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Jared Vasil – ProQuest LLC, 2024
Successful reference relies on being appropriately informative for listeners. What factors influence informativeness? For example, what factors influence the decision to refer to a ball with the less informative phrase "it," as opposed to the more informative phrase "the red ball"? The present dissertation proposes and…
Descriptors: Young Children, Language Usage, Educational Games, Behavior Patterns
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Jared Vasil; Dayna Price; Michael Tomasello – Child Development, 2024
The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous how many puppets performed an activity together. When asked who performed the activity, a…
Descriptors: Child Development, Preschool Children, Age Differences, Morphemes
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Orvell, Ariana; Elli, Giulia; Umscheid, Valerie; Simmons, Ella; Kross, Ethan; Gelman, Susan A. – Child Development, 2023
A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns "you" and "we," which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to…
Descriptors: Child Development, Form Classes (Languages), Decision Making, Social Behavior
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Vasil, Jared; Moore, Charlotte; Tomasello, Michael – First Language, 2023
Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Preschool Children, Language Acquisition, Language Usage
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Vogels, Jorrig; Lindgren, Josefin – Discourse Processes: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 2022
When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…
Descriptors: Swedish, Preschool Children, Discourse Analysis, Cues
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Cournane, Ailís – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
This paper revisits the longstanding observation that children produce modal verbs (e.g., must, could) with their root meanings (e.g., abilities, obligations) by age 2, typically a year or more earlier than with their epistemic meanings (e.g., inferences). Established explanations for this "Epistemic Gap" argue that epistemic language…
Descriptors: Verbs, Language Acquisition, Inferences, Syntax
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Lustigman, Lyle – First Language, 2015
The study aims to account for the distribution of finite versus non-finite verbs during a developmental period when children use both types of verb forms in contexts requiring finiteness. To meet this goal, longitudinal samples from three Hebrew-acquiring children (aged 1;4-2;6) are examined from the onset of verb production and across the…
Descriptors: Syntax, Morphology (Languages), Verbs, Language Usage
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Tardif, Twila; Fletcher, Paul; Liang, Weilan; Kaciroti, Niko – Journal of Child Language, 2009
Parent report instruments adapted from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) examined vocabulary development in children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6 for two Chinese languages, Mandarin (n = 1694) and Cantonese (n = 1625). Parental reports suggested higher overall scores for Mandarin- than for Cantonese-speaking children from…
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Monolingualism, Foreign Countries, Mandarin Chinese
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Kedar, Yarden; Casasola, Marianella; Lust, Barbara – Child Development, 2006
Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Infants, Grammar, Sentence Structure