Thea Cameron-Faulkner

A comparison of book text and Child Directed Speech

This article evaluates the extent to which pre-schoolers’ picture books can be viewed as a form of enriched linguistic input. Twenty best-selling picture books were analysed in terms of syntactic constructions and compared with a sample of Child Directed Speech. The findings of the study demonstrate the prevalence of canonical utterances (i.e. those displaying Subject-Verb (Object) ordering) and Complex constructions within the book sample, both types of which occur with very low frequency in everyday Child Directed Speech. It is concluded that the linguistic content of young children’s books has the potential to play an important role in children’s grammatical development.

The acquisition of the multiple senses of 'with'.

Abstract The present article reports on an investigation of one childs acquisition of the multiple senses of the preposition with from 2;0–4;0. Two competing claims regarding childrens early representation and subsequent acquisition of with were investigated. The “multiple meanings” hypothesis predicts that children form individual form-meaning pairings for with as separate lexical entries. The “monosemy approach” (McKercher 2001) claims that children apply a unitary meaning by abstracting core features early in acquisition. The childs (“Brian”) speech and his input were coded according to eight distinguishable senses of with. The results showed that Brian first acquired the senses that were most frequent in the input (accompaniment, attribute, and instrument). Less common senses took much longer to emerge. A detailed analysis of the input showed that a variety of clues are available that potentially enable the child to distinguish among high frequency senses. The acquisition data suggested that the child initially applied a restricted one-to-one form-meaning mapping for with, which is argued to reflect the spatial properties of the preposition. On the basis of these results it is argued that neither the monosemy nor the multiple meanings approach can fully explain the data, but that the results are best explained by a combination of word learning principles and childrens ability to categorize the contextual properties of each senses use in the ambient language.

The interaction of gesture, intonation and eye-gaze in proto-imperatives.

In the present study we investigate the production of gesture, intonation, and eye-gaze within the proto-imperative behaviour of one English child aged 1;0 to 1;7. The study is based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the three behaviours. The results indicate a shift from reaching gestures to points, and from rising terminal pitch contours to non-rising contours. The analysis also highlights changes in eye-gaze to the co-participant over time. In addition we identify a significant relationship between pitch contour and gesture type within the sample, with points being more closely associated with non-rise intonation than reaching gestures. We suggest that the changes in proto-imperative behaviour signal a shift in the underlying representation of the function from a request for help to a demand for a particular object, and that this development paves the way for the subsequent conventional linguistic expression of the imperative function.

A functional account of verb use in the early stages of English multiword development.

The present study investigates flexibility of verb use in the early stages of English multiword development, and its relationship with patterns attested in the input. The data is taken from a case study of a monolingual English-speaking boy aged 2 ; 5-2 ; 9 and his mother while engaged in daily activities in the home. Data were coded according to Hallidays (1975) functional system. The findings suggest that early multiword verb use is functionally restricted and closely tied to verb use in the input.

Review: Rethinking Innateness

Book reviewed in this article: Jeffrey Elman, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi & Kim Plunkett, Rethinking Innateness