Maya Hickmann

Social and Functional Approaches to Language and Thought

One of the most fundamental and recurring issues in the social sciences--the relation between language and thought--is examined in this work from a broad and coherent interdisciplinary perspective. Many of the great historical issues are also addressed and newly examined such as: the multifunctionality of language, the role of natural logic in the structuring of linguistic rules, and the place of linguistic disambiguation and repair in particular cultures.

Cohesion and Anaphora in Children's Narratives: A Comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese.

The aim of this study is to determine universal vs. language-specific aspects of childrens ability to organize cohesive anaphoric relations in discourse. Analyses examine narratives produced on the basis of two picture sequences by subjects of four ages (preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, adults) in four languages: English (n = 80), German (n = 40), French (n = 40), and Mandarin Chinese (n = 40). Particular attention is placed on the impact of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors in determining the uses of referring expressions and of word order in the maintenance of reference to the animate characters. Although subjecthood and agency determine NP position within the clause, role relations in discourse coreference account for NP form in all languages, notwithstanding some variations across languages, ages, and referents (e.g. density of coreference, null elements vs. overt pronouns, clause structures). It is concluded that the development of anaphora is determined by universal pragmatic principles and by language-specific properties characterizing how languages map discourse-internal and sentence-internal functions onto the same forms.

French children's ability to introduce referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge

This study examines referent introductions in narratives produced by French children of 6, 9, and 11 years in two situations where they either could or could not assume mutual knowledge. In one situation (MK) the children and their interlocutor were looking at a picture book together; in the other (NMK) the interlocutor was blindfolded. Children in all age groups used more indefinite determiners in Situation NMK than in MK. However, some clear developmental changes were also found: the 6-year-olds used both definite and indefinite determiners in NMK; the 9-year-olds selected indefinite determiners in NMK and definite ones in MK; the 11-year-olds produced indefinite determiners not only in NMK, but also in MK. These results show that children acquire the rules governing referent introductions in three steps: (a) they have no systematic rule in the absence of mutual knowledge; (b) they acquire a rule associating appropriately different linguistic devices with the presence versus absence of mutual knowledge; (c) they acquire an additional rule that generalizes indefinite forms to all narrative situations, regardless of mutual knowledge conditions.

The marking of new information in children's narratives: a comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese*

This study examines childrens uses of nominal determiners (‘local markings’) and utterance structure (‘global markings’) to introduce new referents. Two narratives were elicited from preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults in English ( N = 80), French ( N = 40), German ( N = 40), and Chinese ( N = 40). Given typological differences (e.g. richness of morphology), these languages rely differentially on local vs. global devices to mark newness: postverbal position is obligatory in Chinese (determiners optional), indefinite determiners in the other languages (position optional). Three findings recur across languages: obligatory newness markings emerge late (seven-year-olds); local markings emerge first, including Chinese optional ones; local and global markings are strongly related. Crosslinguistic differences also occur: English-speaking preschoolers use local markings least frequently; until adult age global markings are rare in English, not contrastive in German and not as frequent in Chinese as in French, despite obligatoriness. It is concluded that three factors determine acquisition: (1) universal discourse factors governing information flow; (2) cognitive factors resulting from the greater functional complexity of global markings; (3) language-specific factors related to how different systems map both grammatical and discourse functions onto forms.

Cohesive anaphoric relations in French children's narratives as a function of mutual knowledge

This study examines how French children of 6, 9, and 11 years use referring expressions for reference maintenance in narratives elicited in two situations: children and their interlocutor were looking at a picture book together (mutual knowledge) or the inter locutor was blindfolded (no mutual knowledge). Local coreference has a strong impact on the selection of pronouns (coreferential) vs. nominals (non-coreferential) at all ages and in both situations. However, children from 9 years on produce more pronouns in the absence of mutual knowledge and the extent to which children mark story structure varies as a function of age and situation. Regardless of situation, 6-year-olds mark boundaries across successive pictures (external structure) and episodes (internal structure) by means of nominals. Although a similar pattern can be observed at other ages in the mutual knowledge condition, it gradually disappears with increasing age in the absence of mutual knowledge. It is concluded that discourse-internal functions of referring expressions are a late development characterized by the increasing impact of coreference, which gradually overrides other factors, as children learn to rely maximally on discourse cohesive relations in the absence of mutual knowledge.

