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A construction based analysis of child directed speech
Abstract
The child directed speech of twelve English-speaking mothers was analyzed in terms of utterance-level constructions. First, the mothers’ utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh-questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers’ utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item-based phrases such as Are you …, I’ll …, It’s …, Let’s …, What did …. The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO form (most were questions, imperatives, copulas, and fragments); (ii) 51% of all maternal utterances began with one of 52 item-based phrases, mostly consisting of two words or morphemes (45% began with one of just 17 words); and (iii) children used many of these same item-based phrases, in some cases at a rate that correlated highly with their own mother’s frequency of use. We suggest that analyses of adult–child linguistic interaction should take into account not just general constructional categories, but also the item-based constructions that adults and children use and the frequency with which they use them.
... Baron (1990, s. 38) suggests that repetitions in speech to children who themselves are not yet using syntax simply serve as a means for keeping the conversation going. Cameron-Faulkner et al. (2003) takes a broader perspective pointing out that in language learning, as in all kinds of skill learning, repetition and repetition with variation is crucial. ...
... Children learn that they can fill the open slots with different words from the same category, a crucial step on the way to master the ability to combine words into sentences. Cameron-Faulkner et al. (2003) investigated the speech of mothers to their children at the age of 2 years in search for these constructions. All item-based constructions that were used four or more times by half or more of the mothers were called core frames. ...
... The approach for investigation of possible item-based constructions and frequent frames in the repetitions (research question 3) was chosen with the limitations of the material in mind. In Cameron-Faulkner et al. (2003) 24 hours of CDS were analysed (12 mothers, 2 hours per subject), totally comprising of approximately 16 800 utterances. In Mintz (2003) speech to six children containing a total of 103 191 utterances was investigated. ...
Repetitions in child-directed speech (CDS) have been shown to vary over time, and are suggested to affect first language acquisition. Correlations between verbal contents of repetitions in CDS and children's language development have been suggested. The verbal contents of repetitions in Swedish CDS have not yet been investigated. The aim of this study was to examine the verbal contents of repetitions in Swedish CDS during the child's first 2 years and possible changes in proportions of repetitions during the same time span. Verbal contents of repetitions in parents' speech in 10 parent-child dyads as the children were 3, 6, 9, 12 and 24 months old were investigated focusing on word classes, sentence types and whole-constituent change. The results were compared to the children's productive vocabularies at the age of 30 months. Possible occurrences of item-based constructions and frequent frames in the repetitions were also examined. The overall results revealed patterns concerning change in verbal contents in repetitions over time and correlations between verbal contents in repetitions and child language development. Two proposals were made: parents adjust the complexity of their speech to linguistic developmental stages of their children, and linguistic variation in the input increases as the child grows older. Keywords Child-directed speech, repetitions, first language acquisition, word classes, sentence types, item-based constructions Det verbala innehållet i repetitioner i svenskt barnriktat tal Stina Andersson Sammanfattning Repetitioner i barnriktat tal (BRT) har visat sig variera över tid, och har föreslagits påverka förstaspåksinlärning. Även ett samband mellan det verbala innehållet i repetitioner i BRT och barns språkutveckling har föreslagits. Det verbala innehållet i repetitioner i svenskt BRT har inte undersökts tidigare. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka det verbala innehållet i repetitioner i svenskt BRT under barnets två första år och möjliga förändringar gällande andelen repetitioner under samma tidsperiod. Det verbala innehållet i repetitioner i föräldrars tal hos tio förälder-barn-dyader då barnen var 3, 6, 9, 12 och 24 månader gamla undersöktes med fokus på ordklasser, satstyper och förändringar gällande konstituenter. Resultaten jämfördes med barnens produktiva ordförråd vid 30 månaders ålder. Även den möjliga förekomsten av typbaserade konstruktioner (item-based constructions) och frekventa ramar (frequent frames) undersöktes. De övergripande resultaten uppvisade mönster gällande förändringar inom det verbala innehållet i repetitioner över tid samt ett samband mellan det verbala innehållet i repetitioner och barns språkutveckling. Två antaganden gjordes: föräldrar justerar komplexiteten i sitt tal efter språkliga utvecklingsfaser hos sina barn, och den språkliga variationen i inputen ökar med barnets ålder. Nyckelord Barnriktat tal, repetitioner, förstaspråksinlärning, ordklasser, satstyper, item-based constructions
... Second, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding why caregiver speech might be scaffolded in this way, and test its predictions against an array of information theoretic patterns computed on child-directed speech. Our account, based on entropy-maximization, and anchoring originally proposed by (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003), clarifies issues in incremental learning from non-stationary input -the problem faced by language learners -and paves the way towards integrating the scaffolded organisation of children's early language environment into computational models of acquisition. ...
... Corpus studies have shown that speech to English-speaking children consists of "anchor points", highly repetitive, lexically-specific frames such as In X, What do X, Are you X, It's X, Let's X, Look X, I think X, If X (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003). Moreover, morphological markers such as -ing are also highly frequent units that are known to strongly differentiate between part-of-speech categories, such as between nouns and verbs (Willits et al., 2014). ...
... Moreover, morphological markers such as -ing are also highly frequent units that are known to strongly differentiate between part-of-speech categories, such as between nouns and verbs (Willits et al., 2014). Cameron-Faulkner et al. (2003) suggested anchor points are starting points from which children enter into the more complex and formal aspects of language acquisition. This view of acquisition opposes the central dogma of nativism which claims that the learner has available from birth knowledge about abstract syntactic categories, and that there is no need -in fact, that it is impossible -to construct such abstractions via experience alone (Chomsky, 2002). ...
Prior work has demonstrated that distributional dependencies between word or morpheme-like entities in artificial and naturalistic language can detect clusters of words which broadly conform to the categories of the adult language (Brent & Siskind, 2001; Mintz, 2002; Redington & Chater, 1998). In this work, we examine the hypothesis that the distributional statistics useful for the discovery of the noun category are more useful in speech to younger children compared to older children (approximately 1-3 vs. 3-6 years of age). First, using a novel method for quantifying the extent that nouns occur in mutually shared contexts, we demonstrate an advantage for speech to younger compared to older children. Second, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding why caregiver speech might be scaffolded in this way, and test its predictions against an array of information theoretic patterns computed on child-directed speech. Our account, based on entropy-maximization, and anchoring originally proposed by (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003), clarifies issues in incremental learning from non-stationary input-the problem faced by language learners-and paves the way towards integrating the scaffolded organisation of children's early language environment into computational models of acquisition.
... Research suggests that children experience a lower frequency of Why questions within their everyday environment and therefore exhibit a later acquisition of this question type, compared to some other wh-questions (e.g., Who, What, Where;Ervin-Tripp, 1970;Rowland et al., 2003;Tyack & Ingram, 1977). In contrast, researchers also suggest that children experience fewer Why questions because they acquire these questions later in development (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Valian & Casey, 2003). That is, parents often exhibit a tendency to use questions that their children appear to understand; therefore, refraining from asking Why questions until children use these questions themselves, which occurs later in development relative to other wh-questions. ...
... Furthermore, in response to Why questions, Malloy and colleagues found that 3-to 5-year-olds provided uninformative responses, while Andrews and colleagues found that 6-to 12-year-olds provided productive and detailed responses; therefore, the current age range was chosen to capture possible developmental changes in accuracy across these age groups. Given that children's experience with Why/How Come questions and linguistic development increases with age (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Edwards & Kirkpatrick, 1999;Rowland et al., 2003;Valian & Casey, 2003), it was expected that older children would be more accurate, across question type (Why, How Come), compared to younger children. Additionally, past research has grouped Why and How Come questions together in analyses, as there were no differences in the productivity of their responses (e.g., Andrews et al., 2016). ...
... Malloy and colleagues (2016) suggest that younger children often experience greater difficulties with Why questions, as they require an understanding of concepts (e.g., causation) for which young children are less familiar. Furthermore, past research has widely established that children's lack of experience may undermine their ability to accurately provide responses to later acquired wh-questions, including Why questions (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Rowland et al., 2003;Valian & Casey, 2003). Taken together, our findings, along with previous studies, indicate that improvement with age is possibly driven by older children's greater experience with Why and How Come questions. ...
Children’s developing understanding of language may influence their ability to accurately respond to questions inquiring about their event knowledge (i.e., Why and How Come questions), potentially creating misinterpretations in adult–child communication. The present study examined 120 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old’s accuracy in responding to Why and How Come questions about the cause of their behaviors. Children’s accuracy improved with age, highlighting a developmental milestone whereby children become highly accurate by 7 years of age. Further, the semantic differences in question type did not influence children’s responses, as there were no differences in children’s accuracy when answering Why or How Come questions. The findings from this study highlight the developmental shift in children’s abilities to answer Why and How Come questions, and thus the importance of considering the age and linguistic abilities of the child when inquiring about their event knowledge.
... The authors conclude: "we have underestimated another odd parental habit that appears to be even more advantageous for the young learner: the use of short, simple, repetitive carrier frames leading up to a familiar noun" (Fernald and Hurtado, 2006, p. F39). Cameron-Faulkner et al. (2003) show that caregivers make frequent use of such frames; their analyses of corpora of child-directed speech present considerable evidence for the ubiquitous use of frames in CDS. They investigate the speech of twelve mothers and find that only eight frames account for 77% of all patterns in the corpus. ...
... As frames they define fixed patterns with open slots that occur at least four times per mother. In a follow-up study, Stoll et al. (2009) investigate whether the findings by Cameron-Faulkner et al. (2003) are due to the peculiar properties of English with its restricted word order, or whether similar results can be obtained for other, more flexible languages. They analyze corpora of Russian, English and German free play interactions between mothers and their 1;8 to 2;6 old children and find that although English has the most lexically specific frames, German and Russian exhibit similar effects, such that there are still 58-75% utterances that make use of lexically restricted sets of frames; still, the more flexible the word order of the language in question, the fewer the lexically specific patterns. ...
... To summarize the effects of the special distributional characteristics of CDS, children's linguistic input is considerably less diversified, i.e. restricted to a subset of structures (Slobin, 1975;Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003), markedly more focused distributionally (Fernald and Hurtado, 2006;Laakso and Smith, 2007), more stereotypical and consistent semantically (e.g. Karmiloff and Karmiloff-Smith, 2002;Goldberg et al., 2004) and also much more heavily redundant pragmatically (cf. ...
... In its current form, UBL has developed mostly through theoretical, corpus and experimental work in 'Cognitive Linguistics' (Goldberg, 1998;Langacker, 1987), human anthropology (Tomasello, 2000), and developmental psychology (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011;Theakston & Lieven, 2017;Tomasello, 2003). Perhaps especially in the field of language acquisition, UBL has gained impetus since it became possible to empirically show links between child-directed input and child speech on the one hand (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Lieven et al., 2009) and early and later child language on the other (Lieven et al., 1992;Lieven et al., 1997;Dąbrowska & Lieven, 2005). The approach is referred to as 'usage-based' due to its central tenet: it posits that "the speaker's linguistic system is fundamentally grounded in 'usage events', i.e., a speaker producing or perceiving language" (Barlow & Kemmer, 2000, p. VIII, also Bybee, 2010, Croft, 2001, Langacker, 1987. ...
... Under the UB approach, however, input is hypothesised not to be imperfect at all: it is instrumental in gradually building up a child's linguistic knowledge, both its 'lexical' and 'grammatical' manifestations. In fact, comparisons of children's input with their own output suggest that much, if not all, of early child language can be linked to repetitive caregiver speech: the frames used by children (e.g., Give me X, Where's X, Let's X) correspond with a limited set of highly repetitive utterance initial chunks used by caregivers, both in English (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003) and in languages with a less fixed word order (Stoll et al., 2009). ...
