Building Language Competence in First Language Acquisition

Lieven, Elena

doi:10.1017/s1062798708000380

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The final question we want to address is how to reconcile our results, that show that children generalise both within and across constructions, with the large body of work demonstrating that children's early productions are lexically specific (see e.g. Lieven, 2008;Pine & Lieven, 1997;Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1998). In the literature, there has traditionally been a dichotomy between those who argue for lexically specific learning and those who argue that children are generalising across specific instances, extracting verb-and construction-general information about the regularities of their language from early on.…”

Section: Competing Constructions 26mentioning

confidence: 95%

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Rowland¹,

chan²,

Noble³

2017

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Most work on competing cues in language acquisition has focussed on what happens when cues compete within a certain construction. There has been far less work on what happens when constructions themselves compete. The aim of the present chapter was to explore how the acquisition mechanism copes when constructions compete in a language. We present three experimental studies, all of which focus on the acquisition of the syntactic function of word order as a marker of the Theme-Recipient relation in ditransitives (form-meaning mapping). In Study 1 we investigated how quickly English children acquire form-meaning mappings when there are two competing structures in the language. We demonstrated that English speaking 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, correctly interpreted both prepositional and double object datives, assigning Theme and Recipient participant roles on the basis of word order cues. There was no advantage for the double object dative despite its greater frequency in child directed speech. In Study 2 we looked at acquisition in a language which has no dative alternation – Welsh – to investigate how quickly children acquire form-meaning mapping when there is no competing structure. We demonstrated that Welsh children (Study 2) acquired the prepositional dative at age 3 years, which was much earlier than English children. Finally, in Study 3 we examined bei2 (give) ditransitives in Cantonese, to investigate what happens when there is no dative alternation (as in Welsh), but when the child hears alternative, and possibly competing, word orders in the input. Like the English 3-year olds, the Cantonese 3-year-olds had not yet acquired the word order marking constraints of bei2 ditransitives. We conclude that there is not only competition between cues but competition between constructions in language acquisition. We suggest an extension to the competition model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982) whereby generalisations take place across constructions as easily as they take place within constructions, whenever there are salient similarities to form the basis of the generalisation.

show abstract

Section: Competing Constructions 26mentioning

confidence: 95%

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Rowland¹,

chan²,

Noble³

2017

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Lieven, 2008;Pine & Lieven, 1997;Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1998). In the literature, there has traditionally been a dichotomy between those who argue for lexically specific learning and those who argue that children are generalising across specific instances, extracting verb-and construction-general information about the regularities of their language from early on.…”

Section: Competing Constructions 26mentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Rowland¹,

Noble²,

Chan³

2014

Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Most work on competing cues in language acquisition has focussed on what happens when cues compete within a certain construction. There has been far less work on what happens when constructions themselves compete. The aim of the present chapter was to explore how the acquisition mechanism copes when constructions compete in a language. We present three experimental studies, all of which focus on the acquisition of the syntactic function of word order as a marker of the Theme-Recipient relation in ditransitives (form-meaning mapping). In Study 1 we investigated how quickly English children acquire form-meaning mappings when there are two competing structures in the language. We demonstrated that English speaking 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, correctly interpreted both prepositional and double object datives, assigning Theme and Recipient participant roles on the basis of word order cues. There was no advantage for the double object dative despite its greater frequency in child directed speech. In Study 2 we looked at acquisition in a language which has no dative alternation -Welsh -to investigate how quickly children acquire form-meaning mapping when there is no competing structure. We demonstrated that Welsh children (Study 2) acquired the prepositional dative at age 3 years, which was much earlier than English children. Finally, in Study 3 we examined bei2 (give) ditransitives in Cantonese, to investigate what happens when there is no dative alternation (as in Welsh), but when the child hears alternative, and possibly competing, word orders in the input. Like the English 3-yearolds, the Cantonese 3-year-olds had not yet acquired the word order marking constraints of bei2 ditransitives. We conclude that there is not only competition between cues but competition between constructions in language acquisition. We suggest an extension to the competition model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982) whereby generalisations take place across constructions as easily as they take place within constructions, whenever there are salient similarities to form the basis of the generalisation.Competing constructions 3

show abstract

“…O meio comunicativo verbal também foi o mais observado no estudo de Cervone e Fernandes 19 durante a análise do perfil comunicativo de crianças normais de quatro e cinco anos. Os estudos sobre aquisição de linguagem são unânimes em afirmar o predomínio da comunicação verbal e a desvinculação da linguagem do contexto imediato com o avanço da idade 25,26 . Trabalhos sobre a evolução do desenvolvimento da compreensão da linguagem são mais restritos quando comparados com os de expressão, já que é complexo determinar se a compreensão verbal dependeu mais de pistas contextuais do que da informação linguística propriamente dita 1 .…”

Section: Discussionunclassified

Protocolo de Observação Comportamental - PROC: valores de referência para uma análise quantitativa

Hage

Pereira²,

Zorzi

2012

Rev. CEFAC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

RESUMOObjetivo: obter valores de referência para protocolo de observação comportamental (PROC) sobre o desenvolvimento de habilidades comunicativas e de esquemas simbólicos em crianças com desenvolvimento típico de linguagem. Método: foram avaliadas 44 crianças entre 24 e 47 meses de ambos os gêneros, selecionadas em escolas de educação infantil, por meio de triagem do desenvolvimento global Denver II e questionário com os pais. Todas as crianças foram filmadas durante 30 minutos em interação com um adulto em atividade envolvendo brinquedos. As gravações foram analisadas por meio do PROC. A análise estatística descreveu valores de média, mediana, valores mínimos e máximos. Foi utilizado o teste T de Student para comparação das idades. Resultados: nas habilidades comunicativas, as crianças do estudo mostraram evolução com a idade (média para três e dois anos, respectivamente: 58,12 e 51,44), apesar de não ter sido encontrada diferença estatisticamente significante para as faixas etárias comparadas (p=0,486). Quanto ao item compreensão verbal, as crianças de três anos obtiveram melhor desempenho que as de dois (respectivas médias: 59,41 e 50,70), havendo diferença estatisticamente significante (p=0,0000020). Em relação ao item aspectos do desenvolvimento cognitivo, as crianças de três anos apresentaram melhor desempenho em comparação com as de dois (respectivas médias: 44,53 e 31,96), havendo diferença estatisticamente significante entre as pontuações obtidas (p=0,00364), mostrando que as crianças evoluem na hierarquia do simbolismo. Conclusão: a obtenção de valores de referência para o PROC veio combinar análise qualitativa e quantitativa, contribuindo, além do diagnóstico, para o acompanhamento objetivo de processos terapêuticos.

show abstract

Building Language Competence in First Language Acquisition

Cited by 12 publications

References 36 publications

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

Protocolo de Observação Comportamental - PROC: valores de referência para uma análise quantitativa

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About