NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Showing all 14 results Save | Export
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Antonijevic, Stanislava; Muckley, Sarah Ann; Muller, Nicole – Journal of Child Language, 2020
Irish is a rapidly changing minority language spoken as the main community language in some areas of the officially Irish-speaking "Gaeltacht" regions in Ireland. We analyse narratives from 17 parent-child dyads, living in one such area. All children, aged 3-6;4, had high exposure to the local variety of Irish. The input quality was…
Descriptors: Irish, Morphology (Languages), Language Minorities, Parent Child Relationship
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Genovese, Giuliana; Spinelli, Maria; Romero Lauro, Leonor J.; Aureli, Tiziana; Castelletti, Giulia; Fasolo, Mirco – Journal of Child Language, 2020
Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and…
Descriptors: Infants, Speech Communication, Syntax, Language Variation
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Davies, Catherine; Lingwood, Jamie; Arunachalam, Sudha – Journal of Child Language, 2020
Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives…
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Syntax, Semantics, Socioeconomic Status
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Ninio, Anat – Journal of Child Language, 2016
The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding…
Descriptors: Verbs, Language Acquisition, Pragmatics, Vocabulary Development
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Hsu, Dong Bo – Journal of Child Language, 2014
Two studies investigated syntactic productivity in three-year-old Mandarin speakers' use of verbs in the SVO and S"ba"OV constructions. In Study 1, children were taught novel verbs in one construction and assessed for their production in the other construction. Children produced verbs taught in the "ba" constructions in…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Toddlers, Syntax, Grammar
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Boyd, Jeremy K.; Goldberg, Adele E. – Journal of Child Language, 2012
The present study exposed five-year-olds (M=5 ; 2), seven-year-olds (M=7 ; 6) and adults (M=22 ; 4) to instances of a novel phrasal construction, then used a forced choice comprehension task to evaluate their learning of the construction. The abstractness of participants' acquired representations of the novel construction was evaluated by varying…
Descriptors: Verbs, Generalization, Linguistic Input, Young Children
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Paradis, Johanne; Nicoladis, Elena; Crago, Martha; Genesee, Fred – Journal of Child Language, 2011
Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age = 4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic…
Descriptors: Monolingualism, French, Language Acquisition, Bilingualism
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Gabor, Balint; Lukacs, Agnes – Journal of Child Language, 2012
This paper investigates early productivity of morpheme use in Hungarian children aged between 2 ; 1 and 5 ; 3. Hungarian has a rich morphology which is the core marker of grammatical functions. A new method is introduced using the novel word paradigm in a sentence repetition task with masked inflections (i.e. a disguised elicited production task).…
Descriptors: Sentences, Form Classes (Languages), Suffixes, Hungarian
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Chevrot, Jean-Pierre; Dugua, Celine; Fayol, Michel – Journal of Child Language, 2009
In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which…
Descriptors: Phonology, Dictionaries, French, Child Language
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Freudenthal, Daniel: Pine, Julian; Gobet, Fernando – Journal of Child Language, 2010
In this study, we use corpus analysis and computational modelling techniques to compare two recent accounts of the OI stage: Legate & Yang's (2007) Variational Learning Model and Freudenthal, Pine & Gobet's (2006) Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children. We first assess the extent to which each of these accounts can explain the level of OI errors…
Descriptors: Verbs, Syntax, Error Analysis (Language), Child Language
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Valian, Virginia; Lyman, Casey – Journal of Child Language, 2003
Examined young children's acquisition of wh-questions. Children heard a wh-question and attempted to repeat it; a "talking bear" answered. The same format was used for two intervention sessions for children in a quasicontrol condition. Suggests very little input--if concentrated and varied and presented so the child attends to it and…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Input, Preschool Children
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Rondal, Jean A.; Cession, Anne – Journal of Child Language, 1990
Input language addressed to language-learning children was analyzed to assess the quality of the semantic-syntactic correspondence posited by the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis. This correspondence was strong--objects were labeled with nouns, actions with verbs, attributes with adjectives--and may serve to make children's construction of…
Descriptors: Caregiver Speech, Language Acquisition, Language Research, Linguistic Input
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Joseph, Kate L.; Pine, Julian M. – Journal of Child Language, 2002
Many recent generativist models attribute grammatical knowledge to young children on the basis that children's language patterns the same way as the target adult language. It has been proposed that the child acquires this knowledge early on in development by a process of parameter setting. Wexler (1996) presents the "Very Early Parameter Setting…
Descriptors: French, Morphemes, Language Usage, Grammar
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Szagun, Gisela – Journal of Child Language, 2004
The acquisition of case and gender marking on the definite and indefinite article was studied in a sample of 6 normally-hearing children and 9 children with cochlear implants. Longitudinal spontaneous speech data are used. Children were matched by MLU, with 4 MLU levels: 1.8, 2.8, 3.6, 4.8. Age ranges for normally-hearing children were 1;4 to 3;8…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, German, Grammar, Assistive Technology