Input-output effects have been the subject of keen research for several decades in the study of monolingual acquisition from a usage-based perspective (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011). However, for bilingual acquisition, similar studies are only beginning to emerge. One major challenge for such studies is to explain why young children switch between their two languages (e.g., Ich bin ready ‘I am’ ready) even when they hear no such switching in their input. This article reviews a strand of recent studies in children aged two to three to explain this apparent paradox. It demonstrates how the focus on one aspect of input, the child’s own prior speech, can explain how and why code-switching occurs. The article examines a range of psycholinguistic processes, showing how they drive variation in children’s use of mixed utterances. Its main contribution lies in its summative value and the recommendations made for future research in early code-switching.
... 1 Introduction 1.1 La lecture partagée comme forme de discours adressé aux enfants Dans le cadre de l'acquisition, de nombreux travaux, notamment ceux issus des approches basées sur l'usage, montrent l'importance de la parole entendue (input) sur la construction du langage chez l'enfant (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Chenu & Jisa, 2006;Hoff, 2002;Snow, 1995). L'input regroupe tout ce que l'enfant perçoit autour de lui et qui lui sert de socle pour développer son langage. ...
... Les particularités de ce langage, par rapport au langage entre adultes, affectent tous les niveaux langagiers. D'un point de vue prosodique, la fréquence fondamentale est plus haute et ses variations au sein d'un énoncé importantes ; concernant le lexique, on trouve plus de redondance (Cameron-Faulkner & Hickey, 2011) et une richesse et une diversification qui s'élaborent progressivement (Snow, 1977) ; au niveau syntaxique, on relève par exemple des structures répétitives et beaucoup de questions (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003) ; l'ancrage dans le « ici et maintenant » (Snow, 1972), un nombre important de reprises, de reformulations des énoncés enfantins (Harris, 1990) sont parmi les caractéristiques pragmatiques du CDS. Enfin, on sait que le CDS est un usage qui évolue, notamment en fonction de l'âge de l'enfant (Foulkes et al., 2005). ...
Les lectures partagées constituent une forme particulière de discours adressé aux enfants. Nous inscrivant dans les approches basées sur l’usage, nous défendons l’idée de l’importance de cette pratique dans la construction du langage chez l’enfant et dans la perspective de son entrée dans la littératie. A partir du module « Livres pour enfants » du corpus ESLO, nous observerons l’usage des liaisons au regard des caractéristiques du lecteur, des enfants, des types d’albums lus et d’un ensemble de facteurs internes. Cette étude est exploratoire dans la mesure où la taille de notre corpus nous permet d’observer seulement certains de ces facteurs. Les premières tendances obtenues et les réflexions sur les aspects méthodologiques à creuser constituent un point d’étape important pour de futurs travaux autour de la lecture partagée et de l’usage des liaisons dans le domaine de l’acquisition du langage.
... Perhaps the most well-established link between input and acquisition is repetition. In general, languages are more repetitive than not (Haiman, 1997;Jakobson, 1966), and this repetitiveness has been shown to support language learning (Ambridge, Kidd, Rowland, & Theakston, 2015;Bannard & Lieven, 2009;Bard & Anderson, 1983;Brown, 1999;Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003;Hoff-Ginsberg, 1986, 1990Horst, Parsons, & Bryan, 2011). In fact, one of the best predictors of learning across levels of linguistic structure is pure frequency (e.g., Ambridge, Kidd, Rowland, & Theakston, 2015). ...
... But frequency effects are also found beyond individual words. Repetition in multi-word contexts (contiguous or non-contiguous) offers reliable cues not only to word segmentation and meaning (e.g., Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013) but also to more general categories, such as word class (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Cartwright & Brent, 1997;Gómez & Maye, 2005;Mintz, 2003Mintz, , 2006Moran et al., 2018;Redington, Chater, & Finch, 1998;Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998;Stoll, Abbot-Smith, & Lieven, 2009). Thus, repetition in the input provides multiple sources of information about the building blocks of language, and children appear quite able to incorporate this information during their early linguistic development. ...
Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation between utterances is necessary to support acquisition of a fully productive grammar. When individual words or morphemes are repeated, but embedded in different lexical and syntactic contexts, the child has more information about how these forms may be used and combined. Corpus analysis has shown that these partial repetitions frequently occur in clusters, which have been coined variation sets. More recent research has introduced algorithms that can extract these variation sets automatically from corpora with the goal of measuring their relative prevalence across ages and languages. Longitudinal analyses have revealed that rates of variation sets tend to decrease as children get older. We extend this research in several ways. First, we consider a maximally diverse sample of languages, both genealogically and geographically, to test the generalizability of developmental trends. Second, we compare multiple levels of repetition, both words and morphemes, to account for typological differences in how information is encoded. Third, we consider several additional measures of development to account for deficiencies in age as a measure of linguistic aptitude. Fourth, we examine whether the levels of repetition found in child-surrounding speech is greater or less than what would have been expected by chance. This analysis produced a new measure, redundancy, which captures how repetitive speech is on average given how repeititive it could have been. Fifth, we compare rates of repetition in child-surrounding and adult-directed speech to test whether variation sets are especially prevalent in child-surrounding speech. We find that (1) some languages show increases in repetition over development, (2) true estimates of variation sets are generally lower than or equal to random baselines, (3) these patterns are largely convergent across developmental indices, and (4) adult-directed speech is reliably less redundant, though in some cases more repetitive, than child-surrounding speech. These results are discussed with respect to features of the corpora, typological properties of the languages, and differential rates of change in repetition and redundancy over children's development.
... Di luar negeri, penelitian pemerolehan kosakata anak pernah dilakukan oleh Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello (2003), Hoff (2009), Weisberg, Zosh, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff (2013, dan Narafshan, Sadighi, Bagheri, & Shokrpour (2013). Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello (2003) meneliti tentang A construction based analysis of child directed speech. ...
... Di luar negeri, penelitian pemerolehan kosakata anak pernah dilakukan oleh Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello (2003), Hoff (2009), Weisberg, Zosh, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff (2013, dan Narafshan, Sadighi, Bagheri, & Shokrpour (2013). Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello (2003) meneliti tentang A construction based analysis of child directed speech. Dalam penelitian tersebut ditemukan (i) secara keseluruhan, hanya sekitar 15% dari semua ujaran ibu memiliki bentuk SVO (sebagian adalah pertanyaan, imperatif, kopula, dan fragmen); (ii) 51% dari semua ujaran ibu dimulai dengan salah satu dari 52 berbasis item frasa, kebanyakan terdiri atas dua kata atau morfem (45% dimulai dengan salah satu dari kata-kata hanya 17%). ...
Abstrak
Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan dan menjelaskan tentang pemerolehan kosakata anak laki-laki bernama Muhammad Zaini dari usia 2 tahun sampai dengan usia 2 tahun 6 bulan. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori tahap-tahap tuturan awal oleh Steinberg, Nagata, dan Aline (2001). Metode yang digunakan adalah penelitian kualitatif dengan teknik longitudinal. Data penelitian ini berupa tuturan Muhammad Zaini yang berisi pemerolehan kosakata. Hasil penelitian ini adalah (1) pemerolehan tuturan satu kata oleh Muhammad Zaini pada usia 2 tahun menunjukkan bahwa Muhammad Zaini lebih banyak menggunakan kata sifat daripada kata benda dan kata kerja, (2) pemerolehan tuturan dua kata oleh Muhammad Zaini pada usia 2 tahun 1 bulan menunjukkan bahwa Muhammad Zaini lebih banyak menggunakan frasa benda, (3) pemerolehan tuturan dua kata oleh Muhammad Zaini pada usia 2 tahun 2 bulan menunjukkan bahwa Muhammad Zaini lebih banyak menggunakan frasa benda, (4) pemerolehan tuturan dua atau tiga kata oleh Muhammad Zaini pada Usia 2 tahun 3 bulan dengan tuturan frasa benda yang terdiri atas kata benda dan kata benda serta kata benda dan kata kerja, (5) pemerolehan tuturan dua atau tiga kata oleh Muhammad Zaini pada usia 2 tahun 4 bulan terdapat kata kerja dan kata keterangan serta kata benda dan kata benda, (6) pemerolehan tuturan tiga kata oleh Muhammad Zaini pada usia 2 tahun 5 bulan lebih banyak menggunakan kata seru dan kata benda, dan (7) pemerolehan tuturan tiga kata sampai lima kata oleh Muhammad Zaini pada usia 2 tahun 6 bulan lebih banyak menggunakan negasi dan kata benda serta kata benda dan negasi.
Kata kunci: pemerolehan kosakata, tuturan, anak laki-laki
Abstract
This research aims to describe and explain vocabulary acquisition of boys named Muhammad Zaini age from 2 years to the age of 2 years and 6 months. This research uses theories of early stages of speech by Steinberg, Nagata, and Aline (2001). The method used was qualitative research with longitudinal techniques. The data of this research in the form of speech of Muhammad Zaini containing vocabulary acquisition. The results of this research are (1) the acquisition of speech a Word by Muhammad Zaini at age 2 years shows that Muhammad Zaini more use of the adjective instead of the noun and the verb, (2) the acquisition of speech is the word by Muhammad Zaini at age 2 years 1 month shows that Muhammad Zaini more use the phrase objects, (3) the acquisition of speech is two words by Muhammad Zaini at age 2 years 2 months indicate that Muhammad Zaini more use of objects, phrases (4) the acquisition of speech is two or three words by Muhammad Zaini at age 2 years 3 months with a speech phrase objects composed of a noun and noun and noun and verb, (5) the acquisition of speech is two or three words by Muhammad Zaini at age 2 years 4 month there are verbs and adverbs and adjectives and nouns, (6) the acquisition of speech is three words by Muhammad Zaini at age 2 years 5 months more exciting words and uses nouns, and (7) the acquisition of three-to five-word speech is said by Muhammad Zaini in the age of 2 years and 6 months more use of negation and noun and noun and negation.
Keywords: acquisition of vocabulary, speech, boy
... Usage-based approaches to child language acquisition have benefited greatly from studies that evaluate the distributional properties of child directed speech (e.g., Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003). Such studies to date have evaluated input in only one language, which is rarely the case for minority language, bilingual, and heritage learners, such as those described in this chapter. ...
... They suggested that in some circumstances, the effect of the audience design theory may not appear in speech. Likewise, this finding is also contrary to earlier evidence suggesting that children use less complex language compared with adults, and also adults arrange their speech complexity for different age group addressees (Adams et al., 2002;Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Ravid, 2005;Sheth & Ramírez, 2022;Tippenhauer et al., 2020). A possible explanation for the current finding might be the content of instruction. ...
Speakers design their multimodal communication according to the needs and knowledge of their interlocutors, phenomenon known as audience design. We use more sophisticated language (e.g., longer sentences with complex grammatical forms) when communicating with adults compared to children. The present study investigates how speech and co-speech gestures change in adult-directed speech (ADS) vs. child-directed speech (CDS) for three different tasks. Sixty-six adult participants (Mage=21.05, sixty female) completed three different tasks (story-reading-task, storytelling-task, and address-description-task) and they were instructed to pretend to communicate with a child (CDS) or an adult (ADS). We hypothesized that participants would use more complex language, more beat gestures, and less iconic gestures in the ADS compared to the CDS. Results showed that, for CDS, participants used more iconic gestures in the story-reading task, and story-telling task compared to ADS. On the other hand, participants used more beat gestures in the story-telling task for ADS than CDS. Additionally, language complexity did not differ across conditions. Our findings indicate that how speakers employ different types of gestures (iconic vs. beat) according to the addressee's needs and across different tasks. Speakers might prefer to use more iconic gestures with children than adults. Results are discussed according to audience design theory.
