Download or read book Child Acquisition of Referring Expressions written by Carlton M Downey and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Acquisition of Referring Expressions written by Anne Salazar-Orvig and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the repertoire and uses of referring expressions by French-speaking children and their interlocutors in naturally occurring dialogues at home and at school, in a wide range of communicative situations and activities. Through the lens of an interactionist and dialogical perspective, it highlights the interaction between the formal aspects of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes, the discourse-pragmatic dimension, and socio-discursive, interactional and dialogical factors. Drawing on this multidimensional theoretical and methodological framework, the first part of the book deals with the relation between reference and grammar, while the second part is devoted to the role of the communicative experience. Progressively, a set of arguments is brought out in favor of a dialogical and interactionist account of children’s referential development. This theoretical stance is further discussed in relation to other approaches of reference acquisition. Thus, this volume provides researchers and students with new perspectives and methods for the study of referring expressions in children.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Reference written by Ludovica Serratrice and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children’s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on the acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of referential acquisition will make the volume appealing to a wide audience of researchers, including linguists and psycholinguists working on phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of language development. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted by several of the contributors will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the relevance of typological differences. The state-of-the-art approach makes the research accessible to specialist and non-specialist researchers alike, and will provide an invaluable resource for graduate-level courses.

Download or read book Impact of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation written by Sauermann, Antje and published by Universitätsverlag Potsdam. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the impact of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation in German-speaking preschoolers. A puzzle in the area of language acquisition concerns the production-comprehension asymmetry for non-canonical sentences like "Den Affen fängt die Kuh." (“The monkey, the cow chases.”), that is, preschoolers usually have difficulties in accurately understanding non-canonical sentences approximately until age six (e.g., Dittmar et al., 2008) although they produce non-canonical sentences already around age three (e.g., Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Weissenborn, 1990). This dissertation investigated the production and comprehension of non-canonical sentences to address this issue. Three corpus analyses were conducted to investigate the impact of givenness, topic status and the type of referring expression on word order in the spontaneous speech of two- to four-year-olds and the child-directed speech produced by their mothers. The positioning of the direct object in ditransitive sentences was examined; in particular, sentences in which the direct object occurred before or after the indirect object in the sentence-medial positions and sentences in which it occurred in the sentence-initial position. The results reveal similar ordering patterns for children and adults. Word order variation was to a large extent predictable from the type of referring expression, especially with respect to the word order involving the sentence-medial positions. Information structure (e.g., topic status) had an additional impact only on word order variation that involved the sentence-initial position. Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether the type of referring expression and topic status influences the comprehension of non-canonical transitive sentences in four- and five-year-olds. In the first experiment, the topic status of the one of the sentential arguments was established via a preceding context sentence, and in the second experiment, the type of referring expression for the sentential arguments was additionally manipulated by using either a full lexical noun phrase (NP) or a personal pronoun. The results demonstrate that children’s comprehension of non-canonical sentences improved when the topic argument was realized as a personal pronoun and this improvement was independent of the grammatical role of the arguments. However, children’s comprehension was not improved when the topic argument was realized as a lexical NP. In sum, the results of both production and comprehension studies support the view that referring expressions may be seen as a sentence-level cue to word order and to the information status of the sentential arguments. The results highlight the important role of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation and indicate that the production-comprehension asymmetry is reduced when the type of referring expression is considered. --- Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Dissertation wurde der Einfluss des referierenden Ausdrucks auf den Erwerb von Wortstellungsvariationen bei deutschsprachigen Vorschulkindern untersucht. Eine zentrale Fragestellung im Spracherwerb betrifft die Asymmetrie zwischen Produktion und Verständnis. Diese Asymmetrie ist dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass sechsjährige Kinder oft Schwierigkeiten haben, Sätze in der nicht-kanonischen Wortstellung, z.B. „Den Affen fängt die Kuh.“, zu verstehen (z.B., Dittmar et al., 2008), obwohl bereits Dreijährige nicht-kanonische Sätze produzieren können (z.B., Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Weissenborn, 1990). Um diese Asymmetrie zu untersuchen wurde in der Dissertation die Produktion und das Verständnis von nicht-kanonischen Sätzen betrachtet. In drei Korpusstudien wurde der Einfluss von Vorerwähntheit, Topikstatus und Wahl des referierenden Ausdrucks auf die Wortstellung in der Spontansprache von Zwei- bis Vierjährigen und in der kind-gerichteten Sprache ihre Mütter analysiert. Es wurde die Position des direkten Objektes in ditransitiven Sätzen untersucht, d.h., Sätze in denen das direkte Objekt vor oder nach dem indirekten Objekt in den satzmedialen Positionen stand, und Sätze in denen es in der satzinitialen Position stand. Die Ergebnisse zeigen ähnlich Abfolgemuster in der Satzproduktion der Kindern und Erwachsenen. Die Position des direkten Objektes, vor allem in den satzmedialen Positionen, war zu einem großen Teil durch die Wahl des referierenden Ausdrucks vorhersagbar. Informationsstrukturelle Faktoren (z.B. Topikstatus) hingegen beeinflussten - unabhängig vom Einfluss des referierenden Ausdrucks - nur die Wortstellung in der satzinitialen Position. Zwei Verständnisexperimente wurden durchgeführt um den Einfluss des referierenden Ausdrucks und des Topikstatuses auf das Verständnis von nicht-kanonischen transitiven Sätzen zu untersuchen. Im ersten Experiment wurde der Topikstatus eines der beiden Satzargumente durch einen vorherigen Kontext modifiziert. Im zweiten Experiment wurde zusätzlich der referierende Ausdruck modifiziert, d.h. das Topik wurde entweder durch eine lexikalische Nominalphrase (NP) oder ein Personalpronomen realisiert. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass vier- und fünfjährige Kinder Sätze in der nichtkanonischen Wortstellung besser verstehen konnten, wenn das Topik als Personalpronomen realisiert wurde, unabhängig von der grammatischen Rolle des Topiks. Das Satzverständnis war jedoch nicht verbessert, wenn das Topik als lexikalische NP realisiert wurde. Zusammengefasst zeigen die Ergebnisse der Produktions- und Verständnisstudien, dass der referierende Ausdruck als Hinweis auf die Wortstellung und auf den Informationsstatus der Argumente des Satzes von den Kindern genutzt werden kann. Sie unterstreichen somit die Bedeutung der Wahl des referierenden Ausdrucks auf den Erwerb von Wortstellungsvariation und zeigen, dass die Asymmetrie zwischen Produktion und Verständnis an Bedeutung verliert, wenn der referierende Ausdruck einbezogen wird.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Referring Expressions by Young Chinese Children written by Rui-Fang Min and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition written by Danielle Matthews and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-06-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatic development is increasingly seen as the foundation stone of language acquisition more generally. From very early on, children demonstrate a strong desire to understand and be understood that motivates the acquisition of lexicon and grammar and enables ever more effective communication. In the 35 years since the first edited volume on the topic, a flourishing literature has reported on the broad set of skills that can be called pragmatic. This volume aims to bring that literature together in a digestible format. It provides a series of succinct review chapters on 19 key topics ranging from preverbal skills right up to irony and argumentative discourse. Each chapter equips the reader with an overview of current theories, key empirical findings and questions for new research. This valuable resource will be of interest to scholars of psychology, linguistics, speech therapy, and cognitive science.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Reference written by Jeanette Gundel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook presents an overview of the phenomenon of reference - the ability to refer to and pick out entities - which is an essential part of human language and cognition. In the volume's 21 chapters, international experts in the field offer a critical account of all aspects of reference from a range of theoretical perspectives. Chapters in the first part of the book are concerned with basic questions related to different types of referring expression and their interpretation. They address questions about the role of the speaker - including speaker intentions - and of the addressee, as well as the role played by the semantics of the linguistic forms themselves in establishing reference. This part also explores the nature of such concepts as definite and indefinite reference and specificity, and the conditions under which reference may fail. The second part of the volume looks at implications and applications, with chapters covering such topics as the acquisition of reference by children, the processing of reference both in the human brain and by machines. The volume will be of interest to linguists in a wide range of subfields, including semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and psycho- and neurolinguistics, as well as scholars in related fields such as philosophy and computer science.

