Acquisition of bi-transitive sentences: pre-linguistic determinants of language acquisition.
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Explore the source record for details and available documents.
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Three Canadian-English infants and three Parisian-French infants were filmed bi-weekly for three to five months, from the age of 0;9 or 0;11 until 1;2, at home in naturalistic interaction with a parent. Their babbled utterances were transcribed phonetically and categorized according to consonant-type and vowel-type. The contexts for each utterance were described in terms of both specific and more general contextual categories. Observed frequencies of co-occurrences between phonetic and contextual categories were compared to expected frequencies, and deviations were considered to be patterns in babbling. Patterning increased after age 1;0 for most infants, and from 1% to 30% of each infant's babbled utterances recurred in particular contexts with a greater-than-expected frequency. Similarities in patterns were found both within and across language groups. These sound-meaning correspondences in babbling are viewed as continuous with early situation-bound meaning in words.
Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother-child dyads each; ages of children between 0;11 and 1;8) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignment of words to lexical and functional item categories. Distributional, phonological, and acoustic measures were analysed. In each language, lexical and functional items (i.e. syllabic morphemes) differed significantly on numerous measures. Despite differences in mean values between categories, distributions of values typically displayed substantial overlap. However, simulations with self-organizing neural networks supported the conclusion that although individual dimensions had low cue validity, in each language multidimensional constellations of presyntactic cues are sufficient to guide assignment of words to rudimentary grammatical categories.
Derived nominals are abstract nouns derived from verbs and adjectives by nominalization. This study traces the route taken by Hebrew-speaking children in the acquisition of Hebrew derived nominals (HDNs) of two types: action nominals which conform in structure to the small set of obligatory verb patterns (binyanim) (e.g., ktiva 'writing') and deverbal nouns, which belong to separate nominal patterns (e.g. maga 'touch'). One hundred native speakers of Hebrew (children aged 5, 8, 11 and 15, and adults) were tested on comprehension and production of HDNs. The test items were grouped by binyan patterns and by morphological regularity. Results showed that acquisition of HDNs starts at about age 8 and is not complete by age 15, and that task type, binyan pattern and morphological regularity all affect ease of acquisition. We consider the strategies employed in the course of acquisition of HDNs and offer an explanation for this late acquisition which requires a vast amount of prior integrated knowledge.
This work reports longitudinal evaluation of the temporal relationships between gaze and vocal behavior addressed to interactive partners (mother or experimenter) in a free-play situation. Thirteen children were observed at the ages of 1;0 and 1;8 during laboratory sessions, and video recordings of free-play interactions with mother and a female experimenter were coded separately for children's vocal behavior (vocalizations and words) and gaze toward their interactive partners. The difference between the observed and expected co-occurrence of these two communicative behaviors was evaluated by transformation into z-scores. The most important findings are related to differences in the temporal relationship observed at age 1;0 between gaze and vocalizations and at age 1;8 between gaze and words. At the earlier age, the infants who exhibited greater coordination between gaze and vocal behavior than was expected by chance (z-score > +1.96) preferred to look at the interlocutor at the beginning of the vocal turn. Instead, when they were older and began to produce words, they frequently looked at the interlocutor at the end of the vocal turn. These results are interpreted as referring to characteristics of conversational competence in the prelinguistic and lingustic periods. Moreover, looking at the interlocutor at the beginning of the vocal turn at age 1;0 was found to be related to language production at age 1;8, highlighting a significant relationship between conversational competence during the prelinguistic period and language acquisition.
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Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information and perceptual similarity on preschoolers' interpretations of labels. In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were less likely to interpret 2 labels for animals as referring to mutually exclusive categories: when the animals were said to share internal, rather than superficial, properties and when the animals were perceptually similar rather than dissimilar. In Study 2, neither internal nor functional property information influenced 4-year-olds' interpretations of labels for artifacts. Studies 3 and 4 provide baseline data, demonstrating that the domain differences were not due to prior differences in children's lexical knowledge in the 2 domains. These results suggest that children have essentialist beliefs about animals, but not about artifacts, and that these beliefs interact with children's assumptions about word meaning in determining their interpretations of labels.
Most theoretical proposals considering effects of language on similarity assume that labels affect similarity in a qualitative all-or-nothing manner. This article proposes another theoretical alternative--a model of the label as a discrete attribute of an object. According to this model, the relative weight of labels decreases with the child's age. Predictions derived from the model were tested in 3 experiments. In these experiments, children aged 6-12 years were presented with triads of schematic faces and were asked to make similarity judgments. Similarity of faces within the triads was manipulated via systematic variation of distinct facial features. It was found that (a) labels contribute to similarity judgment in a quantifiable manner, (b) labels' weight decreased with age, and (c) effects of labels are likely to stem from the cross-modality of labels. These results are discussed in relation to theories of development of categorization.
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