The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking 6- to 8-year old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several referents) met the pragmatic assumptions of relativisation. Comprehension of the main and relative clauses of centre-embedded and right-branching structures was compared for each context. Pragmatically-appropriate contexts exerted a positive effect on relative clause comprehension, but children with higher memory spans demonstrated a further benefit for main clauses. Comprehension for centre-embedded main clauses was found to be very poor, independently of either context or memory span. The results suggest that children have access to adult-like linguistic processing mechanisms, and that sensitivity to extra-linguistic cues is evident in young children and develops as cognitive capacity increases

Mental files: Developmental integration of dual naming and theory of mind

We use mental files theory to provide an integral theory of children’s diverse dual naming problems and why these problems are overcome when children pass the false belief test. When an object is encountered under different appearances or given different verbal labels, two distinct representations (mental files) may be deployed for that single object. The resulting files refer to the same object but capture different perspectives on the object. Such coreferential files can thus be used to represent people’s differing perspectives (e.g., belief). Typically the existence of different files indicates the existence of two separate objects. To mark that only a single object is involved, coreferential files need to be linked. Development of the ability to link files provides a powerful developmental explanation for success on dual labelling and perspective tasks at the same age, around 4 years: processing identity statements, overcoming mutual exclusivity (accepting different labels for an object), visual perspective taking, and understanding differences of belief. Mental files also provide a new framework for understanding conceptual pacts and their relation to mutual exclusivity in children and adults

The development of conversational and communication skills

This thesis investigates the development of children's conversational and communication skills. This is done by investigating both communicative process and outcome in two communication media: face-to-face interaction and audio-only interaction. Communicative outcome is objectively measured by assessing accuracy of performance of communication tasks. A multi-level approach to the assessment of communicative process is taken. Non-verbal aspects of process which are investigated are gaze and gesture. Verbal aspects of process range from global linguistic assessments such as length of conversational turn, to a detailed coding of utterance function according to Conversational Games analysis. The results show that children of 6 years and less do not adapt to the loss of visual signals in audio-only communication, and their performance suffers. Both the structure of children's dialogues and their use of visual signals were found to differ from that of adults. It is concluded that both verbal and non-verbal communication strategies develop into adulthood. Successful integration of these different aspects of communication is central to being an effective communicator

Intergenerational transmission of attachment: A move to the contextual level

Wetensch. publ. non-refereedFaculteit der Sociale Wetenschappe

Intonation in Language Acquisition - Evidence from German

This dissertation studies the role of intonation in language acquisition. After a general introduction about the phonetic and phonological aspects of intonation and its different forms and functions within language, two different models of language acquisition and the role of intonation within these two models will be presented. Following this, I will present and discuss empirical data on the question, whether young German learning children use intonation in order to acquire language. Two comprehension studies will be presented. Here, I concentrate on the question whether children understand the referential function of intonation and whether they can use this knowledge in order to learn new words. Additionally, I will present empirical evidence that focuses on the question whether children use intonation in resolving participant roles in complex syntactic constructions as well as in resolving syntactic ambiguities development. Finally, I will present two production studies that investigate the prosodic realization of target referents that have different informational statuses within a discourse from both young children and parents, talking to their children. Overall, the data from these studies suggest that language learning children do use the intonational form of an utterance from early on in order to understand another´s intention. Young language learning children do understand that a certain intonational form conveys a function. Additionally, the studies presented in this thesis suggest that children also use intonation in order to convey their own communicative intentions. Thus, intonation is an important instrument for young children‘s language acquisition as they use the information that is provided by intonation, not only to learn words and to combine them to syntactic constructions, but also for the understanding of paralinguistic properties of language. The findings of the studies presented in this thesis are discussed with regard to different theories of language acquisition. Additionally, I will give insight into the understanding of the development of young children´s use of intonation

Anaphoric resolution of zero pronouns in Chinese in translation and reading comprehension

