Showing papers in "Journal of Child Language in 1987"

The eyes have it: lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm.

Abstract: A new method to assess language comprehension in infants and young children is introduced in three experiments which test separately for the comprehension of nouns, verbs, and word order. This method requires a minimum of motor movement, no speech production, and relies on the differential visual fixation of two simultaneously presented video events accompanied by a single linguistic stimulus. The linguistic stimulus matches only one of the video events. In all three experiments patterns of visual fixation favour the screen which matches the linguistic stimulus. This new method may provide insight into the child's emerging linguistic capabilities and help resolve longstanding controversies concerning language production versus language comprehension.

Type/Token Ratios: what do they really tell us?

Abstract: Type/Token Ratios have been extensively used in child language research as an index of lexical diversity. This paper shows that the measure has frequently failed to discriminate between children at widely different stages of language development, and that the ratio may in fact fall as children get older. It is suggested here that such effects are caused by a negative, though non-linear, relationship between sample size (i.e. number of tokens) and Type/Token Ratio. Effects of open and closed class items are considered and an alternative Verbal Diversity measure is examined. Standardization of the number of tokens before computing Type/Token Ratios is recommended.

Turn taking affects the quality of infant vocalizations.

Abstract: Two groups of 20 infants aged 0; 3 experienced either conversational turn taking or random responsiveness of an adult. All infant vocalizations were counted and then each was categorized as a speech-like (syllabic) sound or a nonspeech-like (vocalic) sound. The results of this experiment indicated that turn taking caused changes in the quality of infant vocal sounds. When the adult maintained a give-and-take pattern, the infant produced a higher ratio of syllabic/vocalic sounds. The effect of turn taking on infant vocalizations was discussed in terms of its possible adaptive value for adult responsiveness.

Linguistic factors in children's understanding of idioms.

Abstract: This study examined the effect of two linguistic factors on children's understanding of idioms. Kindergarten, first, third and fourth graders listened to idiomatic expressions either alone or at the end of short story contexts. Their task was to explain verbally the intended meanings of these idioms and then to choose the correct idiomatic interpretations of these phrases. The results showed that in the presence of supporting context younger children (kindergarten and first graders) understood idioms that were syntactically frozen (e.g. turn back the clock) better than they did idioms which can be seen in a variety of syntactic forms (e.g. lay down the law). Older children (third and fourth graders) comprehended both kinds of idiom equally well. Moreover, with context, children at all grade levels were better at explaining the figurative meanings of idioms whose literal and idiomatic interpretations were closely related (e.g. hold your tongues) than they were at explaining idioms whose literal and figurative meanings were not closely related (e.g. beat around the bush). Without context there were few significant differences noted in children's understanding of the different kinds of idiom. The significance of these findings for developmental models of idiom comprehension is discussed.

The range of narrative forms conversationally produced by young children.

Abstract: The productive narrative competence of three young children as revealed in their spontaneously occurring conversations recorded over an 18-month period during their kindergarten and grade one years was investigated. Almost 90 hours of the children's conversations, produced as they were being driven to and from school, were audiotaped and analysed in order to determine whether children between the ages of five and seven include narrative accounts in their conversations with each other and, if so, the nature of the narrative language produced. The subjects were found routinely and regularly to produce a striking variety of narrative forms; 14 different narrative types were distinguished and defined, six of which have not previously been reported in the literature on children's narratives. Seventy per cent of the recorded narratives took anecdotal form; original fantasy narratives occurred only rarely. A significant proportion of the narratives were collaboratively created.

Learning to use prepositions: a case study.

Abstract: The current study documented one child's earliest use of prepositions during her second year of life. The spatial oppositions up-down, on-off, in—out and over—under were first to be learned. These words were all used initially in non-prepositional senses (mostly as holophrastic, verb-like requests for activities) prior to prepositional usage. They were seldom omitted or misused. The prepositions with, by, to, for, at and of were learned later. Four of these were used to express at least two distinct case relationships, and some case relationships (instrumental and dative) were indicated by more than one of these words. These later learned prepositions were not used by adults or learned by the child as holophrases, but rather they were acquired as distinct lexical items by means of analytic learning strategies that employed some form of ‘extraction’ from adult phrases. These words were omitted and misused much more often than the spatial oppositions. Differences in the acquisition pattern of these two groups of prepositions were attributed to linguistic rather than to cognitive factors.