Download or read book Handbook of Child Psychology Cognition Perception and Language written by William Damon and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2006-05-11 with total page 1072 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the authoritative four-volume reference that spans the entire field of child development and has set the standard against which all other scholarly references are compared. Updated and revised to reflect the new developments in the field, the Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition contains new chapters on such topics as spirituality, social understanding, and non-verbal communication. Volume 2: Cognition, Perception, and Language, edited by Deanna Kuhn, Columbia University, and Robert S. Siegler, Carnegie Mellon University, covers mechanisms of cognitive and perceptual development in language acquisition. It includes new chapters devoted to neural bases of cognition, motor development, grammar and langauge rules, information processing, and problem solving skills.

Download or read book A Functional Approach to Child Language written by Annette Karmiloff-Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1981-07-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical exposition of Piaget's views on child language and thought.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Romance With Special Reference To French written by Eve Clark and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2016-01-08 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986. This edition offers a grammatical sketch of French, with occasional comments on how other Romance languages diverge from this picture; a brief account of the sources available on language acquisition by children; and a summary of the overall course of development in children acquiring the major Romance languages. The remainder of the review takes up different facets of the language acquisition process in more detail.

Download or read book Reference written by Laure Gardelle and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2023-02-02 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides an innovative approach to the referential process thanks to its focus on the relationship between conventions and discourse pragmatics. It brings together a cross-section of current research on referential conventions and pragmatic strategies, in a number of different fields (formal and theoretical linguistics, semantics, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, interactional linguistics, natural language processing), in a variety of verbal and non-verbal languages (English, German, different varieties of French, Indonesian, French Belgian Sign Language) and in a diversity of contexts (the coining of names, language acquisition, second language learning, and various genres such as news articles, narratives, satire or game playing). The volume is meant as a series of thought-provoking studies which place speakers and addressees at the core of the referential act, thus providing evidence on how they negotiate and adjust, depending on the context.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Heritage Languages written by Silvina Montrul and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative overview of research into heritage language acquisition, covering key terminological and empirical issues, theoretical approaches, and research methodologies.

