Stylistic variation at the ''single-word'' stage: Relations between maternal speech characteristics and children's vocabulary composition and usage

Item does not contain fulltextIn this study we test a number of different claims about the nature of stylistic variation at the ''single-word'' stage by examining the relation between variation in early vocabulary composition, variation in early language use, and variation in the structural and functional properties of mothers' child-directed speech. Maternal-report and observational data were collected for 26 children at 10, 50, and 100 words. These were then correlated with a variety of different measures of maternal speech at 10 words. The results show substantial variation in the percentage of common nouns and unanalyzed phrases in children's early vocabularies, and significant relations between this variation and the way in which language is used by the child. They also reveal significant relations between the way in which mothers use language at 10 words and the way in which their children use language at 50 words and between certain formal properties of mothers' speech at 10 words and the percentage of common nouns and unanalyzed phrases in children's early vocabularies. However, most of these relations disappear when an attempt is made to control for possible effects of the child on the mother at Time 1. The exception is a significant negative correlation between mothers' tendency to produce speech that illustrates word boundaries and the percentage of unanalyzed phrases at 50 and 100 words. This suggests that mothers whose speech provides the child with information about where new words begin and end tend to have children with few unanalyzed phrases in their early vocabularies.13 p

Determinants of acquisition order in wh-questions: Re-evaluating the role of caregiver speech

Item does not contain fulltextAccounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by two interlocking linguistic factors; the syntactic function of the wh-word that heads the question and the semantic generality (or 'lightness') of the main verb (Bloom, Merkin Wootten, 1982; Bloom, 1991). Another more recent view, however, is that acquisition is influenced by the relative frequency with which children hear particular wh-words and verbs in their input (e.g. Rowland & Pine, 2000). In the present study over 300 hours of naturalistic data from twelve two- to three-year-old children and their mothers were analysed in order to assess the relative contribution of complexity and input frequency to wh-question. acquisition. The analyses revealed, first, that the acquisition order of wh-questions could be predicted successfully from the frequency with which particular wh-words and verbs occurred in the children's input and, second, that syntactic and semantic complexity did not reliably predict acquisition once input frequency was taken into account. These results suggest that the relationship between acquisition and complexity may be a by-product of the high correlation between complexity and the frequency with which mothers use particular wh-words and verbs. We interpret the results in terms of a constructivist view of language acquisition.27 p

Interactions between givenness and clause order in children's processing of complex sentences

Understanding complex sentences that contain multiple clauses referring to events in the world and the relations between them is an important development in children's language learning. A number of theoretical positions have suggested that factors like syntactic structure (clause order), iconicity (whether the order of clauses reflects the order of events), and givenness (whether information is shared between speakers) affect ease of comprehension. We tested these accounts by investigating how these factors interact in British English-speaking children's comprehension of complex sentences with adverbial clauses (after, before, because, if), while controlling for language level, working memory and inhibitory control. 92 children in three age groups (4, 5 and 8 years) and 17 adults completed a picture selection task. Participants heard an initial context sentence, followed by a two-clause sentence which varied in: (1) the order of the main and subordinate clause; (2) the order of given and new information; and (3) whether the given information occurred in the main or subordinate clause. Accuracy and response times were measured. Our results showed that given-before-new improves comprehension for four- and five-year-olds, but only when the given information is in the initial subordinate clause (e.g., “Sue crawls on the floor. Before she crawls on the floor, she hops up and down”). Temporal adverbials (after, before) were processed faster than causal adverbials (because, if). These effects were not found for the eight-year-olds, whose performance was more similar to that of the adults. Providing a context sentence also improved performance compared to presenting the test sentences in isolation. We conclude that existing accounts based on either ease of processing or information structure cannot fully account for these findings, and suggest a more integrated explanation which reflects children's developing language and literacy skills