Individual differences in discourse priming

Abstract

In this paper we use corpora of four monolingual German-speaking children at 2 years of age to analyze the effect of input on the activation of chunks and frame-and-slot patterns. For this purpose, we first investigate to what extent chunks and patterns can be traced back to the direct input compared to input which is not part of the immediate discourse situation. Second, we take mean length of utterance (MLU) into account to see how the level of proficiency influences the amount of priming in each child. Results indicate that children with a lower MLU rely more on priming than children who are more proficient. This conclusion is consistent with the usage-based assumption that children’s linguistic development starts with a strongly item-based reproduction of input patterns that gradually gives rise to increasingly creative and productive uses of constructions.

A usage-based approach to metaphor identification and analysis in child speech

“…To test input–output effects in metaphor acquisition, our approach will rely on two features of input that have been shown to drive language development. The first is priming, a basic learning mechanism, based on the propensity to store memory traces from immediate discourse (Kirjavainen & Theakston, 2011; Koch et al, 2020; Rowland et al, 2012). Koch et al (2020) examined the speech of German-speaking children aged two in terms of priming effects and showed that by the age of three, once children’s utterances become long and more productive, children emancipate themselves from the input and become more creative with their language choices.…”

“…The first is priming, a basic learning mechanism, based on the propensity to store memory traces from immediate discourse (Kirjavainen & Theakston, 2011; Koch et al, 2020; Rowland et al, 2012). Koch et al (2020) examined the speech of German-speaking children aged two in terms of priming effects and showed that by the age of three, once children’s utterances become long and more productive, children emancipate themselves from the input and become more creative with their language choices. These results suggest that priming eases the processing of structures that have been activated before, especially those less entrenched in the speaker’s memory (e.g., Schmid, 2020).…”

Priming of Frames and Slots in Bilingual Children’s Code-Mixing: A Usage-Based Approach

“…Strongly entrenched patterns and words can be retrieved more easily from longterm memory, but especially less entrenched patterns can be activated by priming in the immediate discourse and in turn also become more entrenched in this process; Schmid refers to this as a feedback loop (Schmid, 2017(Schmid, , 2020. This is a particularly important strategy for monolingual children who are two (less so 3 years of age) as for these children constructions are not yet fully entrenched (Koch et al, 2020). Our study provides evidence that priming also applies to bilingual acquisition between their second and third birthday.…”

“…An assumption characteristic of the UB framework is that there is an intimate relationship between the linguistic knowledge and the instances of language use: input provides the basis from which children extract and build up their linguistic knowledge. Immediate discourse effects have been shown to play a major role in the production of constructions, particularly in the form of priming (e.g., Kirjavainen and Theakston, 2011;Koch et al, 2020). In this article, we wish to investigate if and how the immediate discourse influences children's production of code-mixed utterances in German-English, Polish-English, and Finnish-English.…”