The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions.

Choosing appropriate referring expressions requires assessing whether a referent is “available” to the addressee either perceptually or through discourse. In Study 1, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, chose different referring expressions (noun vs. pronoun) depending on whether their addressee could see the intended referent or not. In Study 2, in more neutral discourse contexts than previous studies, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds clearly differed in their use of referring expressions according to whether their addressee had already mentioned a referent. Moreover, 2-yearolds responded with more naming constructions when the referent had not been mentioned previously. This suggests that, despite early social–cognitive developments, (a) it takes time tomaster the given/new contrast linguistically, and (b) children understand the contrast earlier based on discourse, rather than perceptual context

How Do Children Combine Pointing and Language in the Earliest Stages of Development? A Case Study of Russian and Chintang

Learning to establish joint reference is an important milestone of communicative and linguistic development. Pointing is one of the first entry points into this process, since gestures often precede verbal communication. During early development, as well as later language use, pointing and linguistic utterances interact in many ways, complementing each other. However, little is known about the development of this relationship during development. In this paper, we focus on the development of the co-occurrence of finger pointing and accompanying utterances in two different cultures: Russia and Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Eastern Nepal). We show that despite the differences in environment, the development of finger pointing and accompanying language use show substantial similarities. Early on, a larger proportion of points is not accompanied by language. As the children's linguistic abilities develop, children first use language to specify what is being pointed at, and later elaborate on some aspect of the referent

Children’s understanding of first and third person perspectives in complement clauses and false belief tasks

De Villiers (2007) and others have claimed that children come to understand false beliefs as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker’s epistemic attitude toward that proposition. In the current study, English-speaking children (N=64) of 3 and 4 years of age were asked to interpret propositional attitude constructions with a first-person or a third-person subject of the propositional attitude (e.g., I think the sticker is in the red box or The cow thinks the sticker is in the red box, respectively). They were also assessed for an understanding of their own and others’ false beliefs. We found that 4-year-olds showed a better understanding of both third-person propositional attitude constructions and false belief than their younger peers. No significant developmental differences were found for first-person propositional attitude constructions. The older children also showed a better understanding of their own than of others’ false beliefs. In addition, regression analyses suggest that the older children’s comprehension of their own false belief was mainly related to their understanding of third-person propositional attitude constructions. These results indicate that we need to take a closer look at the propositional attitude constructions that are supposed to support children’s false-belief reasoning. Children may come to understand their own and others’ beliefs in different ways, and this may affect both their use and understanding of propositional attitude constructions and their performance in various types of false-belief tasks

Converging and competing cues in the acquisition of syntactic structures: The conjoined agent intransitive

ABSTRACTIn two studies we use a pointing task to explore developmentally the nature of the knowledge that underlies three- and four-year-old children's ability to assign meaning to the intransitive structure. The results suggest that early in development children are sensitive to a first-noun-as-causal-agent cue and animacy cues when interpreting conjoined agent intransitives. The same children, however, do not appear to rely exclusively on the number of nouns as a cue to structure meaning. The pattern of results indicates that children are processing a number of cues when inferring the meaning of the conjoined agent intransitive. These cues appear to be in competition with each other and the cue that receives the most activation is used to infer the meaning of the construction. Critically, these studies suggest that children's knowledge of syntactic structures forms a network of organization, such that knowledge of one structure can impact on interpretation of other structures.</jats:p

Children aged 2

The current study used a forced choice pointing paradigm to examine whether English children aged 2 ; 1 can use abstract knowledge of the relationship between word order position and semantic roles to make an active behavioural decision when interpreting active transitive sentences with novel verbs, when the actions are identical in the target and foil video clips. The children pointed significantly above chance with novel verbs but only if the final trial was excluded. With familiar verbs the children pointed consistently above chance. Children aged 2 ; 7 did not show these tiring effects and their performance in the familiar and novel verb conditions was always equivalen

The Linguistic Implications of Early and Systematic Variation in Child Language Development

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1989), pp. 203-21

The influence of pragmatic function on children's comprehension of complex because- and if-sentences

Introduction: In complex adverbial sentences, the connectives because and if can perform different pragmatic functions (e.g. Content, Speech-Act), although this is often overlooked in studies investigating children's acquisition of these connectives. In this study, we investigated whether pragmatic variation is responsible for some of the difficulty young children have in understanding because- and if-sentences and tested the extent to which patterns of acquisition are related to the cognitive complexity or input frequency of the different pragmatic types.Methods: Ninety-two children (aged 3–5; F = 39) and 20 adults (F = 12) took part in a forced-choice picture task where they had to identify correct pictures after hearing Content and Speech-Act because- and if-sentences.Results: Results showed that children were most accurate on the sentence type where cognitive simplicity and input frequency converge (If Content), but this pattern was largely driven by the girls in the study. For response times, children were fastest with the least cognitively complex sentence types. However, for because Speech-Act sentences, there was an inverse relationship between response time and input frequency.Discussion: Taken together, these findings suggest that neither account (cognitive complexity or input frequency) can fully explain the findings. Instead, we suggest that the relative contributions of both factors are best understood in terms of the relevance of these utterances to children and the precise contexts in which children hear these utterances produced.<br/

Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions:an analysis of two dense corpora

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials “after”, “before”, “because”, and “if” in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00–4;07). In comparing mothers’ and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations