Structure and Variation in Child Language

Bloom, Lois; Lightbown, Patsy M.; Hood, Lois; Bowerman, Melissa; Maratsos, Michael P

doi:10.2307/1165986

Cited by 316 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Children often produce verbs describing actions or physical motion such as throw or run before the second birthday (L. Bloom, Lightblown & Hood, 1975), and appear to understand them well (Huttenlocher, Smiley & Charney, 1983;Gentner, 1978). Think and know don't usually appear until the end of the third year of life (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982;Shatz, Wellman & Silber, 1983) and are not well distinguished from one another in comprehension until around age four (Johnson & Maratsos, 1977;Moore, Bryant & Furrow, 1989;Moore & Furrow, 1991;Naigles, 2000).…”

Section: The Learning Trajectory For Mental Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

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Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the difficulty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear. The experiments reported here explore the implications of these proposals by investigating the contribution of observational and linguistic cues to the acquisition of mental predicate vocabulary. We first demonstrate that particular observed situations can be helpful in prompting reference to mental contents, specifically, contexts that include a salient and/or unusual mental state such as a false belief. We then compare the potency of such observational support to the reliability of alternate or concomitant syntactic information (e.g., sentential complementation) in tasks where both children and adults are asked to hypothesize the meaning of novel verbs. The findings support the efficacy of false belief situations for increasing the saliency of mental state descriptions, but also show that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues. Moreover, when syntactic and observational information sources converge, both children and simulated adult learners are vastly more likely to build conjectures involving mental verbs. This is consistent with a multiple-cue constraint satisfaction view of vocabulary acquisition. Taken together, our findings support the position that the informational demands of mapping, rather than age-related cognitive deficiency, can bear much of the explanatory burden for the learning problems posed by abstract words. Keywordstheory of mind; mental verbs; verb learning; syntactic bootstrapping; language acquisition --many of our complex ideas never had impressions that corresponded to them, and ...many of our complex impressions never are exactly copied in ideas.

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Section: The Learning Trajectory For Mental Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

2007

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“…Identifying the underlying factors that cause children to produce such 'aberrant' structures has been one of the major challenges in language acquisition research. A number of factors have been suggested, including processing limitations (e.g., Pinker, 1984;Bloom, 1990), children's lack of knowledge of a particular word (e.g., Brown, 1973), immature syntactic structures (e.g., Hyams, 1986;Radford, 1990), and the non-verbal context of children's early interactions (e.g., Bloom, 1973;Brown, 1973;Greenfield and Smith, 1976). While it is most likely that all of these factors play a role in syntactic productions, in this article, I will be concerned with the particular contribution of social cognition to children's early utterances.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In other languages, such as Inuktitut, it is also permissible to omit expressions in both subject and object positions, as in Milurpara, '(I) hit (him/her)'. It is well-documented that in the early stages of language development children omit subjects and objects at a higher rate and in different contexts from adults, whether or not the adult language syntactically allows this option (e.g., Greenfield and Smith, 1976;Hyams, 1986;Bloom, 1990;Gerken, 1991;Valian, 1991;Valian and Eisenberg, 1996;Allen, 2000;Grinstead, 2000;Skarabela and Allen, 2002). While much research on argument realization to date has been focused on the formal linguistic characteristics of argument omission in child language, virtually no attention or systematic investigation has been devoted to how this phenomenon might be influenced by children's socio-cognitive abilities, such as joint attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signs of early social cognition in children's syntax: The case of joint attention in argument realization in child Inuktitut

Skarabela

2007

Lingua

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“…Overt subject use in child English has been extensively studied since the 1960s (e.g., Antinucci and Parisi 1973;Bates 1976;Bloom et al 1975aBloom et al , 1975bBrown and Fraser 1964;Guilfoyle 1984;Hyams 1986;Orfitelli and Hyams 2008;Valian 1991). As an illustration of the phenomenon, Valian (1991) shows that in a cross-sectional sample of US English-speaking children, the least grammatically developed, between MLU 1.5 and 2.0 (n = 6, age range 1;10-2;2), used overt subjects in roughly 70% of non-imperative sentences, while a sample of Italian-speaking children used overt subjects in roughly 30% of such utterances (n = 5, age range 2;0-2;5).…”

Section: Subject Occurrence In An Overt Subject Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As an illustration of the phenomenon, Valian (1991) shows that in a cross-sectional sample of US English-speaking children, the least grammatically developed, between MLU 1.5 and 2.0 (n = 6, age range 1;10-2;2), used overt subjects in roughly 70% of non-imperative sentences, while a sample of Italian-speaking children used overt subjects in roughly 30% of such utterances (n = 5, age range 2;0-2;5). Examples of such null subject sentences in child English include the following from Bloom et al (1975aBloom et al ( , 1975b and Brown (1973).…”

Section: Subject Occurrence In An Overt Subject Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Null Subject Occurrence in Monolingual Spanish SLI: A Discriminant Function Analysis

et al. 2018

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Background: Child Spanish-speakers appear to use more null subjects than do adults. Null subject use, like the use of tense marking, is sensitive to discourse-pragmatics. Because tense marking has been used to identify child Spanish-speakers with specific language impairment (SLI) with near good sensitivity and specificity (89%), null subject use may as well, following the predictions of the Interface Deficit Hypothesis. We investigate the possibility that null subject occurrence may form part of a useful discriminant function for the identification of monolingual child Spanish-speakers diagnosed with specific language impairment. Methods: We evaluate the rate of null subject expression from spontaneous production data, together with results from independent measures of another discourse-sensitive construction, verb finiteness, in child Spanish. We perform a discriminant function analysis, using null subject expression as a target variable, among others, to classify monolingual child Spanish-speakers (N = 40) as SLI or as typically-developing (TD). Results: The SLI group is shown to have significantly higher scores than the TD group on null subject expression. Multiple discriminant functions, including the null subject variable with tense measures, and in combination with mean length of utterance in words (MLUw), are shown to provide good sensitivity and specificity (<90%) in the classification of children as SLI vs. TD. Conclusion: Our findings support the contention that null subject occurrence is a plausible reflection of the Interface Deficit of SLI for Spanish-speaking children.

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Structure and Variation in Child Language

Cited by 316 publications

References 37 publications

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs

Signs of early social cognition in children's syntax: The case of joint attention in argument realization in child Inuktitut

Null Subject Occurrence in Monolingual Spanish SLI: A Discriminant Function Analysis

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