The acquisition of scalar structures: Production of adjectives and degree markers by Dutch-speaking children and their caregivers

Comprehension of degree modifiers by pre-school children: What does it mean to be ‘a bit cold’?

“…Tribushinina (2011b) analyzed a number of fragments such as (7) and (8) in longitudinal corpora of nine children acquiring Netherlandic Dutch (Tribushinina 2011b) and suggests that children commonly use combinations of diminishers and relative adjectives in contexts where a 'too'-interpretation is unlikely. The results of a cross-sectional study of spontaneous child speech in Belgian Dutch (Tribushinina & Gillis 2012) confirm these observations and demonstrate that even 6-year-olds seem to use such combinations in a non-adult-like way. Notice, however, that from production data, such as interactions in (7) and (8), we cannot be confident that children indeed fail to interpret phrases such as a bit cold in an argumentative way (i.e.…”

“…On the other hand, corpus studies of spontaneous use of degree adverbs in child speech indicate that children have not fully acquired the semantics and syntax of degree adverbs by age 6 (Gathercole 2009, Tribushinina Brought to you by | University Library Utrecht Authenticated Download Date | 1/15/15 10:49 AM 2011b, Tribushinina & Gillis 2012). These studies show that the first combinations of adjectives and degree adverbs are primarily used as rote-learnt units; therefore, the error rate before age 3 is very low.…”

“…to express a small degree of the designated property) rather than argumentatively (i.e. to express an undesirable excess) (Tribushinina 2011a, Tribushinina & Gillis 2012. See, for instance, the following two fragments of mother-child interactions from the Groningen corpus: In the situation discussed in (7), Abel wants to make a bridge higher so that the toy train can ride under it.…”

“…Another problem with corpus studies of degree modification is that adjectives in general and degree-modified adjectives in particular are quite infrequent in spontaneous speech (Tribushinina & Gillis 2012); hence generalizations from these data are unwarranted.…”

Aprendizagem de substantivos e adjetivos por meio de leitura compartilhada para crianças com desenvolvimento típico e com Síndrome de Down

“…Um dos aspectos que tornam a aprendizagem de adjetivos tardia é a sua menor frequência na fala dos adultos (Tribushinina & Gillis, 2012). Outro fator que dificulta aprendizagem de adjetivos, é que, para identifica-los corretamente, a criança deve ser capaz de buscar sinais nas frases ou sentenças que ajudem a restringir o significado da palavra nova para uma única característica de determinado objeto e, para isso, é necessário ter conhecimento prévio de outras classes gramaticais, como o substantivo (Booth & Waxman, 2009).…”