Information Structure in First Language Acquisition

Höhle, Barbara; Berger, Frauke; Sauermann, Antje

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.011

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 437 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Despite the overwhelmingly frequent occurrence of focus in utterances, a large number of acquisition studies show that children’s difficulties both with producing and especially with comprehending sentences with focus are manifold even at around 5 or 6 years of age (see Höhle et al, 2016 for a detailed overview). In the following, we concentrate on challenges that are most relevant to this study, namely those concerning the identification and exhaustive interpretation of focus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preschoolers’ comprehension of exhaustive focus: The role of contextualization

Pintér

Surányi

2022

First Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children’s comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an essentially identical logical structure, have been argued to stem not from the lack of their competence to compute the implicature itself, but from their immature contextualization abilities to identify relevant scalar alternatives. We address the question whether the same extraneous factor may underlie preschooler’s difficulties with focus exhaustification in a comprehension study of 5- to 6-year-old Hungarian children which investigated the effect of contextual cues on their focus interpretation. It was found that while the presence of an explicit Question Under Discussion significantly raises children’s accuracy in identifying the focus and its alternatives (sub-experiment 1), it fails to induce a similar increase in the proportion of exhaustive interpretations (sub-experiment 2). These results indicate that, in contrast to the case of scalar implicatures, children’s low rate of exhaustification of focus reflects a deeper, less context-dependent difference from adult-like comprehension, possibly rooted in the linguistic representation of focus exhaustivity.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preschoolers’ comprehension of exhaustive focus: The role of contextualization

Pintér

Surányi

2022

First Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Children acquire the core components of a language (e.g., phonology, morphology, and syntax) based on experience with the ambient language by the age of four or five years (e.g., Hoff 2009). However, their knowledge of information structure (IS)-adapting the production of language to the appropriate informational needs of the interlocutors and specific speech contexts-tends to lag behind (e.g., Höhle et al 2016). An important dimension of IS or information packaging (Chafe 1976) involves a distinction between "old" or "given" information (recently activated information, e.g., a referent mentioned in previous discourse) versus "new" information (e.g., a referent introduced for the first time) (Birner and Ward 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Structure and Word Order Preference in Child and Adult Speech of Mandarin Chinese

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS.

show abstract

“…In addition, children also produce, at an early age, the language-specific devices that adults use to mark information structure, such as prosody, varying referential forms (lexical vs. pronominal forms), and different word orders and construction types, among others (Hoff 2009). Nevertheless, children's ability to use these devices to mark information structure in an adult-like manner develops over a protracted trajectory (Höhle et al 2016) which "may be caused by the fact that producing and understanding linguistic means of encoding. .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%