Relationships between parental input frequencies and children's language acquisition: a reanalysis of Brown's data

Moerk, Ernst L.

doi:10.1017/s0305000900007054

Cited by 67 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…The input from Phases I through III has been subdivided into Phase I and Phases II-III to see whether the input frequency for each form is consistent over time. If there is inconsistency, that is, if a given form is noticeably more frequent in one particular phase, we wanted to see whether there is a correlation between high frequency at a given time and the time of acquisition (Cross 1977, Moerk 1980). A first look at the data suggests that the 7 suffixes can be divided into three groups in terms of relative frequency.…”

Section: Formmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early acquisition of epistemic meanings in Korean: a study of sentence-ending suffixes in the spontaneous speech of three children

Choi

1991

First Language

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This study investigates the form and function of sentence-ending suffixes in the speech of three Korean children between 1;8 and 2;11. The major findings are that before 2;0 years Korean children make a clear morphological distinction between requests and statements, and that when they make statements they distinguish among three types of propositions, each with a distinct form: (1) the information has been recently acquired by the child through direct experience, and it is in the process of being assimilated to the child's knowledge system (-TA); (2) the information has been assimilated to his/her knowledge system (-E); (3) the information is established and, in addition, it is certain and is shared by the interactant (-CI). These denote different types of epistemic meaning in that they mark various degrees of integration of knowledge in the child's mind. Our data also suggest that Korean children make these epistemic distinctions before deontic ones, e.g., desire, intention.Recent discourse-functional studies of language show that, in many languages, tense and mood markers denote various attitudes of the speaker toward the proposition. These attitudes denote different types of epistemic and evidential meaning (Akatsuka 1985, Aksu-Kof & Slobin 1986, Bybee 1985, Palmer 1986). Particularly, Bybee (1985, in her cross-linguistic survey of inflectional morphology on the verb, shows that in many languages the mood markers distinguish not only different types of mood (e.g., indicative mood, interrogative mood), but also denote different types of epistemic meaning.Palmer defines epistemic modality as 'the degree of commitment by the speaker to what he says' (Palmer 1986:51). This refers to the

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Section: Formmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early acquisition of epistemic meanings in Korean: a study of sentence-ending suffixes in the spontaneous speech of three children

Choi

1991

First Language

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“…These results are consistent with previous findings on the relationship between maternal and child frequency of forms. Moerk (1980) reports a correlation of .66 between mother-child frequencies of certain forms in Roger Brown's data, and Fomer (1977), even stronger correlations between mother-child frequency of wh-questions: .87/.98 in her German data and .91 in Savid's Serbo-Croatian data.…”

Section: The Role Of Maternal Frequencymentioning

confidence: 90%

A case study in language socialization: Korean wh‐questions

PatriciaM.

1989

Discourse Processes

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This study analyzes the process of language socialization in two young Korean children, focusing on their acquisition of one linguistic subsystem, wh-questions. The two children, aged 1 year, 8 months and 1 year, 10 months at the start of the study, were audio-recorded approximately twice a month for 1 year in interaction with their mothers. The paper examines: (1) the transmission of cultural values via the pragmatic functions of whquestions in the mothers' speech, (2) the role of "family culture," that is, differences in the interactive functions of wh-questions in the two families, and (3) the contributions of the children to the socialization process. Findings include significant correlations between maternal and child frequencies of forms and of form/function pairs, as well as selectivity and innovation in the children's adoption of forms and functions. The results support a model of language socialization in which linguistic forms and functions serve as a vehicle for the transmission of social knowledge, and clarify the roles of culture, family, and child in this process.

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“…English grammatical morphemes: Forner (1979) and Moerk (1980) reanalyzed Brown's (1973) data on the input frequency of these morphemes and found that the order of acquisition can be predicted not only by linguistic complexity but equally well by input frequency (see also Wolff, 1988, p. 201).…”

Section: Confounding Of the Effect Of Simplicity And Input Frequency mentioning

confidence: 99%

Model learning in syntactic development: Intransitive verbs

Ninio

1999

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Previous findings suggest that in natural language, frequency may be inherently correlated with generality, prototypicality or simplicity. The most frequently used instances in each domain may be the “best models” of that domain, so that the effect of input frequency is to have children learn the best exemplars of a domain first. To test this hypothesis, the first intransitive verbs to participate in multiword combinations were investigated, based on longitudinal observations of 20 children acquiring Hebrew. The results were compared to the frequency of intransitive verbs in multiword utterances in a speech corpus based on recordings of 48 mothers. The first verbs that begin the acquisition of intransitive word-combinations are the most frequent intransitive verbs in the input. These verbs also tend to be relatively nonspecific, general, or generic intransitive verbs with light semantics. The same verbs that children first combine with subjects or locative adjuncts, and which are the most frequent in the speech of mothers, are typical grammaticalized markers of intransitivity or directional-movement in many languages. These results join many previous findings in showing that the statistical structure of natural languages makes possible, at the onset of acquisition, a kind of lexical learning which is at the same time a type of category-or rule-formation.

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Relationships between parental input frequencies and children's language acquisition: a reanalysis of Brown's data

Cited by 67 publications

References 6 publications

Early acquisition of epistemic meanings in Korean: a study of sentence-ending suffixes in the spontaneous speech of three children

Early acquisition of epistemic meanings in Korean: a study of sentence-ending suffixes in the spontaneous speech of three children

A case study in language socialization: Korean wh‐questions

Model learning in syntactic development: Intransitive verbs

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