Sophie Kern

Influence of preterm birth on early lexical and grammatical acquisition

This study compares early grammatical and lexical acquisition in 323 preterm and 166 full-term children at 24 months. The French MacArthur-Bates parental report was employed for analysis. Gestational age and birth order showed a significant effect on vocabulary size and grammatical distribution. Preterm children showed fewer words and produced more games, routines and animal noises words. Except for the group of extremely premature children, first-born children in each gestational age group produced more words than second-born. In contrast, first-born children exhibited more predicates than second-born children. It is concluded that preterm children show delayed rather than deviant language development.

Relative clauses in French children's narrative texts

This study investigates the use of relative clauses in French childrens narrative monologues. Narrative texts were collected from French-speaking monolinguals in four age groups (five, seven, ten years and adults). Twenty subjects from each group were asked to tell a story based on a picture book consisting of twenty-four images without text (Frog, Where are you?). Relative constructions were coded following the categories defined by Dasinger & Toupin (1994) into two main functional classes: general discourse and narrative functions. The results show that the use of relative clauses in general discourse functions precedes their use in more specific narrative functions. An analysis of textual connectivity (Berman & Slobin, 1994) in one episode reveals that children and adults differ in their choice of preferred structures. The results also show that children use fewer transitive predicates in relative clauses than do adults. Transitive verbs are essential for advancing the narrative plot (Hopper & Thompson, 1980). While subject relative clauses are acquired early and used frequently, the development of their multifunctional use in diverse narrative functions extends well beyond childhood.

Extended Statistical Learning as an account for slow vocabulary growth

Stokes (2010) compared the lexicons of English-speaking late talkers (LT) with those of their typically developing (TD) peers on neighborhood density (ND) and word frequency (WF) characteristics and suggested that LTs employed learning strategies that differed from those of their TD peers. This research sought to explore the cross-linguistic validity of this conclusion. The lexicons (production, not recognition) of 208 French-speaking two-year-old children were coded for ND and WF. Regression revealed that ND and WF together predicted 62% of the variance in vocabulary size, with ND and WF uniquely accounting for 53% and 9% of that variance respectively. Epiphenomenal findings were ruled out by comparison of simulated data sets with the actual data. A generalized Mann-Whitney test showed that children with small vocabularies had significantly higher ND values and significantly lower WF values than children with large vocabularies. An EXTENDED STATISTICAL LEARNING theory is proposed to account for the findings.

Parent report of early lexical production in bilingual children: a cross-linguistic CDI comparison

ABSTRACT This paper compared the vocabulary size of a group of 250 bilinguals aged 24–36 months acquiring six different language pairs using an analogous tool, and attempted to identify factors that influence vocabulary sizes and ultimately place children at risk for language delay. Each research group used adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences and a specially designed developmental and language background questionnaire to gather information on risk factors for language impairment, demographic and language exposure variables. The results showed a wide range in vocabulary development which could be somewhat attributed to mothers’ education status, parental concerns about language development and amount of exposure to the second language. We looked at those children performing below the 10th and above the 90th percentile to determine what factors were related to their vocabulary size. Features of the entire group of lower performing children were fewer than 50 words and the absence of two-word combinations by 24 months, lower levels of parental education and parental concerns about language development. The implications for identifying bilingual children at risk for language impairment as well as the language enrichment that might be needed for young bilinguals are outlined.

Emergent complexity in early vocal acquisition: Cross linguistic comparisons of canonical babbling

Phonetic complexity, as evidenced in speech production patterns, is based on congruence of production system, perceptual, and cognitive capacities in adult speakers. Pre-linguistic vocalization patterns in human infants afford the opportunity to consider first stages in emergence of this complex system. The production system forms a primary site for considering determinates of early output complexity, as the respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory subsystems of infant humans support the types of vocal forms observed in early stages as well as those maintained in phonological systems of languages. The role of perceptual input from the environment in earliest stages of infant learning of ambient language phonological regularities is a second locus of emergent complexity. Young infants must both attend to and reproduce regularities to master the full range of phonological forms in their language. Cross linguistic comparison of babbling in infants acquiring typologically different languages including Dutch, Romanian, Turkish, Tunisian Arabic and French are described to consider production system based regularities and early perceptually based learning supporting emergence of ambient language phonological complexity.

When Context Matters More than Language: Verb or Noun in French and Turkish Caregiver Speech.

The main goal of this article is to study the respective role of language typology and context on the noun to verb asymmetry in caregiver speech. The speech of 20 French- and 20 Turkish-speaking mothers addressed to their children in two different situations (book-reading and toy-play) were analysed in terms of noun to verb ratio as well as in terms of object-oriented to action-oriented utterances ratio. Only a tendency to noun orientation was shown in French mothers. Both groups of mothers behave in the same ways in both contexts with more nouns and object-oriented utterances in the book-reading context vs more verbs and action-oriented utterances in toy-play. These results confirm a more important role of context on mothers’ linguistic behaviours than language typology.