Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

Naigles, Letitia R.

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00177-4

Cited by 117 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 95 publications

(131 reference statements)

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“…Legendre et al, 2014). Yet many methodological factors may have obscured children's grammatical competence in these studies, giving the impression that children have acquired less abstract linguistic knowledge than they actually possess (Naigles, 2002). The current study reevaluated SV agreement comprehension in monolingual Spanish-speaking children in two experiments manipulating task demands.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject–verb agreement in Spanish

Gonzalez‐Gomez

Hsin

Barrière

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Studies across many languages (e.g., Dutch, English, Farsi, Spanish, Xhosa) have failed to show early acquisition of subject-verb (SV) agreement, whereas recent studies on French reveal acquisition by 30months of age. Using a similar procedure as in previous French studies, the current study evaluated whether earlier comprehension of SV agreement in (Mexican) Spanish can be revealed when task demands are lowered. Two experiments using a touch-screen pointing task tested comprehension of SV agreement by monolingual Spanish-speaking children growing up in Mexico City between about 3 and 5years of age. In Experiment 1, the auditory stimuli consisted of a transitive verb+pseudonoun object (e.g., agarra el micho 'he throws the micho' vs. agarran el duco 'they throw the duco'); results failed to show early comprehension of SV agreement, replicating previous findings. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli were used, with the crucial difference that the word objeto 'object' replaced all pseudonouns; results revealed SV agreement comprehension as early as 41 to 50months. Taken together, our findings show that comprehension at this age is facilitated when task demands are lowered, here by not requiring children to process pseudowords (even when these were not critical to the task). Hence, these findings underscore the importance of task-specific/stimulus-specific features when testing early morphosyntactic development and suggest that previous results may have underestimated Spanish-speaking children's competence.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject–verb agreement in Spanish

Gonzalez‐Gomez

Hsin

Barrière

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…In the latter, some researchers have argued that one-and two-year-olds show a better performance in looking tasks because elicited production and act-out tasks are inherently too difficult for children this age (e.g., Fisher 2002). In addition, Naigles (2002) argues that one reason why children have performed better in the preferential-looking studies is that most of these studies have only required children to notice differences in form and match this with extremely rough differences in meaning. The novel verb elicitation studies (and perhaps also the act-out comprehension studies), on the other hand, might require the child to understand the meaning of the novel verb more exactly for the child to be able to extend the transitive frame to it.…”

Section: Towards a Usage-based Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic acquisition

Abbot-Smith

Tomasello

2006

The Linguistic Review

259

166

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“…Research on the acquisition of syntax has reported many cases of such dissociation between comprehension and production, with a systematic advantage for the former (see Naigles, 2002, for an extended argumentation of this point). For example, studies of children's processing of function words by Gerken et al (1990) have shown that young children, who typically omit function words in their productions, have problems processing sentences that lack those words in comprehension tasks.…”

Section: Critical Issues With the Usage-based Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting evidence for lexicalized word order in young children

Franck

Lassotta

2012

Lingua

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One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of children’s early grammatical knowledge. This paper focuses on the early representation of word order. It questions the validity of the results obtained with the Weird Word Order methodology (Akhtar,1999) inwhichchildrenare presented with un grammatical sentences. These results have previously been considered as major evidence for the constructivist,usage-based approach to word order development according to which young children initially encode word order as a verb-specific lexical property which only slowly develops into abstract knowledge at age 3 or 4 (e.g., Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Matthews et al., 2005, 2007). The critical review presented here addresses various problems with the results and their interpretation. The discussion questions the relationship between theory and data as well asmethodological issues related to thesm all number of observations and the discarding of data not missing at random. It is argued that the data not only fail to support the constructivist account, but they actually bring evidence for the alternative hypothesis according to which children, from early on, represent word order abstractly

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Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

Cited by 117 publications

References 95 publications

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject–verb agreement in Spanish

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject–verb agreement in Spanish

Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic acquisition

Revisiting evidence for lexicalized word order in young children

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