Adjective forms and functions in British English child-directed speech

Abstract

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds’ exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives in child-directed speech (CDS); and (ii) investigate how features of the input might scaffold adjective acquisition. In our novel corpus of UK English, adjectives occurred more frequently in prenominal than in postnominal (predicative) syntactic frames, though postnominal frames were more frequent for less-familiar adjectives. They occurred much more frequently with a descriptive than a contrastive function, especially for less-familiar adjectives. Our findings present a partial mismatch between the forms of adjectives found in real-world CDS and those forms that have been shown to be more useful for learning. We discuss implications for models of adjective acquisition and for clinical practice.

Semantic as well as referential relevance facilitates the processing of referring expressions

“…Although the interaction between referential and semantic relevance was not significant, there was a supportive trend in the reading times, which were fastest in the tworeferent, semantically relevant condition (M = 666 ms, SD = 211) and slowest in the two non-relevant conditions (M = 872 ms, SD = 326). This 'double relevance' highlights the dual functions of adjectives: they describe as well as contrast referents (Davies, Lingwood, & Arunachalam, 2020;Karmiloff-Smith, 1979). When they do both, processing is rapid.…”

Three-year-olds' comprehension of contrastive and descriptive adjectives: Evidence for contrastive inference

“…In a larger corpus of adjectives in child-directed speech across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts, adjectives were found to occur prenominally in 52% of occurrences, cf. 41% postnominally (Davies et al, 2020). These findings present a puzzle: the forms that should be more cognitively taxing for children are also more frequent in the input.…”

“…Our first research question examines three-year-olds' adjective-noun integration, i.e., to what extent do they combine crucial information from the adjective with the noun to derive a composed meaning and uniquely resolve the intended reference. Meaning integration is necessary across all levels of language processing and is especially pertinent in adjective interpretation given that the primary function of adjectives is to specify the meaning of a noun, and that adjectives rarely occur as isolated words (Davies, Lingwood, & Arunachalam, 2020). Comprehension is at risk if children do not integrate and instead process the elements serially, for example when asked to pick the "second green ball", five-year-olds picked the second ball in the series which also happened to be green, but not the second of two green balls in the set (Matthei, 1982).…”

“…First, they are early acquired; at two years children can interpret these size terms accurately (Ebeling & Gelman, 1988). They are also highly frequent, e.g., they were the two most frequent scalar adjectives found in a recent corpus study on child-directed speech (Davies et al, 2020). Because they are scalar adjectives, their interpretation necessarily involves semantic integration of the adjective and noun (e.g., Ziegler & Pylkkanën, 2016).…”

Corpus Analysis of the Grammatical Categories’ Constituents in Fiction Texts Considering the Linguo-Regional Component

“…Die Korpusanalyse ist eine Forschungsmethode, die in unserer Zeit nicht an Popularität verloren hat und zur Lösung verschiedener Sprachprobleme verwendet wird. Dazu gehören die Fremdsprachendidaktik und das Übersetzungstraining (Giampieri, 2020;Silva, 2020); die Untersuchung einzelner sprachlicher Phänomene (Duque, 2020;Davies et al, 2020;Meidani, 2019) und selbst das Studium philosophischer Fragen (Caton, 2020).…”