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Biomedical subjects

Marina Vasilyeva

Publications and source records attributed to Marina Vasilyeva.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2002

Language input and child syntax.

Existing work on the acquisition of syntax has been concerned mainly with the early stages of syntactic development. In the present study we examine later syntactic development in children. Also, existing work has focused on commonalities in the emergence of syntax. Here we explore individual differences among children and their relation to variations in language input. In Study 1 we find substantial individual differences in children's mastery of multiclause sentences and a significant relation between those differences and the proportion of multiclause sentences in parent speech. We also find individual differences in the number of noun phrases in children's utterances and a significant relation between those differences and the number of noun phrases in parent speech. In Study 2 we find greater syntactic growth over a year of preschool in classes where teachers' speech is more syntactically complex. The implications of our findings for the understanding of the sources of syntactic development are discussed.

Child Language↗
PubMed2002

Solving spatial tasks with unaligned layouts: the difficulty of dealing with conflicting information.

Previous research has shown that preschool children have difficulty using relational information in spatial tasks. The present study investigates whether this difficulty is due, in part, to children's inability to deal with situations of conflict where both objective and egocentric cues are available and point to different responses. Two studies were conducted to compare performance in the presence versus absence of conflicting cues. In Study 1, 40 four-year-olds had to locate an object in a single layout presented from different perspectives. In Study 2, 39 four-year-olds had to transfer locational information between two unaligned layouts. The presence of conflict significantly affected children's performance in both studies. The results are discussed in the context of similar findings in other cognitive domains.

Child↗