Input Subject Diversity Accelerates the Growth of Tense and Agreement: Indirect Benefits From a Parent-Implemented Intervention

Abstract

These findings establish a link between children's sentence diversity and the development of T/A morphemes and provide evidence about characteristics of input that facilitate growth in this grammatical system.

Individual and Developmental Differences in Distributional Learning

“…One example of a treatment approach that does this can be found in Hadley and colleagues' work on unique syntactic types. They have suggested that focusing on training a variety of sentence subjects and a variety of predicates may both diversify the syntactic frames that children use and improve grammatical morpheme accuracy (Hadley, McKenna, & Rispoli, 2018;Hadley, Rispoli, & Holt, 2017). Focusing on the category of sentence subject rather than the nonadjacent dependencies associated with agreement marking may capitalize on children's ability to use distributional learning.…”

The quality of child-directed speech depends on the speaker's language proficiency

“…Utterance length in input has been argued also to predict vocabulary growth in children because longer utterances are likely to provide more information about the meaning of a new word they containeither through content or through information provided in the syntactic frames in which new words appear (Hoff, 2003). Linguistic features of child-directed speech that have been found to predict children's grammatical development include the number of different verbs used as main verbs and the number of different lexical nouns (i.e., not pronouns) used as sentence subjects (Hadley, Rispoli, & Holt, 2017;Hsu, Hadley, & Rispoli, 2017;Plante et al, 2014). The theoretical argument for why these latter variables predict grammatical development is that input that contains many different lexical items serving as sentence subjects and many different lexical items serving as main verbs provides a basis for children's abstracting the patterns that are regular across different words serving these grammatical functions (Hadley et al, 2017;Hsu et al, 2017).…”

The influence of limited scope formulae on children’s subject-copula combinations

“…On the other hand, providing explicit information about objects and surroundings with lexical NP subjects could promote growth in USC by decreasing children's reliance on rote memorization. Recent work has provided evidence that when parents are taught to increase the diversity of their own sentence subjects through other-focused commenting, their children later use more diverse third person subjects themselves and use more adult-like tense and agreement marking compared to peers [45,46].…”