Short-form versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories

Fenson, Larry; Pethick, Steve; Renda, C. Renee; Cox, Jeffrey; Dale, Philip S.; Reznick, J. Steven

doi:10.1017/s0142716400001053

Cited by 547 publications

(580 citation statements)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

515

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Children's productive vocabularies, measured by the short form of the MacArthur CDI, ranged from 19 to 100, with a median of 66. These values are consistent with norms for this measure : Fenson, Pethick, Renda, Cox, Dale and Reznick (2000) reported a fiftieth-percentile score at 25 months of 73 for girls, and 58 for boys.…”

Section: Participantssupporting

confidence: 87%

What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

2006

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name (This is a corp!) or a spatial-relational term (This is acorp my box!). We argue that children rely on the intimate relationship between nouns in sentences and semantic arguments of predicate terms: Noting that a new word takes noun arguments identifies the new word as a predicate term, and directs the child's attention to relations among its arguments. q

show abstract

Section: Participantssupporting

confidence: 87%

What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

2006

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Six additional children were tested but not included because of a side bias (2), activeness (2), or failure to complete the task (2). Parents completed the short form of the MCDI: Level II (Form A) (Fenson et al, 2000). The median productive vocabulary was 86.5 (of 100 words on the inventory) 1 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Two additional children were tested but not included, because of a side bias (1), or because the child's productive vocabulary, measured using the MCDI-II, was at or below the fifth percentile for children 28 to 30 months old in a norming study for the Level II inventory (1; Fenson et al, 2000). The median productive vocabulary of the included children was 94.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Song

Fisher

2007

Lingua

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

“…Children learning languages like English (i.e. those that have several different meanings for the transitive) know and use many noncausal transitives in a broadly adultlike way by the time they are three years old (Fenson et al, 2000, Wagner 2010). However, we do know that English-learning preschoolers struggle to learn some kinds of noncausal transitives.…”

Section: Learning Noncausal Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs

Kline

Snedeker

Schulz

2016

Language Learning and Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3-4 year old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verblearning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also inform children's interpretation of transitive verbs either with or without the causal/inchoative alternation (She broke the lamp/the lamp broke). In Experiment 1, we examined spatiotemporal continuity. Children saw scenes with puppets that approached a toy in a distinctive manner, and toys that lit up or played a sound. In the causal events, the puppet contacted the object, and activation was immediate. In the noncausal events, the puppet stopped short before reaching the object, and the effect occurred after a short pause (apparently spontaneously). Children expected novel verbs used in the inchoative transitive/intransitive alternation to refer to spatiotemporally intact causal interactions rather than to 'gap' control scenes. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the temporal order of sub-events, holding spatial relationships constant, and provided evidence for only one verb frame (either transitive or intransitive). Children mapped transitive verbs to scenes where the agent's action closely preceded the activation of the toy over scenes in which the timing of the two events was switched, but did not do so when they heard an intransitive construction. These studies reveal that children's expectations about transitive verbs are at least partly driven by their nonlinguistic understanding of causal events: children expect transitive syntax to refer to scenes where the agent's action is a plausible cause of the outcome. These findings open a wide avenue for exploration into the relationship between children's linguistic knowledge and their nonlinguistic understanding of events. During their first years of life, children develop rich and robust cognitive models of the world around them. They represent the differences between people and objects, make predictions about physical and social events, and learn complex patterns of causal information ( Baker, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2011;Luo, Kaufman, & Baillargeon, 2009;Sobel, Tenenbaum, & Gopnik, 2004;Spelke, 1990;Woodward, 1998). At the same time, they learn the structure and content of at least one language, acquiring representations that allow them to understand the speech around them and produce novel sentences of their own. LINKING LANGUAGE AND EVENTSRelatively little is known about how children map these linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode.A central property of human language is that there are systematic correspondences between the form of sentence (syntax) and its meaning (semantics) (Baker, 1988;Brown, 1958;Fillmore, 1968;Montague, 1970;Pinker, 1984). For instance, although there are no familiar content words in the sentence The blicket daxed the wug to the blorg, adults can infer that t...

show abstract

Short-form versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories

Cited by 547 publications

References 10 publications

What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions

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

Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About