Elena Tribushinina

The acquisition of scalar structures: Production of adjectives and degree markers by Dutch-speaking children and their caregivers

Abstract This study seeks to establish whether and at what age childrens language production reflects relevant semantic differences between nongradable adjectives, on the one hand, and various classes of gradable adjectives, on the other hand. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of adjectives in spontaneous speech samples from Dutch-speaking children aged 2 to 7 and their caregivers show that children reveal some sensitivity to scalar structures already at age 2. From the outset of adjective production, toddlers use degree markers (comparatives, superlatives, degree adverbs) to modify only gradable, but not nongradable adjectives. By age 4, the proportions of degree markers within the class of gradable adjectives are clearly contingent on the type of scalar structure associated with an adjective. The patterns in child speech reflect frequencies in child-directed speech. However, the frequency of context-dependent adjectives in child speech across all age groups is lower than predicted by the input. Although very few errors were attested in the domain of degree modification, the errors seem to persist until age 6. At this age, the proportion of degree adverbs in child speech reaches the adult level. The results are consonant with the idea that children construe scales through exposure to linguistic input, rather than on the basis of pre-linguistic conceptual distinctions.

The role of (explicit) contrast in adjective acquisition: A cross-linguistic longitudinal study of adjective production in spontaneous child speech and parental input.

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16–36 months) acquiring eight different languages. Adjectives in child speech and child-directed speech were coded as either unrelated or related to a contrastive term in the preceding context. Results show large differences between children in the growth of adjective production. These differences are strongly related to contrast use. High contrast users not only increase adjective use earlier, but also reach a stable level of adjective production in the investigated period. Average or low contrast users increase their adjective production more slowly and do not reach a plateau in the period covered by this study. Initially there is a strong relation between contrast use in child speech and child-directed speech, but this relation diminishes with age.

Infrequent word classes in the speech of two- to seven-year-old children with cochlear implants and their normally hearing peers: a longitudinal study of adjective use.

OBJECTIVEnStudies investigating language skills of children after cochlear implantation usually use global language proficiency scores and rarely tackle the acquisition of specific language phenomena (word classes, grammatical constructions, etc.). Furthermore, research is largely restricted to frequent word classes (nouns, verbs). The present study targets the acquisition of adjectives (e.g. big, intelligent) by children implanted before their second birthday. Adjectives constitute a relatively infrequent, but functionally important word class and were shown to be good indicators of language delays and impairments.nnnMETHODnNine cochlear-implanted (CI) children and 60 age-matched normally hearing (NH) controls participated in the study. The CI children were followed longitudinally from ages 2 to 7; control data were collected in a cross-sectional manner (10 children per age group). Samples of childrens spontaneous interactions with their caregivers were transcribed and analyzed for adjective use (frequency, lexical diversity, complexity of syntactic constructions, and morphological correctness).nnnRESULTSnThe performance of the CI subjects was not significantly different from that of NH peers on adjective frequency and lexical diversity. On these measures, both groups reached adult levels by age 3. However, the CI group had a significant delay in the acquisition of complex syntactic constructions. The NH subjects produced adjectives in adult-like grammatical constructions from age 3 onwards, whereas their CI peers lagged behind until age 5. The speech of the CI participants also featured morphological errors that are not characteristic of typical development (inflection of predicative adjectives). However, the overall error rate was low.nnnCONCLUSIONSnThe findings suggest that CI children have particular difficulty with grammatical items (bound morphemes, copulas) that are less salient in the flow of speech than content words. Nevertheless, children implanted before their second birthday are able to catch up with their hearing peers by age 5, even in the use of relatively infrequent word classes.

Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment

Research on specific language impairment (SLI) has primarily focused on the acquisition of nouns and verbs. Less attention has been given to other content-word classes, such as adjectives and adverbs. This article investigates adjective production by 7- to 10-year-old Russian-speaking children with SLI and their typically developing (TD) peers and focuses on the production of antonymous adjectives and degree markers in an elicitation experiment. The results show that degree morphology is more impaired in SLI than antonymy. In antonym production, children with SLI were able to catch up with their TD peers by age 8. In the domain of degree, however, the SLI group lagged behind the TD controls across all ages studied. Error analysis indicates that language-impaired children have particular difficulty with agreement inflection and affixal negations. They also substitute adjectives with specific meanings by more general terms. The implications of this study for the morphological-richness hypothesis are discussed.

The linguistics of zero: A cognitive reference point or a phantom?