... A partir de la comprensión de los mensajes que se le están transmitiendo al niño, este puede tener un crecimiento lingüístico, por esto es importante que el input no se quede solo en los contactos en el aula de clase, sino que se debe incrementar esa exposición al input (Flores et al., 1999). En ese sentido, es importante que la interacción se dé también en el entorno familiar, más aún si se parte del hecho de que la mayor parte del contenido léxico que se evidencia en los niños y niñas es aquel que escuchan en su entorno más cercano (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003). Así pues, la lectura debería estar enfocada o dirigida no solo a la interacción docente-estudiante, sino también a la interacción del núcleo familiar, puesto que esto permite que aquellas adquisiciones lingüísticas que se dan en el entorno académico se refuercen en el entorno familiar y, de esa forma, el input lingüístico sea más fácil de comprender y procesar por parte del estudiante al generar una mayor producción oral y escrita. ...
El presente texto busca identificar la influencia de la interacción adulto-estudiante en el input lingüístico como base y mediación fundamental de los procesos de aprendizaje de la lengua y en el desarrollo de las capacidades humanas como sustentos de las relaciones y los procesos de construcción social. Para ello, se presentan algunas perspectivas conceptuales acerca del input lingüístico, se precisa la lectura en voz alta como factor fundamental en la interacción adulto-niño, se exponen evidencias acerca de la influencia del input en el proceso de aprendizaje del estudiantado, y se describen las posibilidades de formación y transformación de la interacción cuando esta se piensa en términos del desarrollo de las capacidades humanas. Este análisis corresponde a la fase pretest del proyecto de investigación La interacción espontánea del adulto con el niño y la interacción apoyada en la propuesta del recurso Espacio de lectura (2020-2021).
... Constructing specialized lexical corpora for children is necessitated by the drasticly different language environments children and adults are exposed to. Infants and toddlers mostly hear child-directed speech from caregivers, which are characterized by item-based phrases (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003) and decontextualized language such as narratives (Rowe, 2012). When children start to read, the picture books they most likely read are accompanied by illustrative pictures and use more communicative and interactive language than adults' printed books. ...
In this article, we introduce the Chinese Children's Lexicon of Oral Words (CCLOOW), the first lexical database based on animated movies and TV series for 3-to-9-year-old Chinese children. The database computes from 2.7 million character tokens and 1.8 million word tokens. It contains 3920 unique character and 22,229 word types. CCLOOW reports frequency and contextual diversity metrics of the characters and words, as well as length and syntactic categories of the words. CCLOOW frequency and contextual diversity measures correlated well with other Chinese lexical databases, particularly well with that computed from children's books. The predictive validity of CCLOOW measures were confirmed with Grade 2 children's naming and lexical decision experiments. Further, we found that CCLOOW frequencies could explain a considerable proportion in adults' written word recognition, indicating that early language experience might have lasting impacts on the mature lexicon. CCLOOW provides validated frequency and contextual diversity estimates that complements current children's lexical database based on written language samples. It is freely accessible online at https://www.learn2read.cn/ccloow .
... IDS is characterised by a slower speech rate, higher fundamental frequency, and greater pitch variations [1], longer pauses, often repetitive intonational structures [2], and shorter sentences with a more limited lexicon than Adult Directed Speech (ADS) [3]. IDS is also characterised by more hyperarticulation: vowels (and consonants) are often given articulatory/acoustically more extreme realisations, resulting in an expanded articulatory/acoustic vowel space, and increased acoustic/articulatory differentiation [4]. ...
The present study examines the spectral and temporal characteristics of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) vowels spoken to young children in the Indigenous Australian language Warlpiri. The results show that vowel hyperarticulation, temporal expansion and pitch raising are characteristics of Warlpiri IDS to children in the third year of life. The results also suggest that vowel space fronting may be a common strategy, and that vowel space and durational expansion may play a didactic role in IDS young children at an age characterised by rapid vocabulary expansion and increased multiword utterances The use and characteristics of special Infant and Child Directed Speech registers (IDS; CDS; or in older literature Baby Talk; Motherese) has been argued to be a supportive strategy adopted by carers (mothers, fathers, other carers, and older children) with the aim to scaffold language acquisition. Questions of the universality of IDS have received significant attention in the literature, and cross-linguistic research has demonstrated differences across languages and cultures, and on changes in the characteristics of IDS across development. The present study examines the spectral and temporal characteristics of IDS vowels spoken to young children in the Indigenous Australian language Warlpiri. The results show that vowel hyperarticulation, temporal expansion and pitch raising are characteristics of Warlpiri IDS to children in the early multiword stage of language acquisition and beyond. The results also suggest that vowel space fronting may be a common strategy observed in Warlpiri IDS, and that vowel space and durational expansion may play a particular didactic role in the speech to young children who are at an age where rapid vocabulary expansion is typical, as nouns appear to be the locus of the greatest IDS modifications. IDS is characterised by a slower speech rate, higher fundamental frequency, and greater pitch variations [1], longer pauses, often repetitive intonational structures [2], and shorter sentences with a more limited lexicon than Adult Directed Speech (ADS) [3]. IDS is also characterised by more hyperarticulation: vowels (and consonants) are often given articulatory/acoustically more extreme realisations, resulting in an expanded articulatory/acoustic vowel space, and increased acoustic/articulatory differentiation [4]. Such vowel hyperarticulation is also a feature of Foreigner Directed Speech (FDS: [5], but not Pet Directed Speech (PDS: [6] unless the pet is a parrot [7], suggesting that slow and clear speech is used as a didactic strategy in communication with individuals/entities who are perceived to be language learners (or at least capable of some language learning) but who are still learning. IDS has been hypothesised to serve a number of different functions, most likely simultaneously and to varying degrees at different developmental stages, including (1) regulating infant attention [8], [9], [10]; (2) communicating affect and supporting social interaction [11], [12], [13], and; (3) supporting language acquisition [14], [15], [16], [17], the latter of which is the focus here. Vowel hyperarticulation in IDS has been particularly highlighted as potentially facilitating certain aspects of language acquisition: in particular, segmental acquisition (the learning of vowels and consonants), and in word-learning. In particular for the first year of life, vowel hyperarticulation has been argued to enhance segmental learning, as argued by [18] by providing infants with input containing high-quality and maximally differentiated vowel tokens that infants might attend to preferentially, perhaps due to its prosodic characteristics, as discussed above. Not all studies have shown that all vowels are uniformly hyperarticulated: In at least one study [19], mothers were found to hypoarticulate back vowels. This was interpreted to make the articulation more visibly accessible to infants than they are in ADS and thus rather than representing a goal of target undershoot, it indicated enhancement in the visual domain (as opposed to the acoustic). In the second year of life, vowel hyperarticulation has been argued to be helpful in terms of word-learning, with research showing that the degree of vowel hyperarticulation in the maternal input at 18 months of age is correlated with the size of the receptive and productive language at 24 months of age [20]. This suggests that extra clarity in the phonemic specifications of words in IDS supports the acquisition of new vocabulary items. Other research has shown that IDS increases neural activity in 6-and 13-month-old infants compared to ADS, which again is argued to assist with the 'word spotting' of young word learners [21]. It is possible that increased neural activity also reflects recognition of being a potential addressee of IDS utterances [22], particularly in older infants and children. The findings in [20] are, however, also consistent with results showing that IDS vowel hyperarticulation (but not an enhanced pitch range) plays an important role in word recognition and word learning. And in one word recognition study, vowel hyperarticulation improved 19-month-olds' performance in word recognition tasks [23]. In another study, using a word learning paradigm, [24] showed that 21-month-olds learned new words only in IDS unless they already had large vocabularies, while 27-month-old toddlers learned new words in both ADS and IDS. The acoustic characteristics of IDS, however, are not stable across early development [25], [26], [27]. This is generally taken to indicate that carers finetune their IDS to the
... Questions had their own developmental trajectory, emerging in the second year of children's lives and rising to a relatively constant rate of about 15% of children's utterances in their fourth year. Parents, in comparison, produced questions in about 25% of their utterances (see also Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven & Tomasello, 2003). Therefore, parent-child interaction offers more opportunities for parents to ask questions (and consequently produce or), than for children to do so. ...
What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of or. We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on or uses. Children started producing or between 18-30 months and by 42 months, their rate of production reached a plateau. Second, we annotated for the interpretation of disjunction in child-directed speech. Parents used or mostly as exclusive disjunction, typically accompanied by rise-fall intonation and logically inconsistent disjuncts. But when these two cues were absent, disjunction was generally not exclusive. Our computational modeling suggests that an ideal learner could successfully interpret an English disjunction (as exclusive or not) by mapping forms to meanings after partitioning the input according to the intonational and logical cues available in child-directed speech.
... Our findings indicated relatively little use of questions, especially in playtime. These findings are inconsistent with those reported in the literature, in which the number of declaratives and questions addressed to children in Western cultures typically exceeded the use of imperatives (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Hart & Risley, 1995). However, the use of questions in CDS varies among languages. ...
This study examined the use of various communicative intentions (CIs) of mothers directed to their children in two contexts: playtime and mealtime at two linguistic stages: preverbal and single-word. The study revealed that statements were most prevalent during mealtime, while both statements and directives were prevalent during playtime. Particularly, directives were more frequent during playtime than during mealtime. Moreover, the number of CIs directed to children in the preverbal stage was higher than children in the single-word stage. These findings emphasize the role of context and culture on the mother-child language use in general and CIs in particular.
... Noncanonical questions are frequent among the many questions addressed to young children in English (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003). 3 1 Some subjectless forms also appear in writing, in what has been called 'diary' style, e.g., Spent the day in the barn, or Have been thinking about last summer (see Schmerling, 1973;Thrasher, 1977). 2 Researchers in the past have counted noncanonical question forms in children as errors (e.g., Brown, 1973, p. 180;Nakayama, 1987, p. 124). ...
Children acquiring English and French do not initially produce any subjects with the verbs that appear in their early two-word utterances. Instead, in both languages children depend heavily on the communicative context for interpretation of what they are trying to say. But they appear to realise early on that subjects are required in these languages. They begin to produce occasional fillers, usually a schwa vowel, in the preverbal slot, and then progress to pronouns and a few lexical nouns in this slot as they produce longer utterances. In this chapter I track the progress children make as they master the options available in English and in French, and show how the forms in adult speech offer somewhat different models in the two languages for how to express subjects. I suggest that the patterns of omission and later use are in large part an effect of information structure, determined by what is given versus new in the current exchange.KeywordsConstructionEarly omissionsSubjectObjectGiven and new information
... Goldberg 2003; Bybee 2010) ont permis de mieux saisir la nature de la langue à laquelle l'enfant est exposé. Ainsi, par exemple, Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven et Tomasello (2003) ont montré que les énoncés produits par les mères tout au long de la journée se laissent décrire dans leur plus grande majorité par un faible nombre de patterns, reproduits plus de 40 fois par jour. Ces mêmes patterns dominent chez leurs enfants. ...
Interactionist (Vygostki, de Weck) and dialogic (François) approaches of language acquisition assume not only that dialogue and/or interaction play a determinant role in language acquisition, but also that forms and structures cannot be understood without referring to discursive practices. Whereas communicative experience is a central concept in most non nativist approaches, for the needs of arguing or demonstration some aspects may be more often foregrounded than others and the dialogic dimension can end up being unaddressed. After a brief presentation of usage-based approaches, this paper contrasts grammatical acquisitions under the light of cultural and social roles and their expression through activities. In the last section it proposes some hints on the way dialogue (and not simply input) is not only the context but also the vehicle for the acquisition of referring expressions, their referential value and their use.
... While adult input-child output patterns have been attested in English monolingual child data with regards to the incidence of active monotransitive constructions (e.g., Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003), the lower frequency rates in the use of English passives have been reported in written corpora (for instance, novels, scientific and informative texts) (e.g., Dusková, 1971;Givón, 1979;Svartvik, 1966). ...
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions
We examine the acquisition of English active and passive monotransitives by English–Spanish bilingual children. These data are compared to English monolinguals from previous studies. We explore whether bi- and monolinguals show similar onset patterns given the shared grammatical properties of actives in the bilinguals’ two languages, and whether they differ in the onset of passives given the grammatical properties in English (canonical determiner phrase [DP]-movement) and Spanish (canonical DP-movement and se-passives). We also investigate the role played by adult input in child output.
Design/methodology/approach
We analyze the spontaneous production data from eight English–Spanish bilinguals (ages: 1;01–6;11), and the adults who interact with them.
Data and analysis
We perform a double analysis: (1) the onset of these structures in the spontaneous production of bilinguals to determine whether emergence patterns differ from those of monolinguals and (2) their incidence through language development to focus on production frequency.
Findings/conclusions
Bilinguals start producing passives at the age of 3, later than actives that emerge at the age of 2, akin to English monolinguals. This acquisition order effect is also seen in the lower incidence of passives when compared to actives in the two child groups. The distributional properties of the two passive types do not seem to have interfered in the bilinguals’ acquisition of the English passive type, causing delay. These data suggest that the emergence and the incidence of the two constructions in bi- and monolinguals could be explained by the DP-movement maturation and/or adult input effects given the adults’ lower frequency of exposure to passives with respect to actives.
Originality
This is the first study that addresses bilingual acquisition data and compares child output to adult input.
Significance/implications
It contributes to elucidate how the bilinguals’ two languages interact in the acquisition and incidence of English actives and passives.
... A greater variety of contexts in which a marker appears can also increase learnability by facilitating the segmentation of the element from the word-unit (see for example Küntay & Slobin, 1996;P. Brown, 1998b;Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003;Stoll, Abbot-Smith, & Lieven, 2009;Moran et al., 2019). Figure 2b illustrates the development of flexibility. ...
Frequency of occurrence in the input is a main factor determining the ease of acquisition in first language learners. However, little is known about the factors relevant for the acquisition of low-frequency items. We examine the use of aspectual markers in a longitudinal corpus of Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) children (ages 2;1-4;5). Only 7.7% of all Chintang verbs are overtly marked for aspect. Chintang has three aspect markers, one of which is substantially more frequent than the others. One of the low-frequency markers is positionally and prosodically more salient, appearing at the word-boundary. Using a Bayesian beta-binomial model, we assess the distribution and flexibility of use of aspectual markers in the input and children's production. Our analysis shows that the most frequent marker was acquired earliest, as predicted. For the low-frequency markers, position, segmentability and uniformity are better predictors of ease of acquisition.
... At a broad level these theories account well for the patterns of behaviour associated with verb argument learning (Goldberg, 1995;Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven & Tomasello, 2003;Tomasello, 2006;Ambridge & Lieven, 2011;Ambridge et al., 2014). However, the mechanisms that they use to explain the developmental progression described aboveschematization and analogytend to be poorly specified (Beekhuizen, Bod & Verhagen, 2014), as is the relationship between traditional and constructionist ideas about the basic functions of language, such as compositionality (Kay & Michaelis, 2012). ...
How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper presents an alternative account of human communication and its acquisition based on the systematic, discriminative approach embodied in psychological and computational models of learning, and formally described by communication theory. It describes how discriminative learning theory offers an alternative perspective on the way that systems of semantic cues are conditioned onto communicative codes, while information theory provides a very different view of the nature of the codes themselves. It shows how the distributional properties of languages satisfy the communicative requirements described in information theory, enabling language learners to align their expectations despite the vastly different levels of experience among language users, and to master communication systems far more abstract than linguistic intuitions traditionally assume. Topics reviewed include morphological development, the acquisition of verb argument structures, and the functions of linguistic systems that have proven to be stumbling blocks for compositional theories: grammatical gender and personal names.
... Babies use this stage to find out the way to communicate with others. During the primary stage of life, babies vocalize and try to find out how to speak with their caregivers, so by the age of twelve months, most babies perceive what's being aforesaid to them and are beginning to communicate their needs by informing or by showing objects to their caregivers (Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven & Tomasello, 2003). ...
The aim of this study is to categorize the differential diagnostic criteria of communication skills for preschool children with shy behaviour and children with autism within the speech therapy intervention process.
For the current study during the speech therapy intervention process 23 preschool children from 3-5 years old were studied who had communication problems and no speech. To establish the differential diagnostic criteria of communication skills for preschool children with shy behaviour and children with autism observation and complex speech therapy methods were used while combining practical and verbal/non-verbal approaches. The quantitative research methodology was used to generalize and conduct a comparative analysis of the results, in order to emphasize the behavioural characteristics and to outline the existing differences between the means of communication of these children.
The analysis of the research results made it possible to compile a comparative description of communication features and indicators of the quality of communication of children with shy behaviour and children with autism. Communication and behavioural problems which are typical for children with shy behaviour and children with autism were clarified and differentiated, as well as the criteria for differential diagnosis of speech and communication features of children with shy behaviour has been established, and speech therapy intervention rules have been developed to overcome those problems.
... One of CDS's main features is it's repetitiousness (Soderstrom, 2007). Studies have identified different types of repetitions, such as partial or exact repetitions and have shown its correlation with language growth (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Kavanaugh & Jirkovsky, 1982;Kaye, 1980;McRoberts et al., 2009;Papousek et al., 1987;Stern et al., 1982). Variation sets specifically refer to successive utterances addressed to young children which include partial self repetitions that have a constant pragmatic intention but varying form, such as, Example from the Argentinian corpus: Küntay and Slobin (2002)'s thorough examination of these sequences of utterances in CDS revealed that variation sets are mostly produced around a verb and its arguments, and are characterized by three types of phenomena occurring across successive utterances: lexical substitution or rephrasing, addition or deletion of specific reference, and reordering. ...
The study adopts a naturalistic perspective, looking at the relationship between socio-economic status (SES), activities and variation sets in child-directed speech (CDS) to Spanish-speaking Argentinian toddlers. It aims to determine the effect of SES and type of activity on the proportion of words and utterances in variation sets and on the pragmatic function they serve in interaction. Thirty two children (mean: 14.3 months) and their families were audio-recorded for four hours and the middle two hours were analyzed using CLAN. We developed an automatic algorithm for variation sets extraction that compares noun, verb and adjective lexemes in successive utterances. Mixed-effects beta regression showed SES and activity type effects on the proportion of variation sets and on the pragmatic function served by variation sets. Findings revealed that the contextual variables considered impact on how interlocutors organize the information to young children at the local level of natural at home interactions.
... In line with past research (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Graf Estes et al., 2016;Ninio & Snow, 1999), IDS was analyzed at the level of the sentence type. Firstly, four types of utterance were distinguished that differ in their function: declaratives, interrogatives, exclamatives, and imperatives (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1985;Ninio & Snow, 1999;Quinn, 2016;Wu & Gros-Louis, 2014; see Table 1). ...
In this study, we test the hypothesis that symbolic play represents a fertile context for language acquisition because its inherent ambiguity elicits communicative behaviors that positively influence development. Infant–caregiver dyads (N = 54) participated in two 20‐minute play sessions six months apart (Time 1 = 18 months, Time 2 = 24 months). During each session, the dyads played with two sets of toys that elicited either symbolic or functional play. The sessions were transcribed and coded for several features of dyadic interaction and language; infants’ linguistic proficiency was measured via parental report. The two contexts elicited different communicative and linguistic behaviors. Notably, the symbolic play condition resulted in significantly greater conversational turn‐taking than functional play, and also resulted in the greater use of questions and mimetics in infant‐directed speech (IDS). In contrast, caregivers used more imperative clauses in functional play. Correlational and regression analyses showed that frequent properties of symbolic play (i.e., turn‐taking, yes–no questions, mimetics) were positively related to infants’ language proficiency, whereas frequent features of functional play (i.e., imperatives in IDS) were negatively related. The results provide evidence supporting the hypothesis that symbolic play is a fertile context for language development, driven by the need to negotiate meaning.
... This tendency to use a more meaningful word with children could be considered a type of Child Directed Speech (CDS) that is known to be more simplified than speech with older children and adults (e.g. Phillips, 1973;Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Mintz, 2003;Matychuk, 2005;Rowe, 2008). ...
Using quantitative, traditional variationist sociolinguistic methods, this study examines the social and linguistic distribution of the interchangeable Syrian Arabic discourse markers yaʕni and ʔinnu: 'I mean' in the speech of 72 speakers from the village Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria. Children and adult data are compared. Age and gender among four groups of children and gender among adults are examined to see if there is a change in progress towards the use of the innovative form ʔinnu:. Children show a reverse pattern, generally using more ʔinnu: than adults. Women use more ʔinnu: than men, and boys use more ʔinnu: than girls. The gender disparity emerged as statistically significant among adults but not among children. While the difference between the older and younger generation indicates a shift towards higher use of ʔinnu:, the undulating pattern among the four age groups indicate age-grading and the conflicting gender differences rules out a change in progress. Regardless of gender, the linguistic distribution favors ʔinnu: in medial position and yaʕni in initial position, although yaʕni shows more variability in its syntactic position, proposing that higher association with specific pragmatic functions leads to higher occurrence in specific syntactic positions through interdependence between the syntactic and pragmatic. Published by Elsevier B.V.
... constructions (Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003;Theakston, Lieven, Pine, & Rowland, 2001). These simple constructions are easily acquired because they are frequent in language input and denote the most basic human behaviors often observed between caregivers and their children (Dodson & Tomasello, 1998;Goldberg, 1995). ...
This study explores how input-focused implicit learning through extensive reading (ER) facilitates construction development in Korean-speaking young EFL students. Twenty-four EFL students, 10–13 years old, participated in ER as an after-school activity for four weeks (ER group). Their construction development in writing was assessed using seven argument structure constructions. The ER group’s performance preceding and following ER activities was compared to 24 young EFL students who did not engage in ER (baseline group). The results showed that the ER group improved their production of ditransitive and caused-motion constructions. Compared to the baseline group, the ER group not only produced a greater number of these constructions, but also used a wider variety of verbs not observed prior to the ER experiences, indicating an expansion of their linguistic knowledge with the target constructions. We conclude by addressing the pedagogical implications for using ER with young EFL students.
... Item-based phrases in language acquisition research, as framed by words in initial positions, constitute a specific type of context (e.g. Cameron-Faulkner et al. 2003, Stoll et al. 2009). AGs may be viewed as superimpositions of such contextual frames. ...
The present study reports results from a series of computer experiments seeking to combine word-based Largest Chunk (LCh) segmentation and Agreement Groups (AG) sequence processing. The AG model is based on groups of similar utterances that enable combinatorial mapping of novel utterances. LCh segmentation is concerned with cognitive text segmentation, i.e. with detecting word boundaries in a sequence of linguistic symbols. Our observations are based on the text of Le petit prince (The little prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in three languages: French, English, and Hungarian. The data suggest that word-based LCh segmentation is not very efficient with respect to utterance boundaries, however, it can provide useful word combinations for AG processing. Typological differences between the languages are also reflected in the results.
