Richard M. Weist

The defective tense hypothesis: on the emergence of tense and aspect in child Polish.

Longitudinal and cross-sectional designs were combined in this analysis of the evolution of childrens capacity to represent deictic relationships. The longitudinal component contained the naturalistic observation of three relatively young children (1; 7–1; 9) and three somewhat older children (2; 0–2; 2). These children were tape-recorded in caretaker–child interactions. The analysis of the corpora from these children revealed: (1) imperfective activity verb phrases in the past tense, (2) telic verb phrases in the past tense used independently of resulting states, (3) moderately remote past references, and (4) deictic future references. The cross-sectional component contained an experiment in which elicitation procedures were used to obtain past and future references to atelic and telic situations. Nine 2½- and nine 3½-year-old children were tested. Generally high levels of performance reinforced the outcome of the longitudinal analysis.

A cross-linguistic perspective on the development of temporal systems

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the development of temporal location within a cross-linguistic experimental design. The research focused on the transition from a temporal system based on absolute temporal relation involving speech time and event time to a more complex system involving relative temporal relationships and reference time. A comprehension test was constructed with problems which were diagnostic of two salient distinctions within each of three temporal systems. The procedure was based on a two-choice sentence-picture matching task. The children who participated were from Poland, the USA and Finland, and there were 12 children at each of the following age levels: 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, 5;6, and 6;6. The Polish and American children solved problems requiring absolute temporal location at 2;6, and the older children eventually solved most of the problems requiring relative location. The Finnish children followed a different pattern taking longer to comprehend both types of problems. A second experiment confirmed the Finnish pattern of development. The results of the comprehension test were compared to observations of conversational and narrative discourse which were the product of two elicitation procedures. The research demonstrates the way in which conceptual development places a universal constraint on the developmental process and how the specific properties of individual languages also have an effect.

The interaction of language and thought in children's language acquisition: a crosslinguistic study

The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential interaction of conceptual representations and linguistic systems in the process of language acquisition. Language-thought interactions were studied in 80 American, 48 Finnish and 48 Polish preschool children. The research focused on the conceptual and linguistic development of space and time. The spatial and temporal conceptual tasks were designed to measure the transition from experimental to inferential knowledge of space/time representations. In the linguistic domain, comprehension and production tests were used to evaluate the childrens capacity to understand mono- and bi-referential location in space and time, where mono-referential location involves a single referent object/event with intrinsic properties (e.g. in/on or past/non-past), and bi-referential location requires two or more referent objects/events and relative perspective (e.g. deictic front/back or before/after). The conceptual and linguistic tests revealed significant changes during the period from two to five years of age, and measures of conceptual development were correlated with measures of linguistic development. As spatial and temporal representations became more structured, children were able to move from mono- to bi-referential location. In a comprehension test, we discovered an interaction of language by dimension. Finnish children found spatial distinctions relatively easy and Polish children found temporal distinctions relatively easy. This interaction was expected on the basis of the relative complexity of the morpho-syntactic coding in the spatial and temporal systems of the two languages. However, the argument relating the timing of acquisition to the transparency versus opacity of the linguistic systems was not supported by the English language comparison. Finally, the Finnish children were relatively better able to accomplish the spatial conceptual tasks as compared to the Polish children. This finding is consistent with a developmental concept of linguistic relativity. In general, the research indicates that spatial and temporal linguistic systems and representational knowledge interact during development with the influence occurring in both directions.

Spatial and temporal systems in child language and thought: a cross-linguistic study

This research was designed to evaluate the interaction of conceptual and linguistic factors during the acquisition of the spatial and temporal systems of Polish, English and Finnish from 3 to 6 years of age. In the conceptual-spatial task, children reconstructed a layout from a 180-degree change in perspective, and in the conceptual-temporal task they arranged three picture cards in a sequence while telling a story. In the linguistic domain, there were two comprehension tests and one production test containing spatial and temporal contrasts requiring either a single or multiple referent object(s)/event(s). The main effects (i.e., age, dimension, complexity) were always significant. There was clear evidence for a Language x Dimension interaction in the linguistic

Prefix versus suffix information processing in the comprehension of tense and aspect

This research evaluated the Polish childs capacity to comprehend aspect and tense distinctions realized by either prefixation or suffixation. Ten 2; 6 and ten 3; 6 children were given a picture–sentence matching task. Aspect picture sets contrasted completed with incompleted situations and sentences contrasted perfective with imperfective verbs differing by a prefix or a suffix. Tense picture sets portrayed either ongoing vs. anticipated action or results of action vs. anticipated action contrasts. Again sentences differed in verb forms either by prefixes or suffixes. The results showed that young children can pay attention to the beginnings of words as easily as to the ends of words and can understand a wide range of aspect and tense distinctions.