Prosody and the development of comprehension

Abstract: Four studies are reported in which young children's response time to detect word targets was measured. Children under about six years of age did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show. When semantic focus of the target word was manipulated independently of accent, children of about five years of age showed an adult-like response time advantage for focussed targets, but children younger than five did not. It is argued that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an expression of sentence focus. Processing advantages for accented words depend on the prior development of representations of sentence semantic structure, including the concept of focus. The previous literature on the development of prosodic competence shows an apparent anomaly in that young children's productive skills appear to outstrip their receptive skills; however, this anomaly disappears if very young children's prosody is assumed to be produced without an underlying representation of the relationship between prosody and semantics.

Parents' speech to toddlers: the effect of play context *

Abstract: The language of mothers and fathers to their toddler sons and daughters at play with three different types of toy was analysed for both sentence types and structural elements. Two of the play contexts, dolls and vehicles, were highly sex-role stereotyped, and the third, shape sorters, was neutral. Few differences in speech were found as a function of either parent or child gender. Each of the three play contexts, however, elicited its own language pattern. With dolls, parental speech was characterized by a relatively large amount of language and a frequent use of questions and nouns, especially by contrast with vehicle play, which involved little language. Play with shape sorters elicited a high proportion of directives and attentionals and a relatively low variety in language. These results suggest that children who play frequently with dolls may receive more opportunities to learn and practise language than do children who select other toys for play. In this way early toy preferences may contribute to differential socialization by parents.

Types of linguistic knowledge: interpreting and producing compound nouns*

Abstract: The present study examined the types of linguistic knowledge that affect children's ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew. Sixty children aged 3;0–9;0, and 12 adults, were asked to interpret and to produce novel Noun + Noun compounds. Their comprehension was in advance of their production. In comprehension, morphological form of head nouns had little effect: from age four, children did equally well on all the compound forms tested; they identified head nouns and also possible relations between heads and their modifiers. In production, though, knowledge of morphological form was crucial. The fewer the changes children had to make in the forms of head nouns, the earlier they mastered that compound pattern. Finally, children who produced novel compounds correctly were also able to interpret novel compounds, but not vice versa.

Age-relation, reliability and grammatical validity of measures of utterance length

Abstract: This study evaluated the age-relationship, intra-sample reliability and grammatical validity of MLU-like measures of utterance length in the free speech of 21 normally developing children aged 1;8 to 2;8 with MLU between 1·05 and 3·06. Contrary to a previous study by Klee & Fitzgerald (1985). it was found that measures of utterance length hold a good relation with age, are reliable and predict grammatical development well in the age and MLU range considered. It is argued that there are identifiable points in the developmental evolution of MLU and MLU-like indices beyond which their reliability and validity have serious problems. Below these points, they constitute sound measures of syntactic development.

Phonological development of two-year-old monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children.

Abstract: Phonetic and phonological analyses were performed on spontaneous speech samples of six 2–year–old monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-learning children. The analyses showed a number of patterns of sound usage similar to those found in English-learning children of the same age, as well as children from other linguistic backgrounds. These findings add support to the claim that certain universal patterns exist in phonological development. However, a number of patterns were also observed which seemed to be accounted for by the target language being acquired. Similarities and differences among the individual children are also discussed.

Communicative Functions of Pitch Range and Pitch Direction in Infants.

Abstract: The communicative functions of pitch direction and pitch range during the second year were investigated. The research focusses on initial plus repeated requests, either for objects or for co-operation, which were contrasted against giving, showing and labelling. Infants aged 1; 2 to 1;10 were observed in interaction with their mothers in a semistructured situation. Vocalizations were coded separately for communicative function and for prosodic features. Results show that pitch range is consistently higher (1) for repeated requests than for initial requests for objects and (2) for initial requests for objects and for co-operation than for labelling. Giving and showing have an intermediate rank between requests and labelling. Trends in prosodic contours were observed in both requests and labelling: rising tones were more frequently associated with requests whereas falling tones appeared more often in conjunction with labelling.

Writing in four- to six-year-olds: representation of semantic and phonetic similarities and differences.

Abstract: When asked to write an utterance, nursery children and kindergartners often produce strings of unrelated characters. We analysed whether these invented writings reflect similarities and differences in the phonetic and semantic aspects of the utterance. One hundred and twenty Israeli children were asked to write pairs of nouns that share a syllable (e.g. pe ‘mouth’ and perach ‘flower’) and series of sentences that share either mainly nouns or mainly verbs. The older the children, the more their invented writing reflected common linguistic elements and length of utterance. Similarities and differences on the word level were represented at a younger age than those on the syllabic level. Nouns were represented in children's written productions earlier than verbs and adverbs. Invented writing was interpreted as a linguistic act, drawing on the semantic, syntactic and phonological levels of language.