... What children start acquiring is item-based and highly dependent on the input they receive and the type of language they are exposed to; then, gradually, they eventually build up an inventory of more abstract and complex networks of constructions that allow them to express a range of complex communicative functions (Tomasello, 2003;Lieven & Tomasello, 2008) . In this regard, Faulkner et al. (2003) found in their study of child-directed speech of twelve English-speaking mothers that the children used similar itembased phrases that their mothers used when addressing them; and, in some cases, the rate of the phrases produced by the children highly correlated with their mother's frequency of use. ...
The present study investigates the use of the five most frequently used prepositions by Moroccan undergraduate EFL learners in their writings. More specifically, our focus is on the choices of the prepositions and the lemmas of the lexical items related to them. This study is corpus-based and uses the Moroccan Learner English Corpus (MoLEC) to investigate learners’ use of said prepositions. The corpus is a joint effort of two Master’s students at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Ennaciri El Mehdi and Iabdounane Yassine. It is a collection of 185 argumentative essays written by undergraduate EFL learners from nine universities in Morocco.
The results showed that across the three targeted study levels (semester 2, semester 4, and semester 6), learners make appropriate choices at the levels of the preposition and the lemma of the lexical item related to it significantly more than erroneous ones. Out of all the uses of the five prepositions, 25% were highly frequent preposition related sequences in the reference corpora, the British National Corpus, and the Open American National Corpus, for S2 learners, 29.81% were highly frequent preposition related sequences for S4 learners, and 24.83% were highly frequent preposition related sequences for S6 learners. The analysis also showed that learners’ errors in the S2 and S4 study levels involved the use of high frequency preposition-related sequences in the reference corpora significantly more than low frequency ones, suggesting that the frequency of these units in the input triggers learners’ erroneous uses of them. As for S6 learners, no significant effect of frequency was observed in learners’ errors, suggesting that other variables affect learners’ choices as well. Finally, the study showed that as learners advance in their study levels, the number of prepositional errors does not decrease significantly from one study level to the next.
... Second, frames help children infer word meaning by embedding words in familiar and meaningful constructions (see Gleitman, 1990;Goldberg, 2003). Third, frequent frames might facilitate production if infants acquire productive language in a construction-specific manner (Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003;Tomasello, 2000). That is, if producing a word depends not only on inferring its meaning but also on having a construction in which it is known to occur, then the words that appear most often in the earliest acquired productive constructions are likely to be produced first. ...
Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child‐directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We evaluate two sets of features: One set is generated from the distribution of words into frames defined by the two adjacent words. These features primarily encode syntactic aspects of word usage. The other set is generated from non‐adjacent co‐occurrences between words. These features encode complementary thematic aspects of word usage. Regression models using these distributional features to predict age of acquisition of 656 early‐acquired English words indicate that both types of features improve predictions over simpler models based on frequency and appearance in salient or simple utterance contexts. Syntactic features were stronger predictors of children's production than comprehension, whereas thematic features were stronger predictors of comprehension. Overall, earlier acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for nouns and verbs, and by thematic content related to food and face‐to‐face play topics; later acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for pronouns and question words, and by content related to narratives and object play.
... Prominent amongst these approaches were the observations by Lieven and colleagues that children's language productions could be described in terms of reproduction and manipulation of linguistic constructions that the individual child is exposed to through the productions of their caregivers. Lieven and colleagues thus sought to determine precisely how experience gives rise to knowledge of language structure (e.g., Lieven et al., 2003, and see also Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Lieven & Brandt, 2011;Lieven et al., 2009). Lieven and colleagues' work helped substantially to define our understanding of the complexity of the computational processes that are available to the learner, and the consequent richness of the structure that can be induced through the operation of these processes over the child's input. ...
Acquiring language is notoriously complex, yet for the majority of children this feat is accomplished with remarkable ease. Usage-based accounts of language acquisition suggest that this success can be largely attributed to the wealth of experience with language that children accumulate over the course of language acquisition. One field of research that is heavily underpinned by this principle of experience is statistical learning, which posits that learners can perform powerful computations over the distribution of information in a given input, which can help them to discern precisely how that input is structured, and how it operates. A growing body of work brings this notion to bear in the field of language acquisition, due to a developing understanding of the richness of the statistical information contained in speech. In this chapter we discuss the role that statistical learning plays in language acquisition, emphasising the importance of both the distribution of information within language, and the situation in which language is being learnt. First, we address the types of statistical learning that apply to a range of language learning tasks, asking whether the statistical processes purported to support language learning are the same or distinct across different tasks in language acquisition. Second, we expand the perspective on what counts as environmental input, by determining how statistical learning operates over the situated learning environment, and not just sequences of sounds in utterances. Finally, we address the role of variability in children’s input, and examine how statistical learning can accommodate (and perhaps even exploit) this during language acquisition.
... One of the core claims of the usage-based approach is that the specific properties of the language input to the child are of crucial import for the acquisition of both the lexicon and morpho-syntactic sentential constructions (e.g. Lieven, 2010;Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003). Of particular importance for morpho-syntactic acquisition is the frequency with which certain items cooccur with certain words. ...
Usage-based theories explain language development in terms of the specific characteristics of language input in combination with a child’s own inherent ability to engage in shared intentionality and statistical learning. In this chapter, I discuss these mechanisms in relation to evidence from Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) and Autism.
First, there is evidence for the role of language input in both conditions. The specific patterns of morpho-syntax impairments in DLD are clearly affected by the relative perceptual salience, frequency and complexity of morpho-syntax in the specific language a child is acquiring. Regarding autism, the grammatical complexity of parental child-directed utterances predicts child vocabulary and morpho-syntactic skills at later time-points. Nonetheless, both conditions are highly heritable, raising questions about the child-internal mechanisms leading to language learning difficulties. Impairments in statistical learning could potentially account for morpho-syntactic difficulties in DLD. However, any firm conclusions await assessments of statistical learning which have good test – retest reliability. Autistic children might plausibly tend to have difficulties with - or lack motivation for - engaging in shared intentionality. If verified, this could account for patterns of relatively spared nuts-and-bolts (structural, core) language in the face of pragmatic language difficulties. However, to date studies of autistic difficulties with shared intentionality have not stringently ruled out alternative explanations. Both DLD and autism are likely to exist on a continuum with the neuro-typical population. Future research needs to move towards designs which can more fully accommodate the vast heterogeneity that exists within both DLD and autism.
... Investigating structural constraints provides a lens into the knowledge that language users have about the constructions of their language and it enables us to probe how they comprehend and produce linguistic expressions. From a usage-based perspective (Bybee, 1985;Ellis, 2002;Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Gries and Ellis, 2015;Gries, 2005;MacWhinney et al., 2014), this dissertation tests and explores numerous factors to ultimately explain regularities and differences in crosslinguistic constituent ordering preferences. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that both the extent and direction of predictions by structural constraints depend on whether the ordering is in the preverbal or postverbal domains. ...
Why are languages the way they are? In this dissertation, I take up this question with
a focus on crosslinguistic constituent orderings. Specifically, borrowing insights from
language processing and language evolution, I ask what abstract constraints as well as
idiosyncratic biases govern language users’ choice among grammatical alternatives of the
same syntactic constructions across genres and languages. Adopting a data-driven ap-
proach, I explore three directions in particular. First, from Chapter 3 to Chapter 6,
taking advantage of large-scale multilingual corpora, I investigate and quantify the roles
of numerous factors that are motivated by long-standing linguistic theories as well as previ-
ous empirical findings in word order preferences. I show that while the effect of individual
factors depends on the ordering structures of different languages, generally the predictive
power and direction of these constraints are more dependent on whether the orderings
are in the preverbal or the postverbal domains. In addition, besides these abstract con-
straints that yield probabilistic typological tendencies, in Chapter 7 I ask why language
users have idiosyncratic ordering preferences and how regularization of this idiosyncrasy
arises diachronically, using Bayesian iterated learning models that simulate the process
of language change. Lastly, I adopt the theoretical framework of dependency syntax to
develop a dependency treebank for Hupa, an endangered Dene language of northwestern
California, as a way to formalize and model the syntax of indigenous languages.
... First, indirect communication has been theorized predominantly in the context of interadult conversations. However, interadult conversations are structurally different than parentchild conversations (Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003). In particular, questioning and repetition are especially prominent in conversations with children (Kilani-Schoch, Balciuniene, Korecky-Kroll, Laaha, & Dressler, 2009). ...
Parent-child discussions about emotion are a key socialization influence on children’s socio-emotional development. Extant research on parent-child discussions about emotion largely focuses on three main types of discourse content: parental elaboration, parental use of emotion labels and explanations, and parental emotion coaching. A new direction involves distinguishing between parents’ direct and indirect communication of discourse content. This distinction may be vital when considering the role of children’s communicative competence in their developing socio-emotional competence. We integrate literature on (in)direct communication, a concept prominent in linguistics, and emotion socialization. We argue that parental indirect communication can teach children communicative competence in the context of emotion talk. We discuss literature from the developmental and linguistic fields on parents’ teaching of communicative skills, as well as potential cognitive, relational, and emotional functions of indirectness, with communication and its socialization embedded within cultural context. Finally, we suggest new research directions examining the role of parental indirect communication in children’s socio-emotional development. By integrating developmental and linguistic literatures, we provide a novel approach to the study of parental emotion socialization through parent-child discourse.
... First, usagebased constructional approaches characterize the acquisition of the constructions as a gradual process of formulating abstract representations through language experience (Barlow & Kemmer, 2000;Bybee, 2008;Croft, 2001;Ellis, 2008;Goldberg, 1995Goldberg, , 2006Langacker, 2000;Tomasello, 2003). In an early acquisition, children accumulate information of individual linguistic input, characterized as concrete and highly frequent item-based constructions (Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003;Farrar, 1990Farrar, , 1992Redington, Chater, & Finch, 1998;Theakston, Lieven, Pine, & Rowland, 2001). Drawing statistical regularities from the input through a repeated exposure, children gradually move beyond the acquisition of discrete lexical items into internalizing abstract constructional representations generalized over individual language exemplars (Ellis, 2003;Goldberg, 1995;Langacker, 2008;MacWhinney, 2005;Tomasello, 2003). ...
... First, indirect communication has been theorized predominantly in the context of interadult conversations. However, interadult conversations are structurally different than parentchild conversations (Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003). In particular, questioning and repetition are especially prominent in conversations with children (Kilani-Schoch, Balciuniene, Korecky-Kroll, Laaha, & Dressler, 2009). ...
Parent‐child discussions about emotion are a key socialization influence on children’s socio‐emotional development. Extant research on parent‐child discussions about emotion largely focuses on three main types of discourse content: parental elaboration, parental use of emotion labels and explanations, and parental emotion coaching. A new direction involves distinguishing between parents’ direct and indirect communication of discourse content. This distinction may be vital when considering the role of children’s communicative competence in their developing socio‐emotional competence. We integrate literature on (in)direct communication, a concept prominent in linguistics, and emotion socialization. We argue that parental indirect communication can teach children communicative competence in the context of emotion talk. We discuss literature from the developmental and linguistic fields on parents’ teaching of communicative skills, as well as potential cognitive, relational, and emotional functions of indirectness, with communication and its socialization embedded within cultural context. Finally, we suggest new research directions examining the role of parental indirect communication in children’s socio‐emotional development. By integrating developmental and linguistic literatures, we provide a novel approach to the study of parental emotion socialization through parent‐child discourse.
