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Showing all 14 results Save | Export
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Shang Jiang; Anna Siyanova-Chanturia – First Language, 2024
Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…
Descriptors: Phrase Structure, Language Processing, Language Acquisition, Child Language
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Davidson, Denise; Rainey, Vanessa R.; Vanegas, Sandra B.; Hilvert, Elizabeth – Infant and Child Development, 2018
Robust evidence exists for the shape bias, or children's tendency to extend novel names and categorize objects more readily on the basis of shape than on other object features. However, issues remain about the conditions that affect the shape bias and its importance as a linguistic device. In this research, we examined how type of instruction…
Descriptors: Preschool Children, Young Children, Classification, Novelty (Stimulus Dimension)
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Hao, Ying; Bedore, Lisa; Sheng, Li; Zhou, Peng; Zheng, Li – First Language, 2021
Mandarin classifiers are a complex system, but little is known about how Mandarin-speaking children manage to learn the system. Based on the extant literature, we explored potential factors influencing the comprehension and production of Mandarin shape classifiers, including classifier-based semantic categorization and errors pertaining to the…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Form Classes (Languages), Language Processing, Child Language
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Miller, Hilary E.; Vlach, Haley A.; Simmering, Vanessa R. – Child Development, 2017
Prior research has investigated the relation between children's language and spatial cognition by assessing the quantity of children's spatial word production, with limited attention to the context in which children use such words. This study tested whether 4-year-olds children's (N = 41, primarily white middle class) adaptive use of task-relevant…
Descriptors: Language Usage, Spatial Ability, Child Language, Preschool Children
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Aarts, Rian; Demir-Vegter, Serpil; Kurvers, Jeanne; Henrichs, Lotte – Language Learning, 2016
The current study examined academic language (AL) input of mothers and teachers to 15 monolingual Dutch and 15 bilingual Turkish-Dutch 4- to 6-year-old children and its relationships with the children's language development. At two times, shared book reading was videotaped and analyzed for academic features: lexical diversity, syntactic…
Descriptors: Academic Discourse, Linguistic Input, Mothers, Indo European Languages
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Li, Hui; Wong, Eileen Chin Mei; Tse, Shek Kam; Leung, Shing On; Ye, Qianling – First Language, 2015
Request for information (RfI) is believed to be the universally dominant function of young children's questioning, whereas request for action (RfA) has been reported to be the leading interrogative form used in early child Cantonese. The possibility of crosslinguistic variability prompts further research and comparison with additional languages.…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Sino Tibetan Languages, Computational Linguistics, Child Language
Pablo E. Requena – ProQuest LLC, 2015
This dissertation examines Spanish Direct Object clitic pronouns in Argentine spoken Spanish of adults and children (ages 4;0-7;0). It concentrates on (Finite verb + Nonfinite verb) constructions that allow both pre-verbal (Proclisis) and a postverbal (Enclisis) clitic placement. Previous corpus studies have shown that lexical (finite verb),…
Descriptors: Spanish, Language Variation, Child Language, Form Classes (Languages)
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Lippeveld, Marie; Oshima-Takane, Yuriko – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2015
Using an observational task followed by an experimental task with an Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, we examined the effect of input on children's acquisition of class extension rules by investigating the relationship between the amount of polysemous noun-verb pairs in French-speaking 2-year-olds' input and both their spontaneous…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Nouns, Verbs, Linguistic Input
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Gabor, Balint; Lukacs, Agnes – Journal of Child Language, 2012
This paper investigates early productivity of morpheme use in Hungarian children aged between 2 ; 1 and 5 ; 3. Hungarian has a rich morphology which is the core marker of grammatical functions. A new method is introduced using the novel word paradigm in a sentence repetition task with masked inflections (i.e. a disguised elicited production task).…
Descriptors: Sentences, Form Classes (Languages), Suffixes, Hungarian
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Chevrot, Jean-Pierre; Nardy, Aurelie; Barbu, Stephanie – Language Sciences, 2011
Numerous studies conducted in both the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic fields have established that the parents' socio-economic status (SES) influences several aspects of children's language production. Moreover, a number of psycholinguistic studies strongly suggest that these differences are due in part to differences in the nature and the…
Descriptors: Socioeconomic Status, Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, Child Language
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Spenader, Jennifer; Smits, Erik-Jan; Hendriks, Petra – Journal of Child Language, 2009
Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a…
Descriptors: Sentences, Form Classes (Languages), Value Judgment, Indo European Languages
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Shiro, Martha – Journal of Child Language, 2003
Examined Venezuelan children's developing abilities to use evaluative language in fictional and personal narratives. Looks at whether the use of evaluative language varies in fictional and personal narratives, there is a relationship between the use of evaluative language in these two narrative genres, and and the role children's age and…
Descriptors: Child Language, Foreign Countries, Language Acquisition, Language Styles
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Anderson, Raquel T. – Applied Psycholinguistics, 1998
Monolingual Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2 and 4 were given two structured tasks that assessed the contrastive use of "se" for coding these functions. Results suggest there is a differential order of acquisition of the clitic "se," whereby children initially contrast regular and reflexive with nonreflexive…
Descriptors: Child Language, Contrastive Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Language Usage
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Boada, Humbert; Forns, Maria – Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2004
The nature of the message used by children, 4 1/2 and 6 1/2 year-old, was studied in a spatial description task. Speaker and listener were separated from one another by an opaque screen, and had to exchange information. Speaker were asked to describe a board showing eight objects placed in a room, and listeners were instructed to draw a similar…
Descriptors: Cognitive Processes, Young Children, Task Analysis, Spatial Ability