Early words of blind children

Abstract: The first 50 words of three blind children were collected and analysed using procedures used by Nelson (1973) on 18 sighted children. The early vocabulary of the blind children paralleled that of the sighted children in the age and speed of acquisition, and in the underlying characteristics of what the children chose to label. These reflect a sensorimotor organization in which self-action and perceptual change are the salient variables. The early words of the blind children differed from those of sighted children in the percentage of words in each of Nelson's grammatical categories. This suggests differences in how the children use language. These differences are discussed as a function of the children's lack of vision and their particular language learning context.

The contrastive hypothesis for the acquisition of word meaning: a reconsideration of the theory.

Abstract: The evidence for the Contrastive Hypothesis (Clark 1980, 1983a, b, 1987, Barrett 1978, 1982) is reviewed. An examination of data from the acquisition of object words, relational words and superordinate terms reveals little support for this hypothesis that young children automatically assume that every two words in their lexicons contrast. Further, theoretical problems with the positions that children assign words to semantic fields as they are acquiring them and that innovations are used to fill lexical gaps make these stances untenable.

Intonation with single words: purposive and grammatical use.

Abstract: The study examined the transition to purposive use of intonation with single words for two children. Contrary to Bloom's (1973) claim of no systematic use of intonation in the one-word period, purposive use of rising tones was demonstrated in the context of indicating interest and naming objects. One child, by 1;3, clearly used rising tones to ask ‘legitimate’ questions in which the content of the replies mattered. If an informative response was not given he repeated his question accentuating the rising tone. The other child also sought informative replies, although this could only be established at 1;6. In addition, by 1;5 both children demonstrated widespread grammatical use of intonation in which a word was combined with distinct intonations to indicate a meaning distinction equivalent to one made by the grammar of the language. There were, however, earlier developments that presaged the way, so that the transition to grammatical use of intonation was gradual.

Performance factors in subject-auxiliary inversion by children.

Abstract: Children's reported copying-without-deletion errors, like ‘ Whose is that is? ’, have often been interpreted as the result of a non-adult rule of subject–aux inversion. By contrast, this study presents a performance account of these errors and supports this account by investigating what factors impede children's performance. Using an elicitation task, 16 test sentences were evoked from 16 3- to 5-year-old children. In particular, errors appeared (1) when the subject NP contained a relative clause, (2) when the relative clause had an object gap, and (3) when the relative clause was long. Since errors occurred in response to some sentence types and not others, and the children who made copying-without-deletion errors produced at least four correct responses, these results were interpreted as support for the performance account.

The connective ‘and’: do older children use it less as they learn other connectives?*

Abstract: The connective and has frequently been described as a useful allpurpose connective that is used as a vehicle for introducing new inter-sentential semantic relationships. As new and more specific connectives are acquired, they are matched to these meanings. An assumption is that as children get older, and should be used less to express the various meanings for which more specific connectives exist; rather, it should be increasingly reserved for simple co-ordination. This hypothesis was tested by examining narratives produced by children between 4 and 9 years old; contrary to expectation, and was used no differently by 9-year-olds than by 4-year-olds, and simple co-ordination constituted no more than 20% of the relationships. The role of and may be to indicate cohesion between sentences, without regard to semantic relationship.

Acquisition strategies in a first and second language: are they the same.

Abstract: Will adults whose native language is English and children whose native language is Spanish follow the same strategies in acquiring the category of noun gender and its functions in Spanish? This investigation shows that there are significant differences in first- and second-language acquisition. Performance on five tasks eliciting responses containing gender agreement was measured for two groups. Results suggest that there is a developmental progression in acquisition of noun gender for both groups. Nevertheless, on tasks containing grammatical and/or semantic conflict, even the linguistically least-experienced adults reflected correct, adult-like strategies for Spanish gender agreement, whereas only the oldest children performed in this manner.

Attempted sounds are sometimes not: an expanded view of phonological selection and avoidance.

Abstract: Young children readily acquire new words with consonants and syllable structures already used accurately (IN words). They have more difficulty acquiring new words with consonants or syllable structures never before produced or attempted (OUT words). In the present study, we examined children's acquisition of a third type of word, containing consonants the children had attempted in the past but never produced accurately (ATTEMPTED words). IN, OUT and ATTEMPTED words and their object referents were presented to 11 young children in a series of play sessions. The children's production and comprehension of the words were then assessed. No comprehension differences among the three types of words were observed. However, ATTEMPTED words as well as OUT words were less likely to be acquired in production than IN words. Some revisions in models of child phonology are proposed to accommodate these findings.

The acquisition of temporal terms.

