerning research methodology, the elicitation and assessment of children's semantic knowledge, and cognitive developmental theory.