Journal of Child Language最新文献

Children are known to derive more implicatures when the required alternative is made salient through contrast or when it is made contextually relevant through a story or a Question Under Discussion. We investigated the exclusivity implicature of three disjunctions (sau “or”, sau… sau, and fie…fie “either…or”) in child Romanian, an understudied language in the previous literature. Three experiments reveal that the mere presence of the stronger alternative, that is, simply hearing unrelated conjunctive statements in the course of the experiment, is not enough to boost implicatures. Rather, implicatures increase as a result of both access to alternatives and contextual relevance (expressed through conjunctive questions such as Did the hen push the train and the boat?). Interestingly, the boost in implicatures was observed only for sau-based disjunctions, not for fie…fie, which we conjecture may be due to children treating the latter as ambiguous between disjunction and conjunction.

The present study examines whether presenting words in song versus spoken sentences can lead to differences in word learning in 47–50-month-old children. This work extends previous findings on this topic and evaluates whether the location of pitch changes within the song may contribute to how well the words are learned. Using a Preferential Looking Paradigm, 32 children were taught the names of objects, either in spoken sentences or in a song that followed an unfamiliar melody. In both conditions, the novel word was emphasized by a pitch change. Looking patterns indicated that children learned the names of the novel items better when the words were trained in the spoken sentence compared to the song condition. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of word learning, and how differences in the characteristics between speech and song may relate to variability in how well new words are acquired.

Recent evidence from cross-situational learning (CSL) studies have shown that adult learners can acquire words and grammar simultaneously when sentences of the novel language co-occur with dynamic scenes to which they refer. Syntactic bootstrapping accounts suggest that grammatical knowledge may help scaffold vocabulary acquisition by constraining possible meanings, thus, for children, words and grammar may be acquired at different rates. Twenty children (ages 8 to 9) were exposed in a CSSL study to an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, and case markers occurring within a verb-final grammatical structure. Children acquired syntax (i.e., word order) effectively, but we found no evidence of vocabulary learning, whereas previous adult studies showed learning of both from similar input. Grammatical information may thus be available early for children, to help constrain and support later vocabulary learning. We propose that gradual maturation of declarative memory systems may result in more effective vocabulary learning in adults.

Idioms play an important role in language; however, little research has examined idioms in children's natural language settings. This study explored idioms usage in maternal talk during mother-child shared book reading and its relation to children's vocabulary development. Thirty-three Chinese children in Norway (aged 3;0-5;5) and their mothers participated. We observed shared reading at the onset of the study and assessed children's receptive and expressive vocabulary in Chinese three times across one year. Results demonstrated that mothers used an average of 1.8 idioms and explained one-third of the idioms. Maternal idiom usage was correlated with their talk amount and lexical diversity. Individual growth modeling revealed that the number of idioms mothers used predicted the growth of children's receptive vocabulary in Chinese. We speculate that idiom usage could be an effective and understudied marker of parental linguistic sophistication. This study underscores the importance of idiom exposure in children's language environment.

We present an exploratory cross-linguistic analysis of the quantity of target-child-directed speech and adult-directed speech in North American English (US & Canadian), United Kingdom English, Argentinian Spanish, Tseltal (Tenejapa, Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (Rossel Island, Papuan), using annotations from 69 children aged 2-36 months. Using a novel methodological approach, our cross-linguistic and cross-cultural findings support prior work suggesting that target-child-directed speech quantities are stable across early development, while adult-directed speech decreases. A preponderance of speech from women was found to a similar degree across groups, with less target-child-directed speech from men and children in the North American samples than elsewhere. Consistently across groups, children also heard more adult-directed than target-child-directed speech. Finally, the numbers of talkers present in any given clip strongly impacted children's moment-to-moment input quantities. These findings illustrate how the structure of home life impacts patterns of early language exposure across diverse developmental contexts.

Late talkers (LTs) exhibit delayed vocabulary development, which might stem from a lack of a typical word learning strategy to generalise object labels by shape, called the 'shape bias'. We investigated whether LTs can acquire a shape bias and whether this accelerates vocabulary learning. Fourteen LTs were randomly allocated to either a shape training group (M_age = 2.76 years, 6 males), which was taught that objects similar in shape have the same name, or a control group (M_age = 2.61 years, 4 males), which was taught real words without any focus on object shape. After seven training sessions, children in the shape training group generalised trained labels by shape (d = 1.28), but not unfamiliar labels. Children in the control group extended all labels randomly. Training did not affect expressive vocabulary.

Two major trends on children's skills to comprehend metaphors have governed the literature on the subject: the literal stage hypothesis vs. the early birds hypothesis (Falkum, 2022). We aim to contribute to this debate by testing children's capability to comprehend novel metaphors ('X is a Y') in Spanish with a child-friendly, picture selection task, while also tracking their gaze. Further, given recent findings on the development of metonymy comprehension suggesting a U-shaped developmental curve for this phenomenon (Köder & Falkum, 2020), we aimed to determine the shape of the developmental trajectory of novel metaphor comprehension, and to explore how both types of data (picture selection and gaze behavior) relate to each other. Our results suggest a linear developmental trajectory with 6-year-olds significantly succeeding in picture selection and consistently looking at the metaphorical target even after question onset.

We present a new corpus of child and child-directed speech (CDS) in Palestinian Arabic. It includes transcriptions following the CHILDES guidelines and features recordings of 16 monolingual Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with an age range of 19–58 months and their adult interlocutors. We analyse the children’s morphosyntactic development and identify a variety of target word orders (45 in child speech, 50 in CDS), with prevalent SV(O) structures; we also found high rates of null subjects in both populations, marginal errors in children’s verbal agreement morphology, and early emergence of serial verb constructions, observed from 23 months of age.