NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Showing all 10 results Save | Export
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Lea Eldstål-Ahrens; Malin Nilsen; Niklas Pramling – Classroom Discourse, 2024
In this study, we analyse a 9-year-old child's argumentative participation in a group discussion, from a microgenetic development angle. Specifically, we follow one child through the discussion and analyse the development process, defined as changed participation and as interactionally contingent upon the other participants and the teacher. The…
Descriptors: Elementary School Students, Persuasive Discourse, Group Discussion, Task Analysis
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
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