Pub Date : 2023-04-24DOI: 10.1177/01427237231165118
Laura M. Morett, Cailee M. Nelson, Sarah S. Hughes-Berheim, J. Scofield
This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting referents with beat gesture, contrastive accenting, both, or neither. Knowledge of these words was then tested via a referent identification task. Novel word learning did not differ by beat gesture or contrastive accenting, nor did use of these cues to support word learning differ by age. However, 3-year-old boys were better able to identify the referents of novel words learned with rather than without beat gesture, and boys’ ability to identify the referents of novel words learned without beat gesture improved from ages 3 to 5 years. By contrast, no such effects of beat gesture on novel word learning by age were observed for girls. These results suggest that, for 3-year-old boys, beat gesture may compensate for difficulty deducing contrast from speech alone, and that their reliance on beat gesture as a cue to contrast decreases as their ability to deduce contrast from speech improves during early childhood. Thus, beat gesture may serve as a visual cue to contrast that scaffolds young children’s learning of words with contrasting meanings by supplementing the use of cues to contrast conveyed via speech.
{"title":"Development of sensitivity to beat gesture and contrastive accenting in support of word learning in early childhood in boys and girls","authors":"Laura M. Morett, Cailee M. Nelson, Sarah S. Hughes-Berheim, J. Scofield","doi":"10.1177/01427237231165118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237231165118","url":null,"abstract":"This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting referents with beat gesture, contrastive accenting, both, or neither. Knowledge of these words was then tested via a referent identification task. Novel word learning did not differ by beat gesture or contrastive accenting, nor did use of these cues to support word learning differ by age. However, 3-year-old boys were better able to identify the referents of novel words learned with rather than without beat gesture, and boys’ ability to identify the referents of novel words learned without beat gesture improved from ages 3 to 5 years. By contrast, no such effects of beat gesture on novel word learning by age were observed for girls. These results suggest that, for 3-year-old boys, beat gesture may compensate for difficulty deducing contrast from speech alone, and that their reliance on beat gesture as a cue to contrast decreases as their ability to deduce contrast from speech improves during early childhood. Thus, beat gesture may serve as a visual cue to contrast that scaffolds young children’s learning of words with contrasting meanings by supplementing the use of cues to contrast conveyed via speech.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"43 1","pages":"469 - 491"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43117916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-11DOI: 10.1177/01427237231161135
L. Singh, Qi Cheng
Most words spoken to infants are produced in larger units, such as clauses, phrases, and sentences. As such, language learners must recognize words amidst the words that surround them. However, the phonetic forms of words change based on surrounding context. Here, we investigate the effects of a common source of phonetic change—phonological assimilation—on word recognition in English monolingual and English-Mandarin bilingual infants from Singapore. Using a preferential looking paradigm, 24-month-old monolingual English and bilingual English-Mandarin toddlers were presented with three different forms of familiar English words embedded in phrases: correct productions (e.g. ‘Look at the pen, dear’), assimilated forms (e.g. ‘Look at the pem, baby’), and mispronunciations (e.g. ‘Look at the pem, dear’). Although participants preferentially fixated visual targets upon hearing them labeled, there were no effects or interactions of language background and trial type on target fixation. However, higher naming effects were associated with increased English exposure in bilingual infants. The results suggest that monolingual and bilingual infants respond similarly to phonetic alternations arising from nasal place assimilation at 24 months.
