Comprehension of directives in young children: influence of social situation and linguistic form

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyse the emergence and development of the ability to relate message form to the production context during the transition between the prelinguistic period and the linguistic period. The study focuses on utterances used to express a request, directly or indirectly. Two groups of 20 children aged 1;7 and 2;5 were observed in a play situation with the experimenter who produced four types of requests: imperative, embedded imperative, expression of a desire and question directive. Each type of utterance was produced twice, once referring to an object that was relevant to the current activity and once referring to an object that was irrelevant. The main results showed that (1) the context of the utterance had an influence on the children's responses by the middle of the second year, and (2) children aged two-and-a-half are able to relate the context of an utterance to its form.Interpersonal communication can take place only if each participant can understand the other person's social intentions by relating the message content and/or form to the production context. The purpose of the present study was to analyse the emergence and initial development of the ability to establish this relationship. In other words, we shall look at the development of speech comprehension from a pragmatic standpoint. The study focuses on utterances used to express a request directly or indirectly.

Children's acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian: contrasting the roles of frequency and positional salience in maternal language

“…Our findings for noun learning are not inconsistent with this position, but they also indicate that the frequency of verbs at the beginning of maternal utterances plays a relevant role in predicting children’s rates of verb growth. At least part of this beneficial influence may be ascribable to the fact that the initial positions of input verbs were often imperatives, which are fully comprehended by children in the second year of life (Babelot &; Marcos, 1999). Pertinently, facilitating effects of the utterance-initial position have been reported for copulas (Richards &; Robinson, 1993) and auxiliary verbs (Newport, Gleitman &; Gleitman, 1977), and Seidl and Johnson (2006) found that infants aged between 0;7 and 0;8 segmented words from the utterance-final position as readily as they did from the utterance-initial position.…”

Two-year-old children differentiate test questions from genuine questions

“…Allen, 1991 ;Babelot & Marcos, 1999 ;Liebal, Behne, Carpenter & Tomasello, 2009 ;Bosco, Bucciarelli & Bara, 2004). Thus, we assume that children's attempts to infer the social intent of the communicator need not be based on complex inferential processes, departing from literal meaning ; nor can their attempts be reduced to any fixed response strategy.…”

Social factors in the acquisition of a new word order

“…In this case, the child might have social knowledge about what languages their interlocutor prefers or what scenes their interlocutor has already seen. This kind of knowledge has been shown to influence word learning (Baldwin, 1993), the learning of phonological contrasts (Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003), or the comprehension of requests (Babelot & Marcos, 1999), but a similar influence on the acquisition of syntactic structures in production has not been found. One reason for this gap is that unlike studies of word or phonological learning, production studies rarely use newly learned syntactic constraints.…”