Insights from cognitive psychology indicate that the zero value on a scale is an important reference-point phenomenon in the processing of relative adjectives. However, linguistic evidence for the reference-point status of the zero value has not been provided hitherto. In this paper, I search for such evidence by analyzing the use of dimensional adjectives denoting vertical size in two languages – English and Russian. Three types of linguistic implications of the zero are discussed. First, the zero point is crucial to the account of markedness asymmetry between antonymous adjectives. Second, the reference-point status of the zero value motivates differences in the compatibility of relative adjectives with maximality adverbs in languages such as Russian. Third, the location of the zero point and the position of the entity vis-à-vis the zero point have implications for adjective-noun combinability.

Semantics of Connectives Guides Referential Expectations in Discourse: An Eye-Tracking Study of Dutch and Russian

This study aims to establish whether connectives can create referential expectations in discourse, and, if so, what these expectations are based on: connective semantics or frequency distributions in language use. This was tested by comparing the processing of the connectives “and” and “but” in Dutch and Russian by means of an eye-tracking experiment using the visual world paradigm. A corpus study showed that in terms of frequency distributions, the Russian connectives are very similar to the Dutch connectives (“and” more often introduces reference maintenance and “but” more often introduces reference shift). In terms of semantics, the two languages are different, because only the Russian connectives are specified for maintenance/shift. The experimental results indicate that only Russian connectives are informative about referential development of discourse. Irrespective of frequency distributions, connectives are only used as processing instructions for referential development if reference maintenance or shift is specified in their semantics.

Adjective Semantics, World Knowledge and Visual Context: Comprehension of Size Terms by 2- to 7-Year-Old Dutch-Speaking Children

The interpretation of size terms involves constructing contextually-relevant reference points by combining visual cues with knowledge of typical object sizes. This study aims to establish at what age children learn to integrate these two sources of information in the interpretation process and tests comprehension of the Dutch adjectives groot ‘big’ and klein ‘small’ by 2- to 7-year-old children. The results demonstrate that there is a gradual increase in the ability to inhibit visual cues and to use world knowledge for interpreting size terms. 2- and 3-year-old children only used the extremes of the perceptual range as reference points. From age four onwards children, like adults, used a cut-off point in the mid-zone of a series. From age five on, children were able to integrate world knowledge and perceptual context. Although 7-year-olds could make subtle distinctions between sizes of various object classes, their performance on incongruent items was not yet adult-like.

Three-year-olds can predict a noun based on an attributive adjective: evidence from eye-tracking.

This paper investigates whether three-year-olds are able to process attributive adjectives (e.g., soft pillow) as they hear them and to predict the noun (pillow) on the basis of the adjective meaning (soft). This was investigated in an experiment by means of the Visual World Paradigm. The participants saw two pictures (e.g., a pillow and a book) and heard adjective-noun combinations, where the adjective was either informative (e.g., soft) or uninformative (e.g., new) about the head-noun. The properties described by the target adjectives were not visually apparent. When the adjective was uninformative, the looks at the target increased only upon hearing the noun. When the adjective was informative, however, the looks at the target increased upon hearing the adjective. Three-year-olds were as fast as adult controls in predicting the upcoming noun. We conclude that toddlers process adjective-noun phrases incrementally and can predict the noun based on the prenominal adjective.

Can connective use differentiate between children with and without specific language impairment

The ability of language-impaired children to maintain coherence by using discourse connectives has so far been assessed by quantitative measures. This study is a first attempt to scrutinize the quality of connective use in specific language impairment (SLI). The authors investigate whether Russian-speaking children reveal sensitivity to the subtle discourse-organizational distinctions between the quasi-synonymous connectives i ‘and’ and a ‘and/but’ in a narrative task. Study 1 compared connective use by 7-year-olds with and without SLI. The results demonstrate that connective frequencies do not differentiate between the two groups, but language-impaired children more often use connectives in a way that violates causal relations in the story. Study 2 assessed connective production by the same SLI participants 16 months later and also tested understanding of causal chains in a follow-up interview. The error rates remained high. These errors were not due to poor understanding of the story, since the language-impaired children answered the causal questions in the follow-up interview as well as their unimpaired peers did.

Usage-Based Approaches to Language Acquisition and Language Teaching

Although usage-based approaches have been successfully applied to the study of both first and second language acquisition, to monolingual and bilingual development, and to naturalistic and instructed settings, it is not common to consider these different kinds of acquisition in tandem. The present volume takes an integrative approach and shows that usage-based theories provide a much needed unified framework for the study of first, second and foreign language acquisition, in monolingual and bilingual contexts. The contributions target the acquisition of a wide range of linguistic phenomena and critically assess the applicability and explanatory power of the usage-based paradigm. The book also systematically examines a range of cognitive and linguistic factors involved in the process of language development and relates relevant findings to language teaching. Finally, this volume contributes to the assessment and refinement of empirical methods currently employed in usage-based acquisition research. This book is of interest to scholars of language acquisition, language pedagogy, developmental psychology, as well as Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar.