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... quantifiers on all nouns to quite a bit of selective use of count noun frames with count nouns. The present studies show that within the linguistic category "common noun" at ages 2: 0 the syntactic context (mass or count) in which a new noun occurs does not affect the child's hypotheses about its meaning. However it indicates that the referent's ontological status seems to determine the child's hypotheses. Landau et al.
Claim that adults like children ignore ontological categories in their inductive projection of noun meanings. They suggest that adults like children determine noun meanings by shape, irrespective of the ontological categories to which the noun's referents belong. So's studies show that 2 -year-old children ignore the shape of non solid substance in their hypotheses on the meaning if newly heard nouns. Dickinson (1988) looked at 3 - 5 years old and adults, says that shape cannot be the general taxonomic basis for noun categories, because of substances and abstract entities that are distinguished by shape. Chapter five: Children acquire Word Meaning Components from Syntactic Evidence. There are difficulties in explaining all of word meaning acquisition as a projection from observed situation.
Recent discussions indicate that children may have another rich body of information from which they deduce word meanings, and verifying syntactic positions in which the meaningfully distinct words appear. For example, the fact that 'dog' is a substance and 'walk' an act are inferred in part by observing that the former word occurs as a noun and the later as a verb. The researchers suggest that acquiring the word meanings solely from the observation of events would require unrealistic extensive storage and manipulation of categorized event. Furthermore, children can extract the surface structures from prosodic clues; they realize at least some of the correlations between the forms and the meanings.
In their studies the researchers found that language learners use structural properties of the speech stream as evidence for constructing the meanings of verb vocabulary items. In about 70 percent of the interpretable responses, the children complied with the demands of new structures by deducing appropriate new interpretations. Learners will bootstrap form from meaning. The researchers believe that there is no effective procedure for learning the word meanings solely by inspection of syntactic environments. Since, many semantic properties are not syntactically encoded in the first place, and there are plenty of complications in the syntactic encodings themselves.
Chapter six: Competence and Performance in Child Language. University of Connecticut Graduate Center And Haskins Laboratories City University of The researchers checked which properties of human language are innately determined. Universal properties of human languages are plausibly taken to be innately determined. The researchers argue that the experimental data do not demonstrate a lack of linguistic knowledge.
They studied mistakes done by children and found out that in many cases it is the non syntactic demands of the task that causes children's errors. The researchers isolated several components of language skills in order to clarify the relationship between innateness and early linguistic knowledge. Three factors that influenced performance in syntactic tasks: &# 61623; Plans- Formulating action plans in order to obey an imperative or act out the content of a declarative sentence may be a possible source of poor performance by children. Since, it is a skill that makes demands on memory and computational resources. &# 61623; Parsing- Complex task involving decision strategies that favor one structural analysis. &# 61623; Presupposition- The variety of pragmatic considerations taken out from linguistic cues.
The following components were examined: &# 61623; Subjacency - It prohibits extraction of constituents from various constructions, including relative clauses. Otsu (1981) suggested that the innateness of Subjacency could be salvaged by showing that children who appeared to violate Subjacency had not yet mastered the phrase structure of relative clauses. The results of the experiment showed that adults gave subjacency violating responses to 29 % of the relative clause construction, slightly higher rate than the 25 % for Otsu's child subjects. &# 61623; Backward pronominal ization - The innateness hypothesis suggests that children's earliest grammars should also exhibit structure dependence, even if their linguistic experience happens to be equally compatible with structure independent hypotheses. The results show that children have early knowledge of the absence of linear sequence conditions on pronominal ization, and of the existence of structural conditions such as command. &# 61623; Subject/Auxiliary inversion - A study by Crain and Nakayama (1987) explored the relationship between children's errors in accession tasks and sentence processing problems. The innateness hypothesis predicts that children never produced an incorrect sentence like: The findings of the study give support to the view that the initial state of the human language faculty contains structure-dependence as an inherent property. &# 61623; Relative clauses - Coordination may be innately favored over subordination, relative clause constructions are very close to the "core." Therefore, ignorance of relative clauses until age 6 would stretch the innateness hypothesis. Hamburger and Crain (1982) showed that the source of children's performance errors on the task (conjoined clauses) is not a lack of syntactic knowledge.
Children grasp the structure and meaning of relative clause constructions quite early in the course of language acquisition, as would expected from the central position of these constructions in natural language. &# 61623; Temporal terms - Children are highly sensitive to pragmatic infelicities, their linguistic knowledge can be accurately appraised only by tests which include controls that they are not penalized by their knowledge of pragmatic principles. The researchers also investigated sentence production of young children. The results of recent production studies are much better than those of comprehension studies directed to the same linguistic constructions. Richards (1976) elicited appropriate uses of the verbs 'come' and 'go' from children age 4; 0 - 7; 7, while Clark and Garnica (1974) reported that even 8 year olds did not consistently distinguish between 'come' and 'go' on comprehension task. In studies that examined relative clauses and passive production, Hamburger and Crain (1982) discovered that children as young as three produce relative clauses in pragmatic contexts. Wexler (1987) said that the age at which passive is acquired in English falls well within a time span that is compatible with other factors.
Chapter seven: The Development of Language Use: Expressing Perspectives on a Scene Berman's study examines children's developing ability to use different linguistic means in order to describe the same content on the particular perspective that is expressed. The scene Berman checked was a picture book, Frog, Where Are You? The children (age 3; 0 - 10; 0) were asked to tell the story based on a picture. The researcher's assumption was that younger children would take a more local view of the scene.
She expected younger children to mention fewer components of a single event. However, even the younger children may adopt varying perspectives on different events. The children who organize their narratives around the three critical plotting elements; the discovery that that the frog was gone, the search after it, and the recovery of the frog, will mention the search motif in describing the scene. All the 3 - 4 year olds and many of 5 year olds presented the scene's components event.
None of the 3 -year-olds related the content of the picture thematically to preceding events. An age related finding is the distinct rise in choice of patient perspective by means of an achievement verb (i. e. 'nick' 'nipas') A quarter of the school children (age 7; 0 - 12; 0) expressed the above orientation, while only 2 out of 29 preschoolers (age 3; 0 - 6; 0) succeeded in the patient perspective task. Another difference between the descriptions of preschoolers and older children reflects an increasing ability at event-packing. They elaborate several phrases or restrict several events into a single prediction. Combining events by embedded clauses occurs across the 9 and 11 year olds and in most 7 -year-olds texts, but not among preschoolers.
The ability to combine different events in discourse within a single syntactic frame is critical feature of developing a narrative perspective. Berman's also checked the children's ability to switch perspective and found that the youngest children age three and four fail when asked to apply the notion of switching perspective. They fail to treat the different events as interrelated in any way. Nevertheless, a couple of the older 4 -year-olds do show some initial chaining of events.
Berman also found that the younger school children (7 - 8 year olds) shift from agent to patient for the same protagonist and many of the 9 year olds express temporal-aspectual switching explicitly. Chapter eight: If De Saussure Was Right, Could Whorf Have Been Wrong? Schlesinger says, Whorf argued that the structure of a language imposes its categorization on its speakers' thinking and affects the way they conceive reality. For example in English the word lightning is a noun, however in Hopi lightning is a verb. Speakers of English think of lightning as a thing like, while speakers of Hopi thinks of lightning as action like. This example implies that different languages have different world views.
This approach is called linguistic relativism. There is an extreme anti-Whorfian view that looks at language as a tool for communication and nothing but that. This view is called radical conventionalism. De Sassure discussed the relationship between language and thought on one hand and language and sound on the other hand. He rejected the view that language serves as a tool of expressing ideas. Saussure an developmental thesis has been fleshed out in Schlesinger's (1982) language acquisition theory.
According to this theory, a concept need not have been form by a child before he has acquired the relevant word for it. Furthermore, the theory does not assume that linguistic categories are available for a child before the advent of language. The child's first relational categories are semantic. A process of semantic assimilation gradually expands the child's semantic categories into formal ones.
There are three hypotheses that deal with the effects of conceptual categories: 1. The nature of linguistic categories - Categories in the mature grammatical system will be regarded in terms of the semantic categories they originated in. 2. The nature of conceptual categories - Adult cognition operates with categories that conform largely to the linguistic categories of the native language. 3. The communicative effect of linguistic categorization - Structural import has an effect on communication; it may influence the hearer construes the message, and in choosing a linguistic structure. Three studies were designed to test hypotheses 1 and 3. &# 61623; Study 1. The Role of Participants.
The participants in this study were given sentences in order to determine the role of the participants, for example: The question asked: which is the agent in these sentences? The results show that in construing sentences presented to him by the investigator, he is influenced by their structural import. &# 61623; Study 2. Experience and Stimulus The question asked: Would the hearer impute agency to the subjects of the following verbs even though no simple alternative is available to the speaker? Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on Year Olds Word Meaning
