Environmental correlates of child copula verb growth

Abstract

A recurring result from studies which relate the frequency of input variables to rate of language development, is the link between auxiliary verb growth and yes—no questions addressed to children. Explanations for this relationship usually concentrate on the advantages of hearing stressed and non-contracted auxiliary forms in sentence-initial position over hearing unstressed, contracted forms in medial position in declaratives. If such accounts are correct, then it can be predicted that yes—no questions which place forms of COPULA be in initial position will also increase the rate of growth of children's COPULA verb development. This prediction was tested using a sample of 33 children, carefully matched for stage of language development at 1;9 and 2;0 years; rate of copula verb growth was then measured over the succeeding nine months. Analyses include an examination of the contribution of sub-categories of yes—no question, tag questions, and utterances containing sentence-final copulas to the growth of contracted and full copulas. Results confirm that the frequency of inverted copulas in yes—no questions predicts children's copula development. Nevertheless, caution is urged before interpreting the relationship in terms of a direct causal model.

The Role of Negative and Positive Feedback in the Second Language Acquisition of the Passé Composé and Imparfait

“…According to researchers in L1 acquisition, children are sensitive to corrective recasts, which are more successful than other types of feedback, such as models (e.g., Farrar, 1990;Nelson, 1977aNelson, , 1991. Recasts seem to play a role in helping children to identify and extract specific grammatical morphemes (Farrar, 1990;Peters, 1983) and to acquire yes-no questions, copula and auxiliary verbs (Richards, 1990a(Richards, , 1990bRichards & Robinson, 1993), and syntactic structures in general (Nelson 1977a(Nelson , 1977b(Nelson , 1987Nelson, Carskaddon, & Bonvillian, 1973). It has also been found that language-impaired children benefit from recasts (Conti-Ramsden, 1990).…”

Cross‐Linguistic Analysis of Vocabulary in Young Children: Spanish, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and American English

“…Although some theorists have also speculated that words in utterance-initial position might also be salient (relative to words in the middle of an utterance; e.g., Caselli et al, 1995;Caselli et al, 1999;Peters, 1985;Tardif et al, 1997), the data supporting the saliency of the initial position deal entirely with learning closed-class words (e.g., copulas: Richards & Robinson, 1993;auxiliary verbs: Newport, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1977) and children's ability to follow nonsense commands (not produce words: Shipley, Smith, & Gleitman, 1969). Most of the data support the idea that final position is more salient than initial position.…”

Input Subject Diversity Enhances Early Grammatical Growth: Evidence from a Parent-Implemented Intervention

“…For example, Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977) explored correlations between 10 aspects of maternal speech and four measures of child language structure and mean length of utterance (MLU). Richards and Robinson (1993) correlated 15 parent input measures and two child outcome variables at three different time points for a total of 90 correlations. When numerous correlations are computed, some findings will be significant by chance alone (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995) and replication is less likely.…”