Showing papers in "Journal of Child Language in 1985"

The child language data exchange system.

Abstract: The study of language acquisition underwent a major revolution in the late 1950s as a result of the dissemination of technology permitting high-quality tape-recording of children in the family setting. This new technology led to major breakthroughs in the quality of both data and theory. The field is now at the threshold of a possible second major breakthrough stimulated by the dissemination of personal computing. Researchers are now able to transcribe tape-recorded data into computer files. With this new medium it is easy to conduct global searches for word combinations across collections of files. It is also possible to enter new codings of the basic text line. Because of the speed and accuracy with which computer files can be copied, it is now much easier to share data between researchers. To foster this sharing of computerized data, a group of child language researchers has established the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). This article details the formation of the CHILDES, the governance of the system, the nature of the database, the shape of the coding conventions, and the types of computer programs being developed.

Language differentiation by the bilingual infant.

Abstract: This 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.

Vocalizations of one-year-olds*

Abstract: Mother–infant interactions were recorded for five dyads in a home environment. This report describes the vocalizations produced when the infants were 13 months old. Data are reported on syllable structure, phonetic properties of vowel-like and consonant-like segments, intonation contours and peak f0 values for individual syllables. In general, the acoustic–phonetic properties of the 13-month-olds' vocalizations were consistent with data reported in other studies for younger and older children. Hence, the results are seen as evidence for an overall continuity in early phonetic development.

Some contributions of mothers' speech to their children's syntactic growth.

Abstract: This 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.

The Relation between Grammatical Development and Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes.

Abstract: A widely held practice in many studies of child language development and disorders has been to employ an easily calculated numerical metric, mean length of utterance measured in morphemes (MLU), as a ‘general index of grammatical development’. While this practice seems to have found acceptance among many students of child language, the usefulness of MLU past Stage II has been assumed but never empirically tested. This study evaluated the grammatical performance and MLU of 18 normally developing 2- and 3-year-old children and found that MLU did not correlate significantly with age (r = 0·26), nor did it discriminate children's profiles of grammatical development.

Towards a theory of definition.

Abstract: A 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.

Implicit contrast in adjectives vs. nouns: implications for word-learning in preschoolers

Abstract: On some views of language, when one uses a term to describe or label an object, a contrast is always implied. However, there is an important difference between nouns and adjectives in their contrastive use: adjectives imply a contrast between members of a single noun category, whereas nouns do not imply a contrast between members of a single adjective category. For example, describing a car as new suggests a contrast with other cars. However, labelling it as a car does not as clearly imply a contrast with other new objects. There is no logical necessity for this distinction – it is not captured by the literal meanings of words. Yet it is a conceptual distinction implicit in the use of these terms. In two studies, we tested preschool children's appreciation for this conceptual distinction, using both familiar and unfamiliar words. In Study I, 4-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) were able to disambiguate the meanings of simple nouns and adjectives by assuming that the adjectives, unlike the nouns, implied a contrast between category members. In Study II, children selected pictures to match totally novel adjectives and nouns (e.g. the fep one, the skub). Relying on part of speech alone, they interpreted these unfamiliar nouns and adjectives differently. Implications for children's use of referential language and word-learning strategies are discussed.

Colour-name versus shape-name learning in young children.

Abstract: Very 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.

Children's knowledge of the presuppositions of know and other cognitive verbs.

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

A naturalistic study of the production of causal connectives by children

Abstract: This 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.

How Does Comprehension of Passives Develop? A Comparison of Actional and Experiential Verbs.

Abstract: Experiment I required first, third, and sixth graders to identify the actor or experiencer from active and passive sentences with actional and three subclasses of experiential verbs. Actional passives were understood better than experientials, with no difference among the subcategories of experiential verbs, and no effect of verb frequency or regularity. Response distributions for each verb type did not show two populations of subjects – one knowing and the other not knowing the passive – but approximately unimodal distributions whose mean increased with age. Experiment II studied preschoolers. Again, the actional passives were systematically easier than the experientials, and again, for neither verb type did the response distributions show two distinct subject populations, one competent and the other incompetent. The forms of the distributions cannot be wholly accounted for by fluctuating attention to cues to passivization, but indicate that many children have partial knowledge of the passive (increasing with age). A hypothesis about the nature of this partial knowledge accounts for the gradual acquisition and the difference between the verb types.

How the young French child avoids the pre-voicing problem for word-initial voiced stops.

Abstract: Macken & Barton (1980) noted an asymmetry in their young Spanish-learning children's word-initial stop productions, as compared with English-learning children's, namely, ‘the Spanish-learning children acquire “lead” voicing…after age four’, whereas ‘English-learning children acquire “long lag” stops…by about 2;6’. ‘One possible explanation’, they propose, ‘is that lead voicing is inherently difficult to produce or at least more difficult to learn than long lag…’. The purpose of this Note is to present data suggesting that young children learning French, which also employs phonetically pre-voiced stops for its phonemically voiced category, also show an asymmetry in their word-initial stop productions. Furthermore, this asymmetry supports the notion, proposed by Macken & Barton, that lead voicing is somehow ‘more difficult’ for these young children to learn to produce. However, the actual ‘strategy’ used by the French-learning children to circumvent this presumed difficulty is different from that used by Macken & Barton's Spanish-learning children. This difference supports the notion that children have a certain degree of latitude in finding their way through the maze of psycholinguistic development (Kiparsky & Menn 1977).