... The advent of child-directed speech (CDS) corpora in recent decades containing years' worth of early linguistic input (e.g., CHILDES; MacWhinney, 2000) has facilitated significant progress in the field of native language acquisition (Nagy and Anderson, 1984;Pinker et al., 1987;Clahsen, 1997;Lewis and Elman, 2001;Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003;Mintz, 2003;Li et al., 2007;Goodman et al., 2008;Song et al., 2009;Tomasello, 2009;Perfors et al., 2011;Legate and Yang, 2013;Pearl and Sprouse, 2013;Yang, 2016;Kodner and Richter, 2020, inter alia). That said, no CDS corpora exist for the overwhelming majority of the world's languages, and none that do exist date back before the mid-20th century. ...
There is a long tradition in linguistics implicating child language acquisition as a major driver of language change, the classic intuition being that innovations or "errors" which emerge during the acquisition process may occasionally propagate through through speech communities and accumulate as change over time. In order to better understand this relationship, I establish new methods for reasoning about language acquisition in the past. I demonstrate that certain aspects of child linguistic experience may be reasonably estimated from historical corpora and employ a quantitative model of productivity learning to investigate the role acquisition played as the driver of four well-documented instances of phonological, syntactic, and morphological change: transparent /aɪ/-raising in modern North American English, the innovation and lexical spread of the to-dative in Middle English, the analogy of the lengthened *ē-grade in Proto-Germanic strong verbs, and the forms of the past participles and t-deverbals in Classical and Late Latin. These case studies provide new insights into the implications of sparsity and variation on the first language acquisition process, the role that acquisition plays as the actuator of community-level change, and the complementary nature of acquisition and diachronic evidence for synchronic representation.
This chapter provides an outline of research on grammatical development within the context of early bilingual education and offers an overview of language support programs and their impact on the early grammatical development of bilingual preschool children. In particular, this chapter addresses studies investigating how grammar develops within various constellations of first and second languages and examining the vulnerable areas of bilingual grammatical acquisition. The choice of studies was governed by their thematic matching, actuality, as well as their quality as defined via the peer-review process. Studies on children’s bilingual grammatical development in various countries give rise to diverse results, providing evidence of great variability. The overall picture of the results dealing with the impact of language support or language support programs is inconclusive. Some studies report positive effects of such programs on some (vulnerable) domains of grammatical development, while others do not. The reviewed studies often do not disentangle grammatical development from lexical development. Separating grammatical skills, given their complex composite nature, from general language proficiency skill has proven to be very difficult. The desideratum for future research in order to develop language support programs which will effectively boost early bilingual lexicon and grammar in preschool and primary school children is the following: to elaborate reliable language assessment instruments, to identify vulnerable domains in grammar production and perception (and comprehension), to establish the impact of background factors on these domains, and to perform intervention studies comparing the effectiveness of language support programs.
Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar a emergência de templates, rotinas articulatórias usadas como meio de expansão lexical, no desenvolvimento linguístico de uma criança bilíngue (sujeito B) falante do português europeu (PE) e do francês. Para tal, utilizamos o Paradigma da Complexidade (THELEN; SMITH, 1994; LARSEN-FREEMAN, 1997) por entender que o desenvolvimento linguístico se auto-organiza de maneira dinâmica, e proporciona a emergência de padrões resultantes do uso recorrente ao passar do tempo; o modelo da Gramática Radical de Construções (CROFT, 2001), para explicar como o desenvolvimento linguístico é norteado pelo léxico (construções) por meio da função comunicativa; o Modelo de Exemplares (BYBEE, 2010), para entender como esse léxico emerge, é atualizado e armazenado; e o Modelo de Fonologia Templática proposto por Vihman e colegas (VIHMAN e VELLEMAN, 2002; VIHMAN; CROFT, 2007) a fim de trazer elementos fonológicos para as construções a partir da análise de nossos dados. Assim, analisamos dados conversacionais e informações do contexto de desenvolvimento linguístico de B., durante o período de 1 a 3 anos de idade. O corpus desta pesquisa é constituído por dados observacionais e naturalísticos, coletados quinzenalmente em 40 de sessões de PE e 39 de francês, com duração de aproximadamente 30 minutos cada, transcritos e disponibilizados na plataforma CHILDES (MACWHINNEY, 2000). Após a análise de 9.919 tokens de PE e 6.470 de francês, os resultados desta pesquisa mostram que, B. produziu 5 tipos de templates durante as sessões de PE: CV.ˈCdentalV, CfrivativaVV, CV, CV.ˈCV, V; e 4 tipos de templates nas sessões de francês: CV, V, CV.'CV, CVV. Três templates foram comuns às duas línguas, demonstrando semelhança na emergência de padrões fonológicos no desenvolvimento bilíngue. Quanto à frequência, B. utilizou mais templates no francês (21 sessões) do que no PE (9 sessões), demonstrando a dominância do PE durante o período analisado, e confirmando que o uso mais sistemático e frequente de templates acontece na língua menos dominante. Em relação à influência tipológica da língua, concluímos que os templates não diferiram significativamente entre as duas línguas, embora a tipologia do PE e do francês tenham, de fato, exercido alguma influência na emergência dos padrões fonológicos. Esse fato, sob a ótica do arcabouço teórico utilizado na pesquisa, demonstra que a palavra como eixo norteador e unidade inicial do desenvolvimento linguístico, juntamente à função comunicativa, é um atrator muito mais estável do que a tipologia da língua no desenvolvimento bilíngue.
How individuals learn complex regularities in the environment and generalize them to new instances is a key question in cognitive science. Although previous investigations have advocated the idea that learning and generalizing depend upon separate processes, the same basic learning mechanisms may account for both. In language learning experiments, these mechanisms have typically been studied in isolation of broader cognitive phenomena such as memory, perception, and attention. Here, we show how learning and generalization in language is embedded in these broader theories by testing learners on their ability to chunk nonadjacent dependencies-a key structure in language but a challenge to theories that posit learning through the memorization of structure. In two studies, adult participants were trained and tested on an artificial language containing nonadjacent syllable dependencies, using a novel chunking-based serial recall task involving verbal repetition of target sequences (formed from learned strings) and scrambled foils. Participants recalled significantly more syllables, bigrams, trigrams, and nonadjacent dependencies from sequences conforming to the language's statistics (both learned and generalized sequences). They also encoded and generalized specific nonadjacent chunk information. These results suggest that participants chunk remote dependencies and rapidly generalize this information to novel structures. The results thus provide further support for learning-based approaches to language acquisition, and link statistical learning to broader cognitive mechanisms of memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Children often interpret first noun phrases (NP1s) as agents, which improves comprehension of actives but hinders passives. While children sometimes withhold the agent‐first bias, the reasons remain unclear. The current study tests the hypothesis that children default to the agent‐first bias as a “best guess” of role assignment when they face uncertainty about sentence properties. Thus, rather than always relying on early‐arriving cues, children can attend to different sentence cues across communicative contexts. To test this account, we manipulated interpretive uncertainty by varying cues to the discourse status of initial arguments (referring to new vs. given entities) and measured interpretation accuracy for active (where the agent‐first bias predicted verb morphology) and passive sentences (where the two conflicted). Across three experiments, we found that children relied on the agent‐first bias more when new discourse entities were signaled by definite NP1s, reference to unmentioned entities, and novel words. This, in turn, led to higher accuracy for actives relative to passives. In contrast, when given entities were implied through pronoun NP1s, reference to mentioned entities, and known words, children avoided the agent‐first bias and instead assigned roles using more reliable but later‐arriving verb morphology. This led to similar comprehension accuracy across constructions. These findings suggest that children simultaneously interpret relations between sentences (e.g., discourse continuity) and within sentences (e.g., role assignment), such that commitments to the former can influence parsing cues for the latter.
Learning in any domain depends on how the data for learning are represented. In the domain of language acquisition, children's representations of the speech they hear determine what generalizations they can draw about their target grammar. But these input representations change over development as a function of children's developing linguistic knowledge, and may be incomplete or inaccurate when children lack the knowledge to parse their input veridically. How does learning succeed in the face of potentially misleading data? We address this issue using the case study of “non‐basic” clauses in verb learning. A young infant hearing What did Amy fix? might not recognize that what stands in for the direct object of fix, and might think that fix is occurring without a direct object. We follow a previous proposal that children might filter nonbasic clauses out of the data for learning verb argument structure, but offer a new approach. Instead of assuming that children identify the data to filter in advance, we demonstrate computationally that it is possible for learners to infer a filter on their input without knowing which clauses are nonbasic. We instantiate a learner that considers the possibility that it misparses some of the sentences it hears, and learns to filter out those parsing errors in order to correctly infer transitivity for the majority of 50 frequent verbs in child‐directed speech. Our learner offers a novel solution to the problem of learning from immature input representations: Learners may be able to avoid drawing faulty inferences from misleading data by identifying a filter on their input, without knowing in advance what needs to be filtered.
It has long been believed across languages that the Agent‐First strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the number of overt arguments and the presence of case‐marking in Korean, an SOV language with case‐marking by dedicated markers. To investigate whether and how these cues affect the operation of this strategy, we measure children's comprehension of a transitive construction (with scrambling and omission of sentential components) in a novel experimental setting where arguments and case markers were obscured to varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find that children do not demonstrate the agent‐first interpretation strongly in the noun–verb pattern without case‐marking, showing their uncertainty about the thematic role of the nominal when it is both the only argument in the sentence and lacks case‐marking. They perform significantly better in the patterns with additional cues, the impact of which is asymmetric by age and by the nature of alignment between cues from word order and case‐marking. These findings suggest that, for Korean‐speaking children's comprehension of a transitive construction, the Agent‐First strategy is activated properly only in conjunction with other types of interpretive cues.
A longitudinal study of verb morphology in conversations between parents and a girl aged 22 to 36 months (1; 10 - 3; 0) confirms the assumption that the child responds to the typological characteristics of Slovenian and that morphological diversity promotes the development of distinctive functions in her speech. The paper uses a constructivist approach based on the assumptions of the theory of naturalness (Dressler et al. 1987) and distinguishes three stages in the morphological development of children's speech: premorphological, protomorphological and morphological (Dressler et al. 1997, Bittner et al. 2000, Laaha, et al. 2007). Based on the linguistic material of the girl, we distinguish three main steps in her early development of conjugation patterns.
At the pre-morphological developmental stage (i.e. up to the age of 2; 2), utterances without verbs predominate, and interjections occasionally appear in the role of action words. In rare contexts we find a handful of rote-learned verb forms of the indicative (3rd person singular) and imperative mood (2nd person singular). Unlike some other Slovenian children (cf. Kranjc, 1999; Rus, 2010), the girl rarely uses bare participles (e.g. čakala, engl. ‘wait’) or bare infinitives in this transitional period. The use of bare participles and infinitives in the early speech of Slovenian-speaking children seems to co-depend on the provided input morphology (ie child directed speech). According to Rus (2010), these constructions are more frequent in children's speech in Germanic and Romance languages. At the premorphological developmental stage, there are no formative oppositions, each verb appears in only one type.
At the transition between the pre- and protomorphological stage (between 2; 2 and 2; 5), we witness the first semantic oppositions between two verb forms, but only few of them meet the strict criteria for a miniparadigm. They are found first with the most common suppletive verbs (e.g. biti, imeti, iti, engl. ‘to be, to have, to go’) and to some extent also with verbs from productive and transparent micro classes (e.g. dati, papati, ninati, engl. ‘give, eat, sleep’).