Syntactic-Semantic Interface in the Acquisition of Verb Morphology.

The purpose of this research was to show how the syntactic and semantic components of the tense-aspect system interact during the acquisition process. Our methodology involved: (1) identifying predicates, (2) finding the initial occurrence of their tense-aspect morphology, and (3) observing the emergence of contrasts. Six children learning Polish and six children learning English, found in the CHILDES archives, were investigated. The average starting age of the children learning English was 1;11, and 1;8 for the children learning Polish. In the first analysis, we traced the same 12 verbs in both languages, and in the second analysis, we contrasted the acquisition patterns for a set of telic versus atelic predicates. We tracked the verbs/predicates from the starting age to 4;11 or the childs final transcript. In English, progressive aspect is the marked form, and in Polish, perfective aspect is the marked form. This typological distinction has a significant effect of the acquisition patterns in the two languages. We argue that children acquire a multi-dimensional system having deictic relations as one of the basic dimensions. This process can be best understood within a functional theoretical framework having a well-defined syntactic-semantic interface.

Spatial and temporal location in child language

The purpose of this research was to determine the relationship between the development of spatial and temporal location. The research was based on the distinction between mono-referential and bi-referential location, where mono-referential location involves the relationship between an object/event to-be-located and a single reference object/time with intrinsic spatial/temporal properties, and bi-referential location requires a projective/sequential relationship between two referential objects/times. A sentence-picture matching task was constructed having four types of problems combining time and space with mono-/bi-referential relationships. Twelve American children were tested at each of three age levels: 2;6, 4;6, and 6;6. At 2;6, the children failed the bi-referential problems and passed the mono-referential problems. By 4;6, children showed an advantage of space over time, and in addition to the mono-referential problems, they also passed the bi-referential space problems. At 6;6, the children passed all of the problems. Changes in the spatial and temporal linguistic systems were related to cognitive development in the linguistic and non-linguistic domains.

Parent and sibling comprehension of children's speech.

In this research, the capacity of parents and siblings to understand the speech of children in early phases of language development was investigated. The utterances of young children were video tape recorded and presented to family members and nonparent and nonsibling controls. Family members showed a comprehension advantage over the appropriate control groups.

BASIC RELATIONS IN CHILD LANGUAGE AND THE WORD ORDER MYTH

Abstract The research involved an evaluation of the psychological reality of the syntactic functions of subject and object, the semantic functions of agent and patient. and the discourse functions of given and new. The domain of analysis was from the early two-word into the early three-word phase (approximately 1;7 to 2;5) of the acquisition of the relatively synthetic language of Polish. An analysis of the inflectional morphology revealed the appropriate use of all seven cases and contrasts within three dimensions of agreement before 1.9; These varied inflectional forms were used with sufficient frequency lo argue that the nominative case and the agreement relations are productive subjecthood properties at this phase of development. The semantic function of the subject noun phrase was either an agent or a patient. Hence, case and agreement cannot be reduced to properties of semantic functions. Since both subject and object were rarely realized simultaneously in the surface structure in the early phase of...

Autobiographical Memory and Past Time Reference

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between the acquisition of language and the development of autobiographical memory. The investigation was based on the analysis of longitudinal caregiver-child interaction data from 10 children learning English during the period from approximately 2 to 4 years of age. Three forms of past reference were analyzed: (1) regular and irregular simple past tense, (2) past progressive, and (3) subordinate clause constructions with when and past time reference (i.e., past when-sentences). Simple past was acquired relatively early at 2;4 (cf. Brown, 1973), past when-sentences relatively late at 3;6 (cf. Limber, 1973), and past-progressive in the interim at 2;10. The discourse segments surrounding the sentences that contained these forms were analyzed for the following three elements: (1) reference time context established, (2) a supporting event expressed in the segment, and (3) reference made to a self-relevant, real-life event. The likelihood that a discourse segment would include these three elements increased as past reference advanced from simple past to past progressive and then to past when-sentences. As the morpho-syntax of past reference became more complex, a higher proportion of past time references provided evidence for autobiographical memory.