{"title":"Words in context: Compensation for phonological assimilation in monolingual and bilingual toddlers","authors":"L. Singh, Qi Cheng","doi":"10.1177/01427237231161135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237231161135","url":null,"abstract":"Most words spoken to infants are produced in larger units, such as clauses, phrases, and sentences. As such, language learners must recognize words amidst the words that surround them. However, the phonetic forms of words change based on surrounding context. Here, we investigate the effects of a common source of phonetic change—phonological assimilation—on word recognition in English monolingual and English-Mandarin bilingual infants from Singapore. Using a preferential looking paradigm, 24-month-old monolingual English and bilingual English-Mandarin toddlers were presented with three different forms of familiar English words embedded in phrases: correct productions (e.g. ‘Look at the pen, dear’), assimilated forms (e.g. ‘Look at the pem, baby’), and mispronunciations (e.g. ‘Look at the pem, dear’). Although participants preferentially fixated visual targets upon hearing them labeled, there were no effects or interactions of language background and trial type on target fixation. However, higher naming effects were associated with increased English exposure in bilingual infants. The results suggest that monolingual and bilingual infants respond similarly to phonetic alternations arising from nasal place assimilation at 24 months.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"43 1","pages":"407 - 430"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44249814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-05DOI: 10.1177/01427237231160242
Rosa G. Turco, M. Rowe, Joseph H. Blatt
Despite the documented rise of children’s use of mobile media devices in the United States, particularly in lower-income homes, there is limited research on how children and parents interact together with these types of devices. This study sought to describe and investigate how parents and their 3-year-old children use one type of mobile digital media – e-books. With a sample of 65 families from middle- and lower-income homes, the present study examined different parent profiles in a parent–child interaction with e-books and how parents’ attitudes around learning influenced their interactions. Results show that parents and children on average demonstrated high levels of engagement and collaboration when using an e-book, although there was wide variability in the way parents and children interacted with e-books. Using latent profile analysis, three distinct profiles of parent interactions when using e-books with their children were identified: parents with high levels of speech quality and dialogic talk but low levels of engagement, parents with low levels of speech quality, and parents with high speech quality but low dialogic talk. In addition, parent report measures of self-efficacy, growth mindset, knowledge of child development, and screen time used at home varied by the parent profiles identified in this study. The findings suggest that future research should examine parent profiles to help advance the research base in service of informing efforts to promote adult–child interactions as they relate to mobile device use.
{"title":"Exploring parent profiles in parent–child interactions with e-books","authors":"Rosa G. Turco, M. Rowe, Joseph H. Blatt","doi":"10.1177/01427237231160242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237231160242","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the documented rise of children’s use of mobile media devices in the United States, particularly in lower-income homes, there is limited research on how children and parents interact together with these types of devices. This study sought to describe and investigate how parents and their 3-year-old children use one type of mobile digital media – e-books. With a sample of 65 families from middle- and lower-income homes, the present study examined different parent profiles in a parent–child interaction with e-books and how parents’ attitudes around learning influenced their interactions. Results show that parents and children on average demonstrated high levels of engagement and collaboration when using an e-book, although there was wide variability in the way parents and children interacted with e-books. Using latent profile analysis, three distinct profiles of parent interactions when using e-books with their children were identified: parents with high levels of speech quality and dialogic talk but low levels of engagement, parents with low levels of speech quality, and parents with high speech quality but low dialogic talk. In addition, parent report measures of self-efficacy, growth mindset, knowledge of child development, and screen time used at home varied by the parent profiles identified in this study. The findings suggest that future research should examine parent profiles to help advance the research base in service of informing efforts to promote adult–child interactions as they relate to mobile device use.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"43 1","pages":"380 - 406"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47818355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-22DOI: 10.1177/01427237231157161
Vajiheh Omidkhoda, A. Alizadeh, Atiyeh Kamyabi Gol
Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two parent–child corpora from the CHILDES database to determine frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech. To do so, a number of frequent frames in the two corpora and more specifically those which contained complex verbs were analyzed in detail. The results indicate that the accuracy of frequent frames in Persian (0.54) with some specific typological features is lower than that of English (0.91) at the word level due to the flexibility of the basic SOV order at the sentence level in Persian. It was also found that Persian frequent frames mostly included complex verbs. This evidence, along with the results of frames in categorizing words at this level, indicates that the accuracy of the frames is also affected by the fact that the subject position of verbs is mostly left vacant in Persian as a pro-drop language. That is why the non-finite forms of the verbs were taken into account when a verb was a part of the frames. The results also revealed that grammatical categories which mostly appeared in the context of frames were verbs, while the target words were nouns and adjectives.