The primary aim of the thesis is to investigate some of the processes of reading Chinese text by means of comparing and analysing approximately 100 parallel translations of four texts from Chinese to English. The translations are answers to A Level examination questions. The focus of the investigation is interpretation of the zero pronoun, a common phenomenon in Chinese, which often requires explicitation when translated into English. The secondary aim is to show how translation gives evidence of comprehension, as shown by the variation in interpretation of zero pronouns. The thesis reviews relevant psycholinguistic research into reading, particularly reading of Chinese text. This is followed by reviews of relevant research into translation as a reading activity, and a discussion of its role in language teaching and testing.The core of the thesis is the discussion of the zero pronoun in Chinese, including discussion of anaphoric choice - the writer's decision on when to use zero in preference to an explicit anaphoric form - and of anaphoric resolution - how a reader decides what a zero pronoun refers to. Anaphoric resolution may be problematic for less experienced readers of Chinese owing to its lack of rich morphological inflection which, in other languages, provides the reader with information. Some of the key ideas on anaphoric choice and resolution are then applied to the analysis of the data in the parallel translations. It would appear that factors in Chinese texts which have an effect on comprehending zero pronouns are antecedent distance, topic persistence, abstraction, multiplicity of arguments and the meaning of the verb. Characteristics of the reader which may affect comprehension of the zero pronoun include personal schemata which may lead to elaborative inferences. On the basis of the data I suggest that mark schemes could be devised on a scalar system encompassing optimal solution, proximal solution and nonsolution, which might help to solve the problem of variability in marking translation.A by-product of the thesis, and an avenue for further research, is the apparent close relationship between idea units, clause length, punctuation breaks and antecedent distance in Chinese texts and saccade length and working memory capacity in the reader of Chinese

The Utilization of Communicational Cues by One- and Two-Year-Old Children

The relationships between three models for describing pragmatic response to utterances were surveyed and the application of these models to young children\u27s response patterns evaluated. Of particular interest was how children might discriminate action-directive and information-testing usage of language. In order to empirically test the validity of these models, sixteen one- and two-year-old children were visited in their homes. Each child participated in two video recorded play sessions with an experimenter, during which he or she was asked complex What-questions that could take either informational or action responses. Gestural accompaniments and preceding discourse were systematically varied in Experiment I. Each child was also given the opportunity to respond to routine directive and testing speech forms. In Experiment II, the experimenter asked the What-questions while the child was looking at irrelevant toys and again while the child was looking at relevant pictures. In Experiment I, children responded appropriately to the routine speech forms, but treated complex What-questions as ambiguous. Of special interest, children often responded with answers which combined informational and directive interpretations. Some aspects of context also affected responses to complex What-questions. The presence of a gesture prompted responses which tend towards nonverbal expression (orienting, acting). The toy activity in which a child was engaged affected the rate of action responding, but did not affect other aspects of response. The pragmatic function of the discourse preceding target questions had no effect on children\u27s responses. Two-year-olds gave more responses that combined or conflated action and informing, and gave more simultaneous response combinations, than did one-year-olds. Two-year-olds, but not one-year-olds, responded to the presence of a gesture by doubling their base rate of responses which contain both action and informing. The linguistic sophistication of the child appeared to be less strongly related to response than was chronological age. These results indicate an early sensitivity to wording, and an increasing ability to integrate linguistic and nonlinguistic sources of information. Overall, the results support a model in which children are sensitive to both pragmatic structures and communicative cues

Common Development of Theory of Mind and Referent Selection

Within a given conversation, children appear to think of labels as mutually exclusive. For instance, if they are presented with a familiar (e.g. shoe) and an unfamiliar object (e.g. whisk) and then are asked to pick the referent of a novel name (e.g. ‘Where is the hinkel?’), they choose the novel object. Various theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon and claim that it is a word- learning strategy. The aim of the present thesis is to demonstrate that the difficulty in using multiple labels is the result of the inability to understand perspective. 331 children predominantly between the ages of 3 and 5 years, were tested on a variety of referent selection tasks assessing their metalinguistic awareness, and theory of mind tasks assessing their metacognitive abilities. Results showed that 3- to 4-year-olds resisted applying two labels to the same object and applied the second name to un- named objects. In contrast, 5- to 6-year-olds accepted both labels significantly above chance. The likelihood of a child applying two names to one object was strongly related to theory of mind performance and remained robust even after partialing out age and verbal mental age. Results were extended to two other populations; bilingual and ASD children. The present thesis showed that children overcome the confusion multiple labels bring once they develop an understanding of perspective

Effects of Prosodic and Lexical Constraints on Parsing in Young Children (and Adults)

Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89134; Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology, 49(3), 238-299]. This pattern is consistent with either a modular parsing system driven by stored lexical information or an interactive system which has yet to acquire low-validity referential constraints. In two experiments we explored whether children could use a third constraint-prosody-to resolve globally ambiguous prepositional-phrase attachments ("You can feel the frog with the feather"). Four to six-year-olds and adults were tested using the visual world paradigm. In both groups the fixation patterns were influenced by lexical cues by around 200 ms after the onset of the critical PP-object noun ("feather"). In adults the prosody manipulation had an effect in this early time window. In children the effect of prosody was delayed by approximately 500 ms. The effects of lexical and prosodic cues were roughly additive: prosody influenced the interpretation of utterances with strong lexical cues and lexical information had an effect on utterances with strong prosodic cues. We conclude that young children, like adults, can rapidly use both of these information sources to resolve structural ambiguities.Psycholog