Static and dynamic location in French and in English

Available research (Bowerman & Choi, 2003; Slobin, 1996) shows crosslinguistic differences in how children talk about space, suggesting the impact of languagespecific factors on language acquisition. This study compares the productions of French children aged 3, 4 and 5 years (N = 60) with those of French and English adults (N = 40) in two tasks that required them to locate objects and to describe object displacements. French adults frequently rely on verbs and focus on manner of attachment, whereas English adults frequently rely on satellites and focus on posture or manner of displacement. French children show few age differences between 3 and 5 years, generally following the French pattern from 3 years on, although they also differ from both groups of adults in some respects, showing developmental changes (overgeneralizations in prepositional use, expansion of the verbal lexicon). The discussion highlights the impact of language-specific determinants of acquisition in relation to the typological properties of French and English as verb-framed vs. satellite-framed languages. It is argued that languages invite speakers to rely on different linguistic means (information locus) and to pay attention to different types of information (information focus), thereby inducing different ways of organizing underlying spatial categories.

Clause-structure variation in Chinese narrative discourse: a developmental analysis

This paper examines some functional determinants of clause-structure variation in narratives produced by Chinese adults and fourto ten-year-old children, with particular attention to the dichotomy between referent introductions and reference maintenance. The aim is to determine whether and how the distinction between new and old information determines the uses of linguistic devices during the course of childrens development. The analyses focus on the use of word order versus NP types, given that new referents must be introduced in Chinese by means of clause structure (obligatory postverbal position), whereas oppositions among NP types are optional. It is shown that the Chinese adults mark newness maximally by means of both NP types and clause structure. The Chinese children at first rarely mark newness in any way, and, although they make an increasing use of both NP types and structural variations, they do not rely on word order as much as the adults evqn at ten years. These results are discussed in light of a comparable data base in English, French, and German. Several cognitive and pragmatic factors are proposed to account for the observed similarities and differences in how children acquire discourse devices across these languages.

Typological constraints on the acquisition of spatial language in French and English

Abstract Typological analyses (Talmy, Towards a cognitive semantics, MIT Press, 2000) show that languages vary a great deal in how they package and distribute spatial information by lexical and grammatical means. Recent developmental research suggests that childrens language acquisition is constrained by such typological properties from an early age on, but the relative role of such constraints in language and cognitive development is still much debated (Bowerman, Containment, support, and beyond: Constructing typological spatial categories in first language acquisition, Benjamins, 2007; Bowerman and Choi, Space under construction: language-specific categorization in first language acquisition, MIT Press, 2003; Slobin, From ‘thought to language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’, Cambridge University Press, 1996, Slobin, Language and thought online: cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity, MIT Press, 2003a, Slobin, The many ways to search for a frog, Erlbaum, 2003b, Slobin, What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic typology, discourse, and cognition, Benjamins, 2006). In the context of this debate, we compare the expression of motion in two data bases of child English vs. French: 1) experimentally induced productions about caused motion (adults and children of three to ten years); 2) spontaneous productions about varied types of motion events during earlier phases of acquisition (18 months to three years). The results of both studies show that the density of information about motion increases with age in both languages, particularly after the age of five years. However, they also show striking cross-linguistic differences. At all ages the semantic density of utterances about motion is higher in English than in French. English speakers systematically use compact structures to express multiple types of information (typically manner and cause in main verbs, path in other devices). French speakers rely more on verbs and/or distribute information in more varied ways across parts of speech. The discussion highlights the joint impact of cognitive and typological factors on language acquisition, and raises questions to be addressed in further research concerning the relation between language and cognition during development.

Metapragmatics in Child Language

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the recent research on language development that has paid a great deal of attention to pragmatic aspects of child language. It has shown the importance of the contextual determinants and the form-function relationships of childrens speech for understanding of language development. Speaking about language is a metalinguistic activity that can take many different forms. The specialized nature of such utterances distinguishes them from other metalinguistic utterances. Metapragmatic transparency has been shown to be one of the dimensions that affect the extent to which speech is amenable to the awareness, when such an awareness is elicited in explicit discourse. Utterances reporting speech have been often discussed in terms of a contrast between so-called direct and indirect quotations. Various types of metalinguistic skills displayed by children have often been interpreted as showing some awareness of language. Analyses of the narratives strictly from a referential-cohesive point of view showed developmental differences in how speech events were represented and organized in discourse.

Children's ability to restore the referential cohesion of stories

Childrens ability to restore discourse cohesion was examined in three experiments. Children of 5, 7 and 10 years heard stories containing referring expressions that constituted inappropriate first or subsequent mentions of referents from the point of view of story cohesion. They were asked to retell these stories (Experiment I), to repeat verbatim some clauses extracted from them on line (Experiment II), as well as to actively detect and judge anomalies on line (Experiment III). Childrens retellings and their integrative repetition errors in Experiments I and II show that they could modify inappropriate expressions into appropriate ones at all ages, despite age differences suggesting an increasing tendency to link NPs in discourse after 5 years. In comparison, only the 10-year-olds could explicitly comment on anomalies in Experiment III. In conclusion, children show a surprisingly early ability to restore cohesion, an increasingly automatized reliance on discourse context with age, and a late metalinguistic awareness of the cohesive functions of different noun phrase types.