{"title":"Grammatical categorization based on frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech","authors":"Vajiheh Omidkhoda, A. Alizadeh, Atiyeh Kamyabi Gol","doi":"10.1177/01427237231157161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237231157161","url":null,"abstract":"Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two parent–child corpora from the CHILDES database to determine frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech. To do so, a number of frequent frames in the two corpora and more specifically those which contained complex verbs were analyzed in detail. The results indicate that the accuracy of frequent frames in Persian (0.54) with some specific typological features is lower than that of English (0.91) at the word level due to the flexibility of the basic SOV order at the sentence level in Persian. It was also found that Persian frequent frames mostly included complex verbs. This evidence, along with the results of frames in categorizing words at this level, indicates that the accuracy of the frames is also affected by the fact that the subject position of verbs is mostly left vacant in Persian as a pro-drop language. That is why the non-finite forms of the verbs were taken into account when a verb was a part of the frames. The results also revealed that grammatical categories which mostly appeared in the context of frames were verbs, while the target words were nouns and adjectives.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"43 1","pages":"336 - 352"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47843989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The current study investigates narrative retelling and comprehension among 30 native Arabic-speaking preschool children with a mean age of 5:10. Narrative features of text-complexity (less-complex and more-complex episodic structure) and language variety (Spoken Palestinian Arabic [PA] and Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) were analyzed for their effect on narrative retelling and comprehension. Four narratives accompanied by six pictures each (Gagarina et al., 2012) were used. Two were presented in MSA and two in PA, the children’s spoken vernacular. Two of them, one per each language variety, matched on episodic structure, were less complex, and two were more complex. Although children were free to choose which language to use for the retelling, they all used PA. Retelling performance was analyzed according to macrostructure, microstructure, and the use of Internal State Terms (ISTs). Comprehension was tested via questions addressing the character’s goals, ISTs, and Theory of Mind. With respect to text complexity, the results showed that the participants produced longer texts and demonstrated better comprehension when the narratives were more complex. Language variety was only associated with a difference in comprehension, with higher scores for the narratives presented in MSA. Older children produced longer texts and a higher number of ISTs. Finally, a three-way interaction emerged in the use of ISTs – while younger children produced more ISTs for the PA narratives, the older ones produced more of those for the MSA narratives. The study suggests that language variety and text complexity may exert different effects on narrative production and comprehension in Arabic-speaking preschool children.
本研究调查了30名母语为阿拉伯语的学龄前儿童的叙事复述和理解能力，这些儿童的平均年龄为5:10。本文分析了文本复杂性(不复杂和更复杂的情节结构)和语言多样性(巴勒斯坦阿拉伯语口语[PA]和现代标准阿拉伯语[MSA])的叙事特征对叙事复述和理解的影响。采用四篇叙事，每篇配有六张图片(Gagarina et al.， 2012)。两个用MSA，两个用PA，孩子们的口语。其中两个，每种语言一个，在情节结构上匹配，不那么复杂，另外两个更复杂。虽然孩子们可以自由选择用哪种语言复述，但他们都使用了PA。从宏观结构、微观结构和内部状态项(Internal State Terms, ISTs)的使用三个方面分析了复述性能。理解能力是通过回答角色的目标、目标和心理理论的问题来测试的。在文本复杂性方面，研究结果表明，当叙述越复杂时，参与者的文本越长，理解能力越强。语言多样性只与理解能力的差异有关，在MSA中呈现的叙述得分更高。大一点的孩子写出了更长的文本和更多的列表。最后，在使用列表中出现了三向互动——年龄较小的孩子为PA叙述生成更多的列表，而年龄较大的孩子为MSA叙述生成更多的列表。研究表明，语言多样性和文本复杂性对学龄前阿拉伯语儿童叙事的产生和理解有不同的影响。
{"title":"Text complexity and variety factors in narrative retelling and narrative comprehension among Arabic-speaking preschool children","authors":"Khaloob Kawar, Elinor Saiegh-Haddad, Sharon Armon-Lotem","doi":"10.1177/01427237221149800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237221149800","url":null,"abstract":"The current study investigates narrative retelling and comprehension among 30 native Arabic-speaking preschool children with a mean age of 5:10. Narrative features of text-complexity (less-complex and more-complex episodic structure) and language variety (Spoken Palestinian Arabic [PA] and Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) were analyzed for their effect on narrative retelling and comprehension. Four narratives accompanied by six pictures each (Gagarina et al., 2012) were used. Two were presented in MSA and two in PA, the children’s spoken vernacular. Two of them, one per each language variety, matched on episodic structure, were less complex, and two were more complex. Although children were free to choose which language to use for the retelling, they all used PA. Retelling performance was analyzed according to macrostructure, microstructure, and the use of Internal State Terms (ISTs). Comprehension was tested via questions addressing the character’s goals, ISTs, and Theory of Mind. With respect to text complexity, the results showed that the participants produced longer texts and demonstrated better comprehension when the narratives were more complex. Language variety was only associated with a difference in comprehension, with higher scores for the narratives presented in MSA. Older children produced longer texts and a higher number of ISTs. Finally, a three-way interaction emerged in the use of ISTs – while younger children produced more ISTs for the PA narratives, the older ones produced more of those for the MSA narratives. The study suggests that language variety and text complexity may exert different effects on narrative production and comprehension in Arabic-speaking preschool children.