At the protomorphological stage (i.e., approximately from age 2; 5.20 onwards), there is a noticeable expansion of semantic contrasts between verb forms and conjugation patterns, accompanied by increased average utterance length, increased number of verb (and noun) tokens and increased lexical diversity. The rapid increase in the number of verbs (verb spurt), which began at the transition between the pre- and protomorphological stage, continues at a similar rate (10 or more new verbs during a single session). The rise of verb lemmas and their tokens certainly indicate a close relationship between lexical and morphological development (cf. Bates et al. 1995). At the protomorphological level, formative oppositions spread to new verb classes. We can find analogies that reveal to us that the girl creatively transfers her knowledge of Slovenian morphology, which she acquired by choosing forms and patterns from the utterances of her interlocutors, to new verbs: e.g. the girl conjugates the irregular verb rezati (engl. ‘to cut’) in the same way as the above mentioned verbs dati, ninati or papati, ie according to a productive and transparent conjugation pattern). At the protomorphological stage, complex verb structures (descriptive participles on -l combined with the auxiliary biti, deontic modal verbs, past and future tense forms) also appear on a regular basis, although their miniparadigms are even less complete than those of the present tense forms. It is only from the age of 3; 0 onwards that the first prefix verb forms appear in the girl's utterances, which gives rise to the emergence of perfective and imperfective verb form oppositions.
Although words are often described as the basic building blocks of language, there is growing evidence that multiword sequences also play an integral role in language learning and processing. It is not known, however, whether children become sensitive to multiword information at an age when they are still building knowledge of individual words. Using a central fixation paradigm, the present study examined whether infants between 11 and 12 months (N = 36) distinguish between three-word sequences (trigrams) with similar substring frequencies but different multiword frequency in infant-directed speech (e.g., high frequency: ‘clap your hands’ vs. low frequency: ‘take your hands’). Infants looked significantly longer at frequent trigrams compared to infrequent ones. This provides the first evidence that infants at the cusp of one-word production are already sensitive to the frequency of multiword sequences, and suggests they represent linguistic units of varying sizes from early on, raising the need to evaluate knowledge of both words and larger sequences during development.
Although words are often described as the basic building blocks of language, there is growing evidence that multiword sequences also play an integral role in language learning and processing. It is still not known, however, whether children become sensitive to multiword information at an age when they are still building knowledge of individual words. Using a central fixation paradigm, the present study examined whether infants between 11 and 12 months (N=36) distinguish between three-word sequences (trigrams) with similar substring frequencies but different multiword frequency in infant-directed speech (e.g., high frequency: ‘clap your hands’ vs. low frequency: ‘take your hands’). Infants looked significantly longer at frequent trigrams compared to infrequent ones. This provides the first evidence that infants at the cusp of one-word production are already sensitive to the frequency of multiword sequences, and suggests they represent linguistic units of varying sizes from early on, raising the need to evaluate knowledge of both words and larger sequences during development.l
This study tests whether the usage-based concept of item-based schema can explain the development of constructions other than verb-argument constructions (VACs). Through a corpus study of 600 dislocations produced by two French children between age 1;7.12 and 2;5.11, and 600 from their input, we show that the concept of item-based schemas can indeed be extended to other types of constructions. We also show that the earliest item-based schemas produced by children are similar to specific syntactic featuress of dislocations in their input, and that the dislocations produced by the adults of our corpus can also be described in terms of item-based schemas. Based on these results, we make the hypothesis that the dislocations of adults may not necessarily be produced based on a more abstract construction, and that the radical exemplar model developed by Ambridge (2019) could also explain our data.
Bu çalışma, Türk ebeveynlerin bebek/çocuklarına yönelttiği dil kullanımlarının anlamsal özelliklerini kavramsal alanlar çerçevesinde ele almaktır. Türk ebeveynler çocuklarına hitap ederken hem sevgi sözcüklerini hem de saldırgan tutum ifadelerini kullanmaktadır. Bu durum, Aragon ve diğerleri (2015)’te açıklanan sevimli uyarana yönelik saldırgan tutum ile uyumludur. B/ÇYD içerisinde yer alan tüm sözel ifadeler eğretilemeyi açıklamak için kullanılan kavramsal alanlar (Lakoff ve Johnsen, 2003; Kövecses, 1986; 1990; 2004; 2010) ile açıklanabilir. Çalışma için 100 Türk ebeveyn ile görüşülmüş ve 3 soruluk bir açık-uçlu bire anket uygulanmıştır. Anketin sonucunda elde edilen veri tabanı nitel çözümlemeye alınmıştır. Çözümleme soncunda, doğrudan sevgi ifadelerinin SEVGİ ve KAP kavramsal alanları, çift-biçimli ‘yeme’ ile ilgili sözel ifadelerin DUYGUSAL İSTEK, AÇLIK ve KAP kavramsal alanları ve son olarak, saldırgan tutum ifade eden çift-biçimli sözel ifadelerin KAP ve CİNNET kavramsal alanları ile açıklanabildiği görülmüştür.
What aspects of connectionist models guarantee cognitive and linguistic outcomes? A range of computational and input assumptions are explored and the general approaches and implications of the accompanying articles are briefly reviewed.
Language research thrives on data collected from spontaneous interactions in naturally occurring situations. However, the process of collecting, transcribing, and analyzing naturalistic data can be extremely time-consuming and often unreliable. This book describes three basic tools for language analysis of transcript data by computer that have been developed in the context of the "Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES)" project. These are: the "CHAT" transcription and coding format, the "CLAN" package of analysis programs, and the "CHILDES" database. These tools have brought about significant changes in the way research is conducted in the child language field. They are being used with great success by researchers working with second language learning, adult conversational interactions, sociological content analyses, and language recovery in aphasia, as well as by students of child language development. The tools are widely applicable, although this book concentrates on their use in the child language field, believing that researchers from other areas can make the necessary analogies to their own topics. This thoroughly revised 2nd edition includes documentation on a dozen new computer programs that have been added to the basic system for transcript analysis. The most important of these new programs is the "CHILDES" Text Editor (CED) which can be used for a wide variety of purposes, including editing non-Roman orthographies, systematically adding codes to transcripts, checking the files for correct use of "CHAT," and linking the files to digitized audio and videotape. In addition to information on the new computer programs, the manual documents changed the shape of the "CHILDES/BIB" system--given a major update in 1994--which now uses a new computer database system. The documentation for the "CHILDES" transcript database has been updated to include new information on old corpora and information on more than a dozen new corpora from many different languages. Finally, the system of "CHAT" notations for file transcript have been clarified to emphasize the ways in which the codes are used by particular "CLAN" programs. The new edition concludes with a discussion of new directions in transcript analysis and links between the "CHILDES" database and other developments in multimedia computing and global networking. It also includes complete references organized by research topic area for the more than 300 published articles that have made use of the "CHILDES" database and/or the "CLAN" programs. LEA also distributes the "CLAN" programs and the complete "CHILDES" Database--including corpora from several languages and discourse situations--described in "The CHILDES Project." Be sure to choose the correct platform (IBM or Macintosh) for the "CLAN" programs; the "CHILDES" Database CD-ROM runs on both platforms.
[examine] the methodology and findings of research into effects of the linguistic environment, particularly on the rate of children's language development / discuss the type of evidence required for drawing conclusions about universal and facilitative processes, paying particular attention to the notion of causation, and evaluate the methodology of previous studies in the light of such requirements
child-directed speech and individual differences: the universals fallacy / inferring causation / the nature of the evidence for environmental effects / passive observation studies using correlational statistics / experimental designs in language acquisition research (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Previous studies have demonstrated that children are aware of the function morphemes in their language despite their failure to produce them. However, none of these studies tested whether children are aware of the linguistic contexts in which particular function morphemes occur. Only if children are aware of such co-occurrence patterns could they use function morphemes to determine the linguistic categories of words and phrases. Young 2-yr-olds demonstrated their awareness of function morpheme co-occurrence patterns by performing better in a picture identification task when the target word was preceded by a grammatical article than an ungrammatical auxiliary. Children who heard the sentences produced in a female voice performed better than those who heard a male voice, and this was especially true for sentences exhibiting the most regular co-occurrence patterns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Abstract Through the detailed investigation of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of one GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION , that containing the conjunction let alone, we explore the view that the realm of idiomaticity in a language includes a great deal that is productive, highly structured and worthy of serious grammatical investigation. It is suggested that an explanatory model of grammar,will include principles whereby,a language can associate semantic and pragmatic interpretation principles with syntactic configurations,larger and more,complex,than those definable by means,of single phrase structure rules. 1. Background
Language addressed to children, or 'Baby Talk', became the subject of research interest thirty years ago. Since then, the linguistic environment of infants and toddlers has been widely studied. Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition is an up-to-date statement of the facts and controversies surrounding 'Baby Talk', its nature and likely effects. With contributions from leading linguists and psychologists, it explores language acquisition in different cultures and family contexts, in typical and atypical learners, and in second and foreign language learners. It is designed as a sequel to the now famous Talking to Children, edited by Catherine Snow and Charles Ferguson, and Professor Snow here provides an introduction, comparing issues of importance in the field today with the previous concerns of researchers.
This study traces the development of interrogative structures in a single child from the first word combinations to age 3;8. It confirms earlier findings that child usage is highly formulaic and goes on to tackle the crucial issue of how children progress from rote-learned formulas to adult-like productivity. It is argued that this is accomplished by analysing formulas and extracting constructional schemas from them. Constructional schemas are partly underspecified symbolic units; unlike the abstract rules of formal linguistics, they are derived from actual expressions and have the same structure as their instantiations. They emerge spontaneously when the learner has acquired a sizeable repertoire of formulas. Their original function is to allow more efficient storage; but, once extracted, they are also available for the construction of novel expressions.
We ask how children solve the mapping problem for verb acquisition: how they pair concepts with their phonological realizations in their language. There is evidence that nouns but not verbs can be acquired by pairing each sound (e.g., ‘elephant’) with a concept inferred from the world circumstances in which that sound occurs. Verb meanings pose problems for this word-world mapping procedure, motivating a model of verb mapping mediated by attention to the syntactic structures in which verbs occur (Landau and Gleitman 1985, Gleitman 1990). We present an experiment examining the interaction between a conceptual influence (the bias to interpret observed situations as involving a casual agent) and syntactic influences, as these jointly contribute to children's conjectures about new verb meanings. Children were shown scenes ambiguous as to two interpretations (e.g., giving and getting or chasing and fleeing) and were asked to guess the meaning of novel verbs used to described the scenes, presented in varying syntactic contexts. Both conceptual and syntactic constraints influenced children's responses, but syntactic information largely overwhelmed the conceptual bias. This finding, with collatoral evidence, supports a syntax-mediated procedure for verb acquisition.
We present a series of three analyses of young children’s linguistic input to determine the distributional information it could plausibly offer to the process of grammatical category learning. Each analysis was conducted on four separate corpora from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) of speech directed to children under 2;5. We show that, in accord with other findings, a distributional analysis which categorizes words based on their co-occurrence patterns with surrounding words successfully categorizes the majority of nouns and verbs. In Analyses 2 and 3, we attempt to make our analyses more closely relevant to natural language acquisition by adopting more realistic assumptions about how young children represent their input. In Analysis 2, we limit the distributional context by imposing phrase structure boundaries, and find that categorization improves even beyond that obtained from less limited contexts. In Analysis 3, we reduce the representation of input elements which young children might not fully process and we find that categorization is not adversely affected: Although noun categorization is worse than in Analyses 1 and 2, it is still good; and verb categorization actually improves. Overall, successful categorization of nouns and verbs is maintained across all analyses. These results provide promising support for theories of grammatical category formation involving distributional analysis, as long as these analyses are combined with appropriate assumptions about the child learner’s computational biases and capabilities.
