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Showing 1 to 15 of 42 results Save | Export
Yi-Lun Weng – ProQuest LLC, 2024
Understanding how a child's language system develops into an adult-like system is a central question in language development research. An increasingly influential account proposes that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions and matches them against incoming input, with higher-level cognitive models serving to minimize prediction…
Descriptors: Child Language, Prediction, Diagnostic Tests, Eye Movements
Danyang Wang – ProQuest LLC, 2022
This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Phrase Structure, Language Research, Child Language
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White, Michelle Jennifer; Southwood, Frenette; Huddlestone, Kate – First Language, 2023
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…
Descriptors: Morphemes, Language Acquisition, Indo European Languages, Standard Spoken Usage
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Hoareau, Mélanie; Yeung, H. Henny; Nazzi, Thierry – Developmental Science, 2019
Individual variability in infant's language processing is partly explained by environmental factors, like the quantity of parental speech input, as well as by infant-specific factors, like speech production. Here, we explore how these factors affect infant word segmentation. We used an artificial language to ensure that only statistical…
Descriptors: Infants, Child Language, Language Processing, Environmental Influences
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Unger, Layla; Vales, Catarina; Fisher, Anna V. – Cognitive Science, 2020
The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated…
Descriptors: Semantics, Role, Schemata (Cognition), Language Processing
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Kirjavainen, Minna; Kidd, Evan; Lieven, Elena – Journal of Child Language, 2017
We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Phrase Structure, Child Language, Computational Linguistics
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Conwell, Erin – Journal of Child Language, 2017
One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…
Descriptors: Nouns, Verbs, Suprasegmentals, Grammar
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Köder, Franziska; Maier, Emar – Journal of Child Language, 2016
This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, "I get the football") and indirect speech ("Elephant said that he gets the football"), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Child Language, Indo European Languages, Young Children
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Wang, Xiao-lei; Plotka, Raquel – Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development, 2018
Idiom comprehension and production reflect a child's language competence. Research suggests that there is a positive relationship between children's reading comprehension skills and their idiom understanding. This study examines whether adult verbal scaffolding, in conjunction with the deliberate use of iconic gestures, can facilitate young…
Descriptors: Chinese, Bilingualism, Experimental Groups, English (Second Language)
Fricke, Melinda Denise – ProQuest LLC, 2013
Studies of connected speech have repeatedly shown that the contextual predictability of a word is related to its phonetic duration; more predictable words tend to be produced with shorter duration, when other factors are controlled for (Aylett & Turk, 2004, 2006; Bell et al., 2003; Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009; Gahl,…
Descriptors: Phonetics, Phonology, Models, Speech Communication
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Westergaard, Marit – Second Language Research, 2014
The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…
Descriptors: Grammar, Second Language Learning, Native Language, Language Acquisition
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Notley, Anna; Zhou, Peng; Jensen, Britta; Crain, Stephen – Journal of Child Language, 2012
This study investigates three- to five-year-old children's interpretation of disjunction in sentences like "The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or the bunny". English disjunction has a conjunctive interpretation in such sentences ("The dog reached the finish line before the turtle and before the bunny"). This interpretation conforms…
Descriptors: Sentences, Speech Communication, Value Judgment, Mandarin Chinese
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Schiff, Rachel; Ravid, Dorit – Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2012
The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of Socio-Economic Status (SES) on Hebrew-speaking children's developing ability to pluralize nouns and mark adjectives in agreement with them. Participants were 180 gradeschool children from mid-high SES and 180 peers from low SES, in six consecutive grade levels. The task consisted of 32…
Descriptors: Semitic Languages, Speech Communication, Socioeconomic Background, Nouns
Gerlach, Sharon Ruth – ProQuest LLC, 2010
This dissertation examines three processes affecting consonants in child speech: harmony (long-distance assimilation) involving major place features as in "coat" [kouk]; long-distance metathesis as in "cup" [p[wedge]k]; and initial consonant deletion as in "fish" [is]. These processes are unattested in adult phonology, leading to proposals for…
Descriptors: Language Patterns, Phonemes, Phonology, Language Acquisition
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Wagner, Laura; Greene-Havas, Maia; Gillespie, Rebecca – Child Development, 2010
For socially appropriate communication, speakers must command a variety of linguistic styles, or "registers", that vary according to social context and social relationships. This study examined preschool children's ability to use a speaker's register choice to infer the identity of their addressee. Four-year-olds could draw correct inferences…
Descriptors: Metalinguistics, Preschool Children, Interpersonal Communication, Social Environment
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