Christina Kauschke

Acquisition and loss of nouns and verbs: parallel or divergent patterns?

Abstract This paper investigates a possible correspondence between the acquisition and breakdown of the ability to name nouns, verbs and their subcategories. The postulation of a universal developmental sequence, according to which children are predisposed to acquire nouns before verbs, has been challenged by cross-linguistic studies. In the case of acquired language loss in adults, the traditional assumption of a double dissociation between nouns and verbs has also been contested in recent work. Furthermore, subcategories of verbs (e.g. transitives versus intransitives) have been shown to be differentially acquired and affected. In our study, we elicited data on noun and verb processing in language production (picture naming task) from children acquiring German and from German aphasic adults. We will report the results from 240 German children (between 2; 6 and 8 years old) as well as the pattern of loss in 11 German aphasic adults. The results show similar category-specific effects in both populations, with a clear-cut noun advantage and a tendency to prefer intransitive verbs, thus supporting the assumption of a specific parallelism in the patterns of acquisition and loss.

Early lexical development in German: a study on vocabulary growth and vocabulary composition during the second and third year of life

This paper focuses on aspects of early lexical acquisition in German. There have been conflicting results in the literature concerning both the pattern of vocabulary growth and the composition of the early lexicon. Our study describes the development of various categories of words and questions the preponderance of nouns in spontaneous speech. 32 children were studied longitudinally through recordings made at age 1;1, 1;3, 1;9 and 3;0. The following properties of the data were investigated: vocabulary size in relation to age, frequency of word use, and distribution of word categories. The results show that use of both types and tokens increases with time. A trend analysis indicates an exponential increase in vocabulary production in the second year, followed by a further expansion. This vocabulary spurt-like pattern can be observed in the use of word types and tokens. The findings in regard to vocabulary composition illustrate the dynamics present in the development of word categories. In the beginning, children use mostly relational words, personal-social words and some onomatopoeic terms. These categories are gradually complemented with nouns, verbs, function words and other words so that we see a balanced lexicon by 3;0. Trend analyses clarify characteristic developmental patterns in regard to certain word categories. Our spontaneous speech data does not support a strong noun-bias hypothesis.

Narrative competence and internal state language of children with Asperger Syndrome and ADHD

The central question of the present study was whether there are differences between children with Asperger Syndrome (AS), children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and healthy controls (HC) with respect to the organization of narratives and their verbalization of internal states. Oral narrations of a wordless picture book produced by 31 children (11 with AS, 9 with ADHD, 11 HC, aged 8-12) were analyzed regarding the following linguistic variables: story length, sentence structure and sentence complexity, coherence and cohesion of the stories, verbalization of the narrators perspective, as well as internal state language (verbal reference to mental states). Considerable similarities were noted between the two clinical groups, which deviate from HC children. Narratives of the children with AS and ADHD were shorter than the narratives produced by the HC children. The children of both clinical groups failed to point out the main aspects of the story. In particular, children with AS did not refer to cognitive states as often as the other groups. With respect to narrative coherence, they produced fewer pronominal references than HC children and children with ADHD. In conclusion, the two clinical groups differed from the HC group on a number of features, and a less frequent reference to cognitive states was identified for the children with AS.

Differences in Noun and Verb Processing in Lexical Decision Cannot be Attributed to Word Form and Morphological Complexity Alone

It has been suggested that the effect of word category in noun and verb processing reflects typical word class properties, which can be characterized in terms of semantic as well as syntactic and morphological features. The present study is aimed at differentiating and discussing the relative contribution of these aspects with a main focus on syntactic and morphological processing. Experiment 1 established a processing advantage for nouns in German visual lexical decision, using nouns denoting biological and man-made objects as compared to transitive and intransitive verbs. Experiment 2 showed that the noun advantage persisted even when the morphological differences between word categories were reduced by using identical suffixes in nouns and verbs. Overall results suggest that the processing differences cannot be reduced to variables such as frequency, word form, or morphological complexity. Reaction time differences between transitive and intransitive verbs strengthen the role of syntactic information. In line with previous accounts the observed effects are discussed in terms of a category-specific combination of linguistic parameters.

Similarities and variation in noun and verb acquisition: A crosslinguistic study of children learning German, Korean, and Turkish

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and the saliency of nouns and verbs, crosslinguistic differences in acquisition were expected. Second, in the light of conceptual differences between the basic categories of nouns and verbs, category-specific effects were also expected. Of the children who participated in a naming study, 240 were German, 240 Korean, and 60 Turkish; 233 German and 99 additional German and Korean children were tested with a word-comprehension task. The target items were 36 nouns and 36 verbs, adapted for the three languages. The results are interpreted as evidence for both language-general tendencies and language-specific influences. Although the children were mostly better at processing nouns than verbs, the extent of this discrepancy differed across languages. The results also indicate more crosslinguistic variance in the case of nouns than in the case of verbs. The findings are discussed with respect to structural characteristics of the languages, developmental patterns in lexical acquisition, and characteristics of the task.