‘He has too much hard questions’: the acquisition of the linguistic mass–count distinction in much and many

Abstract: Subjects aged 3;6–9;0 were asked to judge sentences in which much and many modified prototypical and non-prototypical mass and count nouns, and to correct those sentences judged to be deviant. The experimental results indicate that children do not approach the co-occurrence conditions of much and many with various nouns from a semantic point of view, but rather from a morphosyntactic or surface-distributional one. Children learn the proper form that the noun must take in these constructions before they learn the proper choice of quantifier. In addition, they reserve many for use with plural count nouns long before they learn that much is restricted in direct noun modification to use with singular mass nouns.

Intonation Comprehension in Ten-Year-Olds.

Abstract: The comprehension of nine intonational contrasts involving different intonation-groupings, different nucleus placements, and different tones, was examined in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults. Fewer ten-year-olds than adults answered correctly on almost all tasks. Initial hypotheses concerning the order of acquisition among the three systems (grouping, nucleus placement, and tone) were in general not confirmed. But the distinction between context-wide and context-limited tonal meanings was predictive of acquisition; and a similar distinction based on local meanings rather than on the intonation patterns themselves is likely to apply to groupings and nucleus placements.

Learning how to use verbs: lexical coding and the influence of the input*

Abstract: Samples of spontaneous speech from two young children and their mothers were analysed to examine how children learn some of the inflectional/syntactic possibilities for individual verbs. Multiple regression analyses were performed to establish predictors of the children's range of grammatical use of particular verbs. Maternal variety of use proved to be a highly significant predictor of the children's use of the same verbs, but maternal frequency was not a significant predictor of children's use. Step-wise regression analyses revealed that each child's own mother's use was a significantly better predictor of the child's use than that of the unacquainted mother. It is argued that the children were monitoring the grammatical patterns of use of individual verbs in the input they received. The extent of novel use of verbs by the child cannot be assessed from these data, and awaits further experimental investigation.

How do children describe spatial relationships

Abstract: H. 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.

Incomplete and Continuing: Theoretical Issues in the Acquisition of Tense and Aspect

Abstract: Weist et al. demonstrate quite elegantly the ecological invalidity of many of the early psycholinguistic experiments that attempted to neutralize the linguistic context while eliciting one or another linguistic form, such as in the study of verb tenseaspect inflection by Bronckart & Sinclair (1973). By neutralizing morphological priming, Bronckart & Sinclair proposed that the child would exhibit an unprejudiced selection of tense-aspect forms. However, such unbiased selection does not occur in the real world. Weist et al. clearly demonstrate that biasing the linguistic context aids children in using temporal deictic notions appropriately, as it does in real-life situations.

The emergence of present perfect verb forms: semantic influences on selective imitation.

Abstract: This 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.

Facilitation of early syntax through discourse structure.

Abstract: The 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.

The semantic focus of maternal speech: a comment on Ninio & Bruner (1978).

Abstract: Ninio & Bruner (1978) added an important dimension to the study of early lexical acquisition by drawing attention to the dialogue-like nature of the mother-child interactions where presumably much language-learning takes place. The authors pointed to the well-established findings that much of the child's early speech consists of names for people and objects (Leopold 1949, Werner & Kaplan 1963, Nelson 1973, Greenfield & Smith 1976). They went on to show that in one familiar type of parent–child interaction, joint picture-book reading, labels are used extensively by the adult and are inserted skilfully into a structured interactional sequence that has the texture of a dialogue (Ninio & Bruner 1978: 6). This dialogue, they suggested, ‘seems… to be a format well suited to the teaching of labelling’ (1978: 12). Subsequent research has also been interpreted as pointing to the teaching potential of joint picture-book reading (Wheeler 1983, Ninio 1983) and the opportunities it affords for situation-specific routines (Snow & Goldfield 1983).

Attentional priority of the agent in the acquisition of word reference.

Abstract: The role of agent priority in event perception in word acquisition was investigated using 24 infants at the one-word stage of language production. Nonsense words were presented in narrations referring to agent, recipient or stationary nonsense puppet-actors in filmed events. The nonsense stimuli along with a sense word referring to a sense puppet were presented in a habituation series. Word acquisition was measured by the extent of response recovery to an incorrect pairing of a nonsense word with a sense referent, and by the number of infants accurately choosing named puppets. Both measures were significantly greater for puppets in agent roles than for other puppets. A speech modification condition (exaggerated intonation with repetition) held attention longer but did not facilitate acquisition.

Acquiring case-marked pronouns in Hebrew: the interaction of linguistic factors.

Abstract: Children's production of case-marked pronouns in Hebrew was studied with respect to possessive marking, direct-object marking, and ‘on’- locative marking. In each of these three instances the preposition appears in a bound form with a suffixal pronominal. One hundred and five children between 2;0 and 5:5 were tested in a game-like procedure designed to elicit each of the three prepositions with 1st, 2nd and 3rd personal pronouns. Results indicate that general cross-linguistic principles are operating in the acquisition process, while language specific morphophonological complexity affects relative order of acquisition. A developmental sequence may be seen in the five response patterns identified.