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"43 1","pages":"355 - 379"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46711811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1177/01427237221149310
I. Gabbatore, Katja Dindar, Veera Pirinen, H. Vähänikkilä, Laura Mämmelä, Aija Kotila, F. Bosco, E. Leinonen, Soile Loukusa
Effective communication is a fundamental aspect of children’s daily living, enabling interaction with adults and peers. A rich literature suggests that communicative abilities develop with age, while little is known about cross-cultural differences and similarities. This study presents a comparison of the communicative performance of Finnish (n = 147) and Italian (n = 147) typically developing children, aged 4–8 years old, as assessed by the widely used Children’s Communication Checklist–2 (CCC-2). The results reveal an effect of nationality in 9 of the 10 subscales. Finnish parents scored their children’s communicative skill higher than Italian parents in eight of those subscales, but for the social relation subscale, Italian parents scored their children higher than the Finnish parents. Some of these differences are evident for the different age groups and are already present at early developmental stages. In both the Finnish and Italian samples, the parents rated the girls’ communicative performance as more competent than the boys’ on a number of CCC-2 subscales. The results are discussed in light of previous evidence highlighting that cultural features affect and shape communicative style within society, leading to differences (and similarities) that should be considered when assessing children’s communicative abilities.
{"title":"Silent Finns and Talkative Italians? An investigation of communicative differences and similarities as perceived by parents in typically developing children","authors":"I. Gabbatore, Katja Dindar, Veera Pirinen, H. Vähänikkilä, Laura Mämmelä, Aija Kotila, F. Bosco, E. Leinonen, Soile Loukusa","doi":"10.1177/01427237221149310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237221149310","url":null,"abstract":"Effective communication is a fundamental aspect of children’s daily living, enabling interaction with adults and peers. A rich literature suggests that communicative abilities develop with age, while little is known about cross-cultural differences and similarities. This study presents a comparison of the communicative performance of Finnish (n = 147) and Italian (n = 147) typically developing children, aged 4–8 years old, as assessed by the widely used Children’s Communication Checklist–2 (CCC-2). The results reveal an effect of nationality in 9 of the 10 subscales. Finnish parents scored their children’s communicative skill higher than Italian parents in eight of those subscales, but for the social relation subscale, Italian parents scored their children higher than the Finnish parents. Some of these differences are evident for the different age groups and are already present at early developmental stages. In both the Finnish and Italian samples, the parents rated the girls’ communicative performance as more competent than the boys’ on a number of CCC-2 subscales. The results are discussed in light of previous evidence highlighting that cultural features affect and shape communicative style within society, leading to differences (and similarities) that should be considered when assessing children’s communicative abilities.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"43 1","pages":"313 - 335"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41573001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1177/01427237221147614
S. Jackson
While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers produced pronouns via a word elicitation task conducted in Trinidadian English Creole and Trinidad and Tobago English. Responses were coded for children’s age, gender, district and socioeconomic status; task language; grammatical gender/number; and response form. Conditional inference trees facilitated statistical analysis. When choices were available, children exhibited variable production, with Creole forms often dominant. Grammatical gender influenced whether English or Creole pronouns were selected. Task language influenced possessive pronoun choices, indicating developing sociolinguistic competence. The non-significance of other variables suggests widespread mixing of English and Creole pronouns. Findings underscore the importance of describing understudied populations, especially where variation is inherent, to ensure accurate language assessment.
