A Study in the Acquisition of Language: Free Responses to Commands

Shipley, Elizabeth F.; Smith, Carlota S.; Gleitman, Lila R.

doi:10.2307/411663

Cited by 265 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…(1969) found that nontelegraphic (one-word utterances) speakers did best in performing oneand two-word commands, whereas telegraphic speakers did better at well-formed commands. It is possible that the present subject was at a level of language development similar to that of the nontelegraphic speakers in the Shipley et al (1969) study. Thus, the subject performed correctly when word order was reversed for two-word instructions, but did not do as well for three-and four-word instructions where irrelevant stimuli (words) were present.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

INSTRUCTION‐FOLLOWING BEHAVIOR OF A RETARDED CHILD AND ITS CONTROLLING STIMULI¹

Striefel

Wetherby²

1973

J of App Behav Analysis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A combination of positive reinforcement and fading of physical guidance was used to teach a profoundly retarded boy specific responses to specific verbal instructions. The design consisted of a multiple baseline of probe data across different verbal instructions. The subject started responding correctly to each verbal instruction as that item was trained in a multiple-baseline order. Generalization did not occur to items that had not yet been trained, nor did it occur to items included to assess generalization. Probes of variations in the verbal instructions, conducted after training was completed, revealed that generalization was minimal except in those cases where the variation consisted of the verb only, the noun only, the noun plus preposition, or where the verb of the instruction was presented last. Training a profoundly retarded 11-yr-old subject to respond to specific verbal instructions did not adequately facilitate the development of a generative instruction-following capability, nor did all verbal elements of the instruction control a specific response.Instruction-following behavior can be defined as the ability to make the appropriate response to a verbal command. Whitman, Zakaras, and Chardos (1971) used a combination of reinforcement and physical guidance to increase the instruction-following behavior of two severely retarded children. Increases in such behaviors occurred for both trained and untrained items. In the discussion, they mentioned that it was unclear whether the increases seen in instruction-following behavior were due to a lack of motivation on the part of the subjects before training, to the subjects' learning specific responses, or to having responses come under the control of specific stimuli. In addition, if the subject continually failed to respond to an in1Appreciation is expressed to David Gast for the time he spent conducting training sessions, to Janet

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

INSTRUCTION‐FOLLOWING BEHAVIOR OF A RETARDED CHILD AND ITS CONTROLLING STIMULI¹

Striefel

Wetherby²

1973

J of App Behav Analysis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, Shipley, Smith, and Gleitman (1969) provided some of the first evidence that children's comprehension of sentences was in advance of their production. Shipley et al compared telegraphic speakers' performance with commands that were either similar to their own speech (i.e.…”

Section: Empirical Differences Between Language Production and Languamentioning

confidence: 99%

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

Naigles

2002

Cognition

115

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…To better approximate the information available to infants and young children, it may be more accurate to fully represent only a subset of the 200 most frequent words and their distributional contingencies. It has been suggested that, although speech produced by 2 years old lacks function words, young language learners might nonetheless represent them, perhaps in a reduced or undifferentiated form (Echols, 1993;Gerken et al, 1990;Gleitman & Wanner, 1982;Newport, Gleitman, & Gleitman 1977;Peters, 1977;Shipley, Smith, & Gleitman, 1969). More recent research indicates that even infants have representations of function words that are more detailed, allowing them to differentiate real function words from nonsense ones, and have expectations of where function words occur in sentences (Höhle and Weissenborn, 1998;Shady, 1996;Shafer, Shucard, Shucard, & Gerken, 1998).…”

Section: Analysis 3: Grammatical Categories From Distributional Contementioning

confidence: 99%

The distributional structure of grammatical categories in speech to young children

2002

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present a series of three analyses of young children's linguistic input to determine the distributional information it could plausibly offer to the process of grammatical category learning. Each analysis was conducted on four separate corpora from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) of speech directed to children under 2;5. We show that, in accord with other findings, a distributional analysis which categorizes words based on their co-occurrence patterns with surrounding words successfully categorizes the majority of nouns and verbs. In Analyses 2 and 3, we attempt to make our analyses more closely relevant to natural language acquisition by adopting more realistic assumptions about how young children represent their input. In Analysis 2, we limit the distributional context by imposing phrase structure boundaries, and find that categorization improves even beyond that obtained from less limited contexts. In Analysis 3, we reduce the representation of input elements which young children might not fully process and we find that categorization is not adversely affected: Although noun categorization is worse than in Analyses 1 and 2, it is still good; and verb categorization actually improves. Overall, successful categorization of nouns and verbs is maintained across all analyses. These results provide promising support for theories of grammatical category formation involving distributional analysis, as long as these analyses are combined with appropriate assumptions about the child learner's computational biases and capabilities.

show abstract

A Study in the Acquisition of Language: Free Responses to Commands

Cited by 265 publications

References 5 publications

INSTRUCTION‐FOLLOWING BEHAVIOR OF A RETARDED CHILD AND ITS CONTROLLING STIMULI¹

INSTRUCTION‐FOLLOWING BEHAVIOR OF A RETARDED CHILD AND ITS CONTROLLING STIMULI¹

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

The distributional structure of grammatical categories in speech to young children

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

A Study in the Acquisition of Language: Free Responses to Commands

Cited by 265 publications

References 5 publications

INSTRUCTION‐FOLLOWING BEHAVIOR OF A RETARDED CHILD AND ITS CONTROLLING STIMULI1

INSTRUCTION‐FOLLOWING BEHAVIOR OF A RETARDED CHILD AND ITS CONTROLLING STIMULI1

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

The distributional structure of grammatical categories in speech to young children

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

INSTRUCTION‐FOLLOWING BEHAVIOR OF A RETARDED CHILD AND ITS CONTROLLING STIMULI¹

INSTRUCTION‐FOLLOWING BEHAVIOR OF A RETARDED CHILD AND ITS CONTROLLING STIMULI¹