This year's conference theme, "Be Seen, Be Heard," reflected not only our goal of celebrating our achievements but also represented our intent of making sure everyone's voices are heard, especially during 2017's difficult political climate. The conference opened with a motivating address from Dean Laura E. Lyons, followed by an…

The world's languages draw on a common set of event components for their verb systems. Yet, these components are differentially distributed across languages. At what age do children begin to use language-specific patterns to narrow possible verb meanings? English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking adults, toddlers, and preschoolers were shown…

Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, December 29, 1968, in New York, New York. (DS)

This paper constitutes a response to Lust and Mazuka's (1989) defense of the Principal Branching parameter and their critique of O'Grady, Suzuki-Wei, and Cho's (1986) experiment, which purported to show that even children learning left-branching languages exhibit a preference for forward patterns of anaphora. (Contains 16 references.) (JL)

Examines whether systematic differences exist in babbling and first words of infants from different language backgrounds (English, French, Japanese and Swedish) and asks whether differences result from the phonetic structure of the languages. Statistically significant differences discerned in the babbling phonetic selection indicates that phonetic…

Although intonation has been said to be one of the first meaningful units of language that a child acquires, it is difficult to say just what this really means. How does the child learn to distinguish the various grammatical meanings that an intonation can have? It was hypothesized that the child first acquires question and request forms on the…

The present research investigated whether children's referential choices for verb arguments are motivated by pragmatic features of discourse referents across different developmental stages, not only for children learning null argument languages but also for those learning overt argument languages. In Study 1, the form (null, pronominal, or…

Tests the prediction that children acquiring left-branching languages will exhibit a preference for backward patterns of anaphora by presenting data from Japanese and Korean which show the prediction to be false. Findings support the view that any directionality preference for anaphora is the same for all languages. (Author/SED)

Two studies of the innovative semantic distinctions and innovative uses before the acquisition of conventional number classifiers by young Japanese children (aged 5-7 years) are discussed. The findings suggest that lexical acquisition is an intricate process which often requires more than simple mappings of forms onto categories, and that…

A study of second language acquisition focuses on the transition from formulaic to creative speech patterns. Subjects were two native Japanese-speaking children, aged 4 and 8, learning English as a Second Language in New York, observed over a period of 2 years. The nature of formulaic speech is discussed, drawing from research on such speech and…

The frequency with which a child's parents use a given linguistic form has been considered influential in language development. This hypothesis has been challenged, however, notably by Ervin (1964) and Brown (1973). The frequency hypothesis makes the assumptions that: (1) children are not selective in what they attend to, (2) they listen to most…

Compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in American and British English, French, German, Japanese, and Italian. Speech samples were instrumentally analyzed to measure mean fundamental frequency, variability, utterance, duration, and pause duration. (67 references) (Author/CB)

Comparison of maternal speech to three-month-olds between American (N=20) and Japanese (N=20) mother-infant dyads revealed that infant gaze affected the intended functions of maternal speech differently for the two groups. Cultural differences were also seen in the nature of function-form and function-referent relationships. (Author/CB)

A study is presented that considers the narrator's knowledge of conventional schemata for stories and the cognitive factors which seem to be affecting the selection and organization of material for narration. Children ranging in age from 3 years 10 months to 7 years 4 months were asked to watch a video tape cartoon and recount the story to a…

This paper examines two studies on language development and narrative discourse structure by looking at how language shapes and is shaped by culture-specific experiences. Conversations between 20 middle-class Japanese preschoolers, aged 4-5 years old, and their mothers were analyzed to study differences in narrative elicitation by mothers towards…