Acquisition of German noun plurals in typically developing children and children with specific language impairment

The present study investigates the acquisition of plural markers in German children with and without language impairments using an elicitation task. In the first cross-sectional study, 60 monolingual children between three and six years of age were tested. The results show significant improvements starting at the age of five. Plural forms which require a vowel change (umlaut) but no overt suffix were most challenging for all children. With regard to their error patterns, the typically developing children preferably overapplied the suffix -e to monosyllabic stems and added -s to stems ending in a trochee. Though the children made errors in plural markings, the prosodic structures of pluralized nouns were kept legitimate. In the second study, the production of plural markers in eight children with SLI was compared to age-matched and MLU-matched controls. Children with SLI performed at the level of the MLU-matched controls, showing subtle differences with regard to their error patterns, and their preferences in addition and substitution errors: In contrast to their typically developing peers, children with SLI preferred the frequent suffix -n in their overapplications, suggesting that they strongly rely on frequency-based cues. The findings are discussed from a morphophonological perspective.

Object and action naming in Russian- and German-speaking monolingual and bilingual children

The present study investigates the influence of word category on naming performance in two populations: bilingual and monolingual children. The question is whether and, if so, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children differ with respect to noun and verb naming and whether a noun bias exists in the lexical abilities of bilingual children. Picture naming of objects and actions by Russian-German bilingual children (aged 4-7 years) was compared to age-matched monolingual children. The results clearly demonstrate a naming deficit of bilingual children in comparison to monolingual children that increases with age. Noun learning is more fragile in bilingual contexts than is verb learning. In bilingual language acquisition, nouns do not predominate over verbs as much as is seen in monolingual German and Russian children. The results are discussed with respect to semantic-conceptual aspects and language-specific features of nouns and verbs, and the impact of input on the acquisition of these word categories.

Narratives of Girls and Boys with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Gender Differences in Narrative Competence and Internal State Language.

Since gender differences in the symptomatology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are not well understood, the current study examines the communicative skills of males and females with ASD. Narrative competence and internal state language (ISL) was investigated using narrations elicited by a wordless picture book. 11 girls and 11 boys with ASD and 11 typically developing girls were individually matched. Although results demonstrate largely comparable narrative skills across groups, the groups differed with respect to the size and use of ISL: Girls with ASD verbalized and motivated internal states more often than boys, and both groups with ASD fell behind typically developing children in production of affective words. Implications for the clinical presentation of males and females with ASD are discussed.

The acquisition of prosodic constraints on derivational morphology in typically developing children and children with SLI

Abstract Aim of this study was to investigate at what age German children master prosodic and morphological constraints in the acquisition of the word formation paradigm -heit/-keit, which is comparable to English -ness, and whether children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have difficulties identifying the prosodic cues from the input. Derived words with -heit contain simple bases with final stress and those with -keit have complex bases with a weak final syllable. Three groups of typically developing children (four, six and eight years old) and 18 children with SLI (from 8 to 10 years) had to produce either -heit or -keit derivations in a sentence completion task. The results show that typically developing children mastered these derivations by the age of six only when both prosodic and morphological cues were present, while eight-year-old children performed almost adult-like. In contrast, most children with SLI did not produce systematic responses that follow prosodic and/or morphological constraints. The findings support the assumption that children with SLI are less sensitive to prosodic properties of grammatical forms than typically developing peers.

Perceiving arousal and valence in facial expressions: Differences between children and adults

Abstract Arousal and valence have long been studied as the two primary dimensions for the perception of emotional stimuli such as facial expressions. Prior correlational studies that tested emotion perception along these dimensions found broad similarities between adults and children. However, few studies looked for direct differences between children and adults in these dimensions beyond correlation. We tested 9-year-old children and adults on rating positive and negative facial stimuli based on emotional arousal and valence. Despite high significant correlations between children’s and adults’ ratings, our findings also showed significant differences between children and adults in terms of rating values: Children rated all expressions as significantly more positive than adults in valence. Children also rated positive emotions as more arousing than adults. Our results show that although perception of facial emotions along arousal and valence follows similar patterns in children and adults, some differences in ratings persist, and vary by emotion type.