{"title":"Acquisition during normative code-mixing: Trinidadian children’s varilingual pronoun usage","authors":"S. Jackson","doi":"10.1177/01427237221147614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237221147614","url":null,"abstract":"While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers produced pronouns via a word elicitation task conducted in Trinidadian English Creole and Trinidad and Tobago English. Responses were coded for children’s age, gender, district and socioeconomic status; task language; grammatical gender/number; and response form. Conditional inference trees facilitated statistical analysis. When choices were available, children exhibited variable production, with Creole forms often dominant. Grammatical gender influenced whether English or Creole pronouns were selected. Task language influenced possessive pronoun choices, indicating developing sociolinguistic competence. The non-significance of other variables suggests widespread mixing of English and Creole pronouns. Findings underscore the importance of describing understudied populations, especially where variation is inherent, to ensure accurate language assessment.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"43 1","pages":"283 - 312"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46236831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-31DOI: 10.1177/01427237221150070
Gary Jones, F. Cabiddu, Douglas Barrett, A. Castro, Bethany J. Lee
Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children’s vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens from adult speech directed at children (from caregiver–child transcriptions) to the same quantity directed at adults. We show that child-directed speech contains greater numbers of words that are lower in phonemic length, higher in frequency, lower in phonotactic probability, and higher in neighborhood density than adult-directed speech; furthermore, child-directed speech explains over twice the variability of children’s productive noun vocabularies than adult-directed speech. These findings indicate that children’s word production is clearly influenced by the characteristics of the words spoken directly to them and that researchers need to be wary of using adult-directed language corpora when calculating lexical measures.
{"title":"How the characteristics of words in child-directed speech differ from adult-directed speech to influence children’s productive vocabularies","authors":"Gary Jones, F. Cabiddu, Douglas Barrett, A. Castro, Bethany J. Lee","doi":"10.1177/01427237221150070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237221150070","url":null,"abstract":"Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children’s vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens from adult speech directed at children (from caregiver–child transcriptions) to the same quantity directed at adults. We show that child-directed speech contains greater numbers of words that are lower in phonemic length, higher in frequency, lower in phonotactic probability, and higher in neighborhood density than adult-directed speech; furthermore, child-directed speech explains over twice the variability of children’s productive noun vocabularies than adult-directed speech. These findings indicate that children’s word production is clearly influenced by the characteristics of the words spoken directly to them and that researchers need to be wary of using adult-directed language corpora when calculating lexical measures.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"43 1","pages":"253 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45723263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-20DOI: 10.1177/01427237221145375
Nancy Joubran-Awadie, Yasmin Shalhoub-Awwad
When the written language that children learn to read and write is distinct from the oral language they acquired as their mother tongue, they may encounter substantial challenges. The linguistic distance between two varieties of the same language could have an impact on the literacy acquisition journey. The present study focuses on Arabic, a prototypical case of diglossia, where the distance between the spoken and standard varieties has been intensively examined phonologically and lexically. However, a paucity of studies has addressed their morphological distance. This study takes one step in this direction by describing, analyzing, and quantifying the distance of morphemes in content words from spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). It is the first to map this distance by form and function in the three predominant systems: derivation, inflection, and clitics in nouns and verbs. All morphemes were arranged on an axis targeting four main levels that varied in the extent of the morphological distance from SPD to MSA, beginning with ‘identical’ morphemes (same form, same function), followed by ‘strongly overlapping’ morphemes (morpho-phonological difference in form, same function), then ‘partially overlapping’ morphemes (different form, same function), and ending with ‘unique’ morphemes (unique form, same/different function). The mapping showed significant findings indicating that most morphemes are non-identical between SPD and MSA, comprising 81.4% of the total. Most of these non-identical morphemes (64.9%) were assembled to the ‘partially overlapping’ and ‘unique’ levels, appearing mainly in the verb inflection category. Implications for the possible impact of morphological distance on reading acquisition are discussed.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-11DOI: 10.1177/01427237221147793