Download or read book Principle B VP Ellipsis and Interpretation in Child Grammar written by Rosalind Thornton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring expressions. The principle that is relevant for pronouns, Principle B, has provided a fertile ground for the study of linguistic development. Although it has long been known that children make certain kinds of errors that appear to contradict this principle, further experimental and theoretical investigation reveals that the child does know the grammatical principle, but implements the pragmatic knowledge incorrectly. In fact, discoveries concerning children's knowledge of Principle B are among the most well-known in the study of language acquisition because of the dissociation between syntactic and pragmatic knowledge (binding versus reference). In this book the authors deepen and extend the results of years of developmental investigation of Principle B by studying the interaction of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis--properties of "strict" and "sloppy" interpretation. This is the first experimental study of these topics in the developmental literature. The striking results show that detailed predictions from the "pragmatic deficiency" theory seem to be correct. Many novel experimental results concern the question of how children interpret pronouns, including elided pronouns, and how they understand VP ellipsis. The authors present the necessary theoretical background on Principle B, review and critique previous accounts of childrens errors, and present a novel account of why children misinterpret pronouns. The book will thus be of interest not only to readers interested in the development of the binding theory, but to those interested in the development of interpretation and reference by children.

Download or read book First Language Acquisition written by David Ingram and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-09-07 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major textbook, setting new standards of clarity and comprehensiveness, will be welcomed by all serious students of first language acquisition. Written from a linguistic perspective, it provides detailed accounts of the development of children's receptive and productive abilities in all the core areas of language - phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. With a critical acuity drawn from long experience, and without attempting to offer a survey of all the huge mass of child language literature, David Ingram directs students to the fundamental studies and sets these in broad perspective. Students are thereby introduced to the history of the field and the current state of our knowledge in respect of three main themes: method, description and explanation. Whilst the descriptive facts that are currently available on first language acquisition are central to the book, its emphasis on methodology and explanation gives it a particular distinction. The various ways in which research is conducted is discussed in detail, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, leading to new perspectives on key theoretical issues. First Language Acquisition provides advanced undergraduate and graduate students alike with a cogent and closely analysed exposition of how children acquire language in real time. Equally importantly, readers will have acquired the fundamental knowledge and skill not only to interpret primary literature but also to approach their own research with sophistication.

Download or read book Children s Discourse written by Maya Hickmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-21 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative study explores two central questions in the study of first language acquisition: What is the relative impact of structural and functional determinants? What is universal versus language-specific during development? Maya Hickmann addresses these questions in three domains of child language: reference to entities, the representation of space, and uses of temporal-aspectual markings. She provides a thorough review of different theoretical approaches to language acquisition and a wide range of developmental research, as well as examining all three domains in English, French, German and Chinese narratives. Hickmann's findings concern the rhythm of acquisition, the interplay among different factors (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) determining children's uses, and universal versus variable aspects of acquisition. Her conclusions stress the importance of relating sentence and discourse determinants of acquisition in a crosslinguistic perspective. Children's Discourse will be welcomed by those working in psychology and language-related disciplines interested in first language acquisition.

Download or read book The Expression of Information Structure written by Manfred Krifka and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information structure deals with the linguistic forms and techniques that support the integration of what is said into the current informational and attentional state of the addressee. This shows in categories like topic-comment structuring, focus to highlight expressions, marking of givenness and of presupposed information, and ways to indicate that the information provided is restricted. The book relates infor-mation structure to theoretical models of grammar, to computation and modelling and brings together what is known about the expression of information structure in human language with regard to its empirical investigation, its psycholinguistic aspects and the acquisition of information structure. Since the need to integrate what is said into the informational and attentional state of the addressee is central to all human communication, it is not surprising that all natural languages have developed devices to express information structural cate-gories. To illustrate this, the book also provides concrete and theory independent descriptions of the information structural encoding strategies of individual languages of different types . The book can be used as a textbook appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses; it also provides information for linguists that are not specialists in the field.

Download or read book Morphosyntactic Development in Child Emirati Arabic written by Dimitrios Ntelitheos and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-09-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates selected aspects of the grammatical development of Emirati Arabic, the variety of Gulf Arabic spoken in the United Arab Emirates and closely related to the varieties spoken in the rest of the Gulf States. While the acquisition of Arabic as a second language has been widely studied, first language acquisition of different Arabic dialects has received much less attention. Ntelitheos addresses this disparity by presenting a number of systematic studies on the acquisition of Emirati Arabic grammar based on a two-year longitudinal corpus of six children. He discusses the acquisition of the nominal domain, including definiteness and possession; the acquisition of verbal functional structure and agreement; and the acquisition of word order and negation in the syntactic domain. In addition, he defines several developmental stages for Emirati Arabic, based on established diagnostic tests. The discussion is framed within a general survey of the relevant literature in Arabic acquisition studies and combines new empirical data with rigorous discussion of several long-standing theoretical problems in the broader field of child language development.