A discourse-pragmatic explanation for argument representation in child Inuktitut

Allen, Shanley

doi:10.1515/ling.38.3.483

Cited by 138 publications

(147 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…the development of the CP system) that triggers the decline of object omissions. Traditionally, grammatical models predict an abrupt shift between stages of development, which has been viewed as a major weakness by researchers working outside of the UG paradigm (Allen, 2000). The parametric shift is conceptualized as instantaneous, a position defended by Hyams (1994: 298): 'we may ultimately find that the instantaneous model of development is closer to the truth than we have imagined.'…”

Section: Grammatical Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Null objects in second language acquisition: grammatical vs. performance models

Zyzik

2008

Second Language Research

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Null direct objects provide a favourable testing ground for grammatical and performance models of argument omission. This article examines both types of models in order to determine which gives a more plausible account of the second language data. The data were collected from second language (L2) learners of Spanish by means of four oral production tasks and a grammaticality judgement task. The results reveal that null objects in oral production are rare events limited to pragmatically appropriate contexts, that is, when the referent is easily recoverable from preceding discourse. The results of the grammaticality judgement task indicate that beginning level learners frequently accept sentences containing null objects with specific antecedents, while more proficient learners categorically reject such argument omissions. It is suggested that lower proficiency learners may rely primarily on semantic strategies in parsing and evaluating sentences, while advanced learners are more sensitive to syntactic violations. A performance account is ultimately adopted to explain the data given the lack of a clear null object stage in development, the presence of self-corrections, and the discourse-constrained nature of object omissions.

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Section: Grammatical Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Null objects in second language acquisition: grammatical vs. performance models

Zyzik

2008

Second Language Research

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“…Children as young as 4 who were learning Chinese, English, French, or German were most likely to pronominalize (or omit, depending on native language) repeated referents that had been mentioned in the immediately preceding sentence (Hickmann and Hendriks, 1999). Twoyear-olds learning Korean or Inuktitut used ellipsis much less often for new referents than for those recently mentioned (Allen, 2000;Clancy, 1997). English-speaking 2-, 3-, and 4-yearolds mostly used indefinite noun phrases to introduce new referents in elicited narratives, and definite noun phrases to mention them again (Emslie and Stevenson, 1981).…”

Section: Children's Sensitivity To Discourse Prominence In Language Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…English-speaking 2-, 3-, and 4-yearolds mostly used indefinite noun phrases to introduce new referents in elicited narratives, and definite noun phrases to mention them again (Emslie and Stevenson, 1981). Children's spontaneous speech also demonstrates sensitivity to the link between given information and subject position (e.g., Allen, 2000;Clancy, 1993): Even in the speech of 2-year-olds, given referents are typically transitive subjects, and are often realized as pronouns or omitted altogether. New referents are much less likely to be omitted or pronominalized, and tend to appear in transitive object or intransitive subject position.…”

Section: Children's Sensitivity To Discourse Prominence In Language Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns

Song

Fisher

2007

Lingua

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Three experiments examined 2.5-year-olds' sensitivity to discourse structure in pronoun interpretation. Children heard simple two-character stories illustrated by pictures on two video screens. In Experiments 1 and 2, one character in each story was established as more prominent than the other in several context sentences because it was mentioned first, appeared in subject position, was mentioned more often, and was pronominalized once. In Experiment 3, one character was singled out as more prominent only by being mentioned first and placed in subject position. In all three experiments, after hearing a pronoun subject in the final (test) sentence of each story, children looked longer at the character established as more prominent in the preceding sentences. These experiments show that 2.5-year-olds, like older children and adults, interpret pronouns relative to a discourse representation in which referents are ranked in prominence, and that the prominence of discourse referents is influenced by some of the same factors that guide pronoun interpretation in adulthood.

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“…Although such investigations have often been informative (for review, see ref. 29), the subtlety, variety, and sheer number of possible nonverbal cues make it difficult to decide a priori whether any particular contextualized utterance is in principle "good for learning" (26,27). Rather than attempt to enumerate and classify these nonverbal environmental cues to a word's referent, we estimated the referential transparency of learning instances in infant-directed speech using a reliable and well-validated overall measure of referential transparency--how easily the meaning of a word can be inferred from nonlinguistic context alone--the so-called Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) (16,30).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, nonverbal cues (e.g., the presence and salience of a word's referent, whether it is being looked at, pointed to, or manipulated by the adult interlocutor) are available from earliest infancy and can, at times, simplify the task of inferring word meaning from situational context (22)(23)(24)(25). Attempts have been made to investigate these nonverbal cues using detailed coding systems (26)(27)(28). Although such investigations have often been informative (for review, see ref.…”

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confidence: 99%

Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later

Cartmill

Armstrong

Gleitman

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

320

237

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Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguistic context, an aspect of input quality. To examine this aspect, we asked 218 adult participants to guess 50 parents' words from (muted) videos of their interactions with their 14-to 18-mo-old children. We found systematic differences in how easily individual parents' words could be identified purely from this socio-visual context. Differences in this kind of input quality correlated with the size of the children's vocabulary 3 y later, even after controlling for differences in input quantity. Although input quantity differed as a function of socioeconomic status, input quality (as here measured) did not, suggesting that the quality of nonverbal cues to word meaning that parents offer to their children is an individual matter, widely distributed across the population of parents.language acquisition | word learning | SES C hildren's vocabularies vary greatly in size by the time they enter school (1, 2). Because preschool vocabulary is a major predictor of subsequent school success (3), this variability must be taken seriously and its sources understood. Some of this variability resides in the individual capacities and temperament that infants bring to the word learning task (4, 5). However, environmental influences are also bound to play instrumental roles. Accordingly, we examined the contextualized speech input parents provide to infants during the second year of life as a potential source of the massive vocabulary differences found at school entry.It is already known that the sheer quantity of linguistic input is an important determinant of vocabulary size; overall, the more words children hear early in development, the larger their subsequent vocabularies. This relationship holds true both for types (different words) and tokens (number of words heard, including repetitions) (6, 7). These quantity differences are correlated with socioeconomic status (SES). Children from low SES homes are typically exposed to fewer words early in development (8, 9) and have smaller vocabularies at school entry than children from high SES homes (10).Taken alone, the correlation of vocabulary size with amount of input is puzzling because as a general rule language learners do not seem to require a large number of exposures to a word to acquire its meaning (11). In experimental settings, for example, children have been shown to acquire and retain a new word heard only once or a very few times (12-14). The likelihood, then, is that certain exposures to a new word are especially informative, supporting secure and rapid inferences to meaning. For example, common sense insists that it will be ...

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A discourse-pragmatic explanation for argument representation in child Inuktitut

Cited by 138 publications

References 7 publications

Null objects in second language acquisition: grammatical vs. performance models

Null objects in second language acquisition: grammatical vs. performance models

Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns

Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later

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