Abstract: An experiment is described which investigates preschool children's understanding of temporal terms. Children aged 2;11 to 4;5 were required to act out situations described by sentences containing before and after. One set of sentences used both a simplified task and simplified materials. These sentences were simple commands, and they only required the children to act out the situation described by the main clause in order to demonstrate comprehension. Performance with these sentences was superior to performance with sentences like those of Clark (1971) and Grain (1982). In addition, children only used an order-of-mention strategy with the Clark sentences. With both the Clark and the Grain sentences, there were more omissions of the subordinate clause in before sentences than in after sentences. There was also a tendency, with these two types of sentence, for children to act out only the first clause in before sentences.

Child characteristics and maternal speech.

Abstract: Infant temperament characteristics of activity level, task persistence and affect were measured in an eight-month longitudinal study of eight children. Discourse and pragmatic features of their mothers' speech, specifically total number of utterances and use of self-repetitions, directives and attention-getting devices, were also monitored. Pearson correlation analysis suggested complex interactions between maternal speech and infant temperament. In some cases a maternal speech pattern appears to maintain an infant temperament characteristic. In others, a child characteristic appears to maintain a maternal speech form. The results are used to argue that non-linguistic child behaviours may influence maternal speech and deserve further attention in investigations of the link between maternal speech and child-language development.

A Japanese child's use of stative and punctual verbs.

Abstract: This study investigated the use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language between the ages of 1;0 and 4;11 in an attempt to find evidence for two of Bickerton's (1981) proposed language acquisition universals, which form part of the language bioprogram hypothesis of language acquisition. As predicted by Bickerton's state-process hypothesis, it was found that all sampled present progressive verb forms occurred with process verbs while these forms were never used with stative verbs. Also, with only one exception, all omissions of present progressive forms occurred with the early use of ‘mixed’ verbs, i.e. verbs which behave syntactically as process verbs in Japanese but are nonetheless semantically stative. However, contrasting with Bickerton's hypothesis that children initially use the past tense to mark punctuality, no relationship between past tense use and punctuality was found.

Individual variation and its relevance to a theory of phonological acquisition.

Abstract: Stoel-Gammon & Cooper (1984) have recently presented phonological analyses in this journal of three children acquiring English. Their general conclusion is that the three children are each following their own unique pattern of acquisition. This paper is a response to that conclusion. We first point out that such research needs to distinguish different possible causes of variation. We then go on to criticize the method of analysis they used, arguing that it disposes the results towards individual variation. Next, we present an alternative analysis, using a different methodology, and show that the children's patterns of acquisition are actually relatively similar. Lastly, we conclude that both their and our results provide evidence for early phonological processing in opposition to the biological model presented in Locke (1983).

Sound-meaning correspondences in babbling

Abstract: The hypothesis that prelinguistic vocalizations contain extensive and systematic sound-meaning correspondences was examined through an exhaustive analysis of the babbling of five infants in their second year. These infants were videotaped over a period of three to six months at home and at a day-care centre. Their babbled utterances were transcribed phonetically and categorized according to consonant-type and vowel-type. Contexts for each utterance were also categorized, primarily according to the infant's simultaneous action. A quantitative analysis of co-occurrences between phonetic and contextual categories determined that across infants between 14 and 40% of utterances recurred in particular contexts with a greater than expected frequency. These findings support Halliday's (1975 a ) notion that babbling is not entirely random but contains consistent sound-meaning relations that are not adult-modelled. They also extend the notions of continuity between prelinguistic and linguistic stages of development to the semantic domain.

The influence of dialectal variation on phonological acquisition: a case study on the acquisition of Cantonese.

Abstract: The phonological acquisition of a young girl whose parents spoke two dialects of Cantonese was examined. The father's dialect had a phonological distinction between initial /l/ and /n/ which was merged into /l/ in the mother's dialect. The child was followed bi-weekly for approximately one year. The results indicate that she acquired neither the mother's nor the father's dialect. Instead, she acquired [l] and [n] as freely varying allophones of a single phoneme. In the first months, [n] was the most frequent realization of the phoneme, with [l] becoming the most frequent one in later sessions. The results are interpreted as supporting the claim that children use all available input in acquiring language rather than limiting themselves to a primary language model.

Sentence comprehension in Hungarian-Russian bilingual and monolingual preschool children.

Abstract: This paper's authors examine the interpretation of transitive sentences with varying word orders /SVO, OVS, SOV, OSV/. The subjects were Hungarian-Russian bilingual preschool children and their Hungarian and Russian monolingual peers. Bever's ‘first noun as agent’ strategy – as indicated by OVS and OSV errors – appears to be weaker in the bilinguals. An explanation for this is proposed in terms of Slobin's ‘attention to the end of words’ factor. The mistaken identification of sentence-initial objects as agents depends on case marking allomorphy. Bilinguals, in general, appear to pay more attention to allomorphy and thus make fewer interpretation errors than their monolingual peers.