Wolfgang Dressler
The development of morphological complexity in child language acquisition has so far been investigated in relatively few (and mostly European) languages, so the author is right to start this book by stressing the importance of studying new genetically unrelated and typologically different non-European languages. Therefore, this book on a polysynthetic North Australian language (about which this reviewer was completely ignorant before reading this work) is highly welcome. After this short motivation for writing his book, Forshaw immediately starts to briefly describe the peculiar and complex classifier stem system of Murrinhpatha. Details of the system are dealt with in chapter 2 (which is a comprehensive overview of the whole verb system) and in the later respective acquisition chapters. The data come from five monolingual Murrinhpatha-speaking children, aged between 1;9 and 6;1 years, living in the town of Wadeye (Port Keats) near the western coast of Australia’s Northern Territory, which is one of Australia’s largest Indigenous towns (ca. 3000 residents). According to Forshaw, there is a wide range of competency in English in the Wadeye indigenous population. The author states (p. 7) that ‘the majority of indigenous children in Wadeye today grow up with Murrinhpatha as their first language. They typically have only a limited exposure to English before they commence education at the local school’, which is information that appears to guarantee the reliability of his data. In the following review, I will focus on brief summaries of the topics and interesting results of the book and on critical comments. However, I should first applaud the book for its rigorous coverage of the data and methods used, for all its many findings, and for the knowledgeable, cautious and self-critical stance of the author. Chapter 3 is dedicated to a (basically cross-linguistic) overview of the state of research concerning acquisition of verbs and especially of verb morphology. However, Forshaw’s claim (p. 30) that ‘the study of language acquisition generally and the acquisition of verbs and verb morphology continues to be dominated by findings from a small number of typically isolating languages’ is only partially true. It holds for lexical acquisition in rather isolating languages (particularly English), but not for the acquisition of verb morphology, as the literature he cites demonstrates. 1147793 FLA0010.1177/01427237221147793First LanguageBook review book-review2023
{"title":"Book Review: William Forshaw, <i>The Acquisition of Complex Morphology: Insights from Murrinhpatha</i> (<i>Trends in Language Acquisition Research</i>, Volume 30)","authors":"Wolfgang Dressler","doi":"10.1177/01427237221147793","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237221147793","url":null,"abstract":"The development of morphological complexity in child language acquisition has so far been investigated in relatively few (and mostly European) languages, so the author is right to start this book by stressing the importance of studying new genetically unrelated and typologically different non-European languages. Therefore, this book on a polysynthetic North Australian language (about which this reviewer was completely ignorant before reading this work) is highly welcome. After this short motivation for writing his book, Forshaw immediately starts to briefly describe the peculiar and complex classifier stem system of Murrinhpatha. Details of the system are dealt with in chapter 2 (which is a comprehensive overview of the whole verb system) and in the later respective acquisition chapters. The data come from five monolingual Murrinhpatha-speaking children, aged between 1;9 and 6;1 years, living in the town of Wadeye (Port Keats) near the western coast of Australia’s Northern Territory, which is one of Australia’s largest Indigenous towns (ca. 3000 residents). According to Forshaw, there is a wide range of competency in English in the Wadeye indigenous population. The author states (p. 7) that ‘the majority of indigenous children in Wadeye today grow up with Murrinhpatha as their first language. They typically have only a limited exposure to English before they commence education at the local school’, which is information that appears to guarantee the reliability of his data. In the following review, I will focus on brief summaries of the topics and interesting results of the book and on critical comments. However, I should first applaud the book for its rigorous coverage of the data and methods used, for all its many findings, and for the knowledgeable, cautious and self-critical stance of the author. Chapter 3 is dedicated to a (basically cross-linguistic) overview of the state of research concerning acquisition of verbs and especially of verb morphology. However, Forshaw’s claim (p. 30) that ‘the study of language acquisition generally and the acquisition of verbs and verb morphology continues to be dominated by findings from a small number of typically isolating languages’ is only partially true. It holds for lexical acquisition in rather isolating languages (particularly English), but not for the acquisition of verb morphology, as the literature he cites demonstrates. 1147793 FLA0010.1177/01427237221147793First LanguageBook review book-review2023","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136211780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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