There has been a growing trend in recent years toward the attribution of adultlike syntactic categories to young, language-learning children. This has derived support from studies which claim to have found positive evidence for syntactic categories in the speech of young children (e.g., Valian, 1986). However, these claims contradict the findings of previous research which have suggested that the categories underlying children's early multiword speech are much more limited in scope (e.g., Braine, 1976). The present study represents an attempt to differentiate and test these models of early multiword speech: focusing on the syntactic category of determiner, we investigated the extent to which 11 children showed overlap in the contexts in which they used different determiner types in their early multiword corpora. The results demonstrated that, although children do use determiners with a semantically heterogeneous collection of different noun types, there is very little evidence that they know anything about the relationship between the different determiner types, and thus there is no real case for the attribution of a syntactic determiner category. Indeed, this pattern of determiner use seems perfectly consistent with a limited-scope formula account of children's early multiword speech, as proposed by Braine (1976). These findings suggest that the development of an adultlike determiner category may be a gradual process, one involving the progressive broadening of the range of lexically specific frames in which different determiners appear, and are broadly consistent with a number of recent constructivist models of children's early grammatical development.
F. LOWENTHAL University of Mons Mons, Belgium In September 1980, researchers from many different countries and working in disciplines as varied as philosophy, psychology, neurology, mathematics, education, linguistics, sociology, and others we forget to mention, again met in Mons to discuss problems concerning Language and Language Acquisition. Conflicting opinions among researchers not only from different disciplines, but also within a same discipline, led to many a lively discussion. This book attempts to recreate the atmosphere of the conference, by reproducing the different papers, some of which were rewritten after the initial presentation and discussion-session, and by giving a summary of each discussion session to enable the reader to understand how each participant reacted. Obviously, we accept full responsibility for these summaries: we hope we have understood correctly what each participant meant. This also holds for the special session devoted to an attempt to define the concept of "language". We suggest that further meetings should study language and context simultaneously, within the framework of a "CONTEXTUAL LINGUISTICS".
Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Aspect (2000)
Recent years have seen a revolution in our knowledge of how children learn to think and speak. In this volume, leading scholars from these rapidly evolving fields of research examine the relationship between child language acquisition and cognitive development. At first sight, advances in the two areas seem to have moved in opposing directions: the study of language acquisition has been especially concerned with diversity, explaining how children learn languages of widely different types, while the study of cognitive development has focused on uniformity, clarifying how children build on fundamental, presumably universal concepts. This book brings these two vital strands of investigation into close dialogue, suggesting a synthesis in which the process of language acquisition may interact with early cognitive development. It provides empirical contributions based on a variety of languages, populations and ages, and theoretical discussions that cut across the disciplines of psychology, linguistics and anthropology.
A fundamental task of language acquisition is to extract abstract algebraic rules. Three experiments show that 7-month-old
infants attend longer to sentences with unfamiliar structures than to sentences with familiar structures. The design of the
artificial language task used in these experiments ensured that this discrimination could not be performed by counting, by
a system that is sensitive only to transitional probabilities, or by a popular class of simple neural network models. Instead,
these results suggest that infants can represent, extract, and generalize abstract algebraic rules.
Which words do children learn earliest, and why? These questions bear on how humans organize the world into semantic concepts, and how children acquire this parsing . A useful perspective is to think of how bits of experience are conflated into the same concept . One possibility is that children are born with the set of conceptual conflations that figures in human language . But assuming (as we will) that most semantic concepts are learned, not innate, there remain two possibilities . First, aspects of perceptual experience could form inevitable conflations that are conceptualized and lexicalized as unified concepts. In this case, we would have cognitive dominance : concepts arise from the cognitive-perceptual sphere and are simply named by language. A second possibility is linguistic dominance : the world presents perceptual bits whose clumping is not pre-ordained, and language has a say in how the bits get conflated into concepts . We propose that both cognitive and linguistic dominance apply, but to different degrees for different kinds of words (Gentner 1981, 1982). Some bits of experience naturally form themselves into inevitable (preindividuated) concepts, while other bits are able to enter into several different possible combinations.
Two experiments showed that 2.5‐year‐olds, as well as older children, interpret new verbs in accord with their number of arguments. When interpreting new verbs describing the same motion events, children who heard transitive sentences were more likely than were children who heard intransitive sentences to assume that the verb referred to the actions of the causal agent. The sentences were designed so that only the number of noun‐phrase arguments differed across conditions (e.g. She’s pilking her over there versus She’s pilking over there). These experiments isolate number of noun‐phrase arguments (or number of nouns) as an early constraint on sentence interpretation and verb learning, and provide strong evidence that children as young as 2.5 years of age attend to a sentence’s overall structure in interpreting it.
The assumption that language acquisition is relatively independent of the amount and kind of language input must be assessed in light of information about the speech actually heard by young children. The speech of middle-class mothers to 2-year-old children was found to be simpler and more redundant than their speech to 10-year-old children. The mothers modified their speech less when talking to children whose responses they could not observe, indicating that the children played some role in eliciting the speech modifications. Task difficulty did not contribute to the mothers' production of simplified, redundant speech. Experienced mothers were only slightly better than nonmothers in predicting the speech-style modifications required by young children. These findings indicate that children who are learning language have available a sample of speech which is simpler, more redundant, and less confusing than normal adult speech.
There have been many studies of children learning to talk, but perhaps none as comprehensive - in terms of the number of children involved, the period of continuous observation and the scope of the analysis - as the Bristol Study of Language Development. This is the first full-length volume to be written by members of the research team and it is a fundamental study of language development from infancy to primary school. It synthesises the research to date and discusses some key socio- and psycholinguistic themes with reference to transcribed excerpts from spontaneous conversations recorded by the team and to experimental data. The authors' central argument is that conversation provides the natural context of language development and that the child learns through exploring his world of interaction with other people. The quality of learning is seen to depend particularly on the strategies that adults employ to develop and extend children's contributions to interaction. This has important practical implications for the transition from home to school, and the second part of the book examines the differences and similarities between the talk that goes on in these two environments. The final chapter considers the development of literacy. The model of language development presented here will make stimulating and challenging reading for a wide range of sociologists, psychologists and educationalists as well as being of particular interest to linguists.
During the second year of his daughter's life, Michael Tomasello kept a detailed diary of her language, creating a rich database. He made a careful study of how she acquired her first verbs and analysed the role that verbs played in her early grammatical development. Using a Cognitive Linguistics framework, the author argues persuasively that the child's earliest grammatical organization is verb-specific (the Verb Island hypothesis). He argues further that early language is acquired by means of very general cognitive and social-cognitive processes, especially event structures and cultural learning. The richness of the database and the analytical tools used make First Verbs a particularly useful and important book for developmental psychologists, linguists, language development researchers and speech pathologists.
A discussion of English native-language vocabulary acquisition in children takes a closer look at the assumption that vocabulary is learned by common association of word with event, focusing on the acquisition of verb meanings. The intuitive power of the view that words are learned by noticing real-world contingencies for their use is acknowledged, but it is pointed out that such mapping, unaided, is in principle insufficiently constrained to explain how the child maps verbs (as phonological objects) with their meanings. The solution offered is that semantically relevant information in the syntactic structures can rescue observational learning from experiential pitfalls. Evidence is offered that children deduce meanings from their knowledge of structural-semantic relations. Limitations in data, need for further information about cross-linguistic correspondences, and problems occurring in the analysis are briefly addressed. A 59-item bibliography is included. (MSE)
[addresses] the following questions / what is the range of environments within which children learn to talk / do adults from other cultures and subcultures see themselves as adjusting their language to children and, if so, to what purpose / how, if at all, might these adjustments relate to the child's task of learning language structure / interested in working-class and/or ethnic-minority groups learning English and other languages, in children learning language in non-industrially advanced, traditional cultures and in children learning languages other than English from the same type of middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Speech in children should be viewed as a developing skill. During acquisition the child becomes increasingly capable of organizing linguistic structure at a number of different levels concurrently. One boy seemed to have strategies for simplifying the tasks of speech reception and production. He would incorporate the immediately prior utterance, or some portion of it, intact into his utterance as if to avoid structuring his entire utterance from scratch. Another strategy was to extend his repertoire of structures to express more complex ideas simply by combining two existing structures without reordering any of the elements to match adult syntax. If such strategies are widespread they may account for the recorded facts about the development of children's question forms. Psychological variables, commonly called performance factors, should not be regarded merely as putting restrictions on the extent to which a child's linguistic knowledge can be expressed. Rather, they affect the manner in which syntactic structures develop. Just as the acquisition of linguistic structure is affected by psychological processes, so is the efficiency of these processes affected in its turn by the child's growing linguistic knowledge.
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.
We examine a corpus of English oral narratives in order to explore the relation between intonation units (IUs) and grammatical units (GUs). IUs are almost always grammatical units (GUs) - the ''full GU condition'' but the mapping is not one-to-one. We examine what causes a GU to be broken across IUs and identify three major constraints: parallelism syntactic complexity in general, and distance. The converse of these principles, closeness and simplicity determines the assignment of two GUs to a single IU. We examine the consequences of our analysis for grammaticalization theory, which includes the evolution of syntactic closeness, and for construction grammar and related processing models, which relate syntactic simplicity inversely to token frequency. The propose the ''IU storage hypothesis'' to link together IUs, grammatical simplicity, and high token frequency.
In this paper we take the position that there are many degrees of constituency and that these derive in a direct manner from the frequency with which elements are used together: elements that are frequently found next to each other show a tighter constituent structure than those that collocate less frequently. We use both phonological and functional evidence from conversation to argue that repetition conditions chunking (Haiman 1994), sometimes overriding the syntactic and semantic logic of the organization of utterances. Our study examines the reduction of don't in American English conversation. We find that don't is reduced the most in the contexts in which it occurs the most, that is, after I and before certain verbs, such as know. While a generalized constituent structure may be an emergent property arising from many analogous utterances, specific combinations that are frequently used may diverge from the general pattern because frequency conditions autonomy in storage and renders internal analysis unnecessary. This phenomenon reveals the essential role of repetition in the creation of constituent structure: while semantic and pragmatic factors determine what occurs together in discourse, the actual repetition of stretches of talk triggers the chunking mechanism that binds them into constituents.
Three models of morphological storage and processing are compared: the dual-processing model of Pinker, Marcus and colleagues, the connectionist model of Marchman, Plunkett, Seidenberg and others, and the network model of Bybee and Langacker. In line with predictions made in the latter two frameworks, type frequency of a morphological pattern is shown to be important in determining productivity. In addition, the paper considers the nature of lexical schemas in the network model, which are of two types: source-oriented and product-oriented. The interaction of phonological properties of lexical patterns with frequency and the interaction of type and token frequency are shown to influence degree of productivity. Data are drawn from English, German, Arabic and Hausa.
The speech register used by adults with infants and young children, known as motherese, is linguistically simplified and characterized by high pitch and exaggerated intonation. This study investigated infant selective listening to motherese speech. The hypothesis tested was that infants would choose to listen more often to motherese when given the choice between a variety of natural infant-directed and adult-directed speech samples spoken by four women unfamiliar to the subjects. Forty-eight 4-month-old infants were tested in an operant auditory preference procedure. Infants showed a significant listening preference for the motherese speech register.
Many theorists have dismissed a priori the idea that distributional information could play a significant role in syntactic category acquisition. We demonstrate empirically that such information provides a powerful cue to syntactic category membership, which can be exploited by a variety of simple, psychologically plausible mechanisms. We present a range of results using a large corpus of child-directed speech and explore their psychological implications. While our results show that a considerable amount of information concerning the syntac-tic categories can be obtained from distributional information alone, we stress that many other sources of information may also be potential contributors to the identification of syntactic classes.
At head of title: Center for the Study of Reading Bibliography: p. 62-73 Research was conducted under a contract from the National Institute of Education under contract no. HEW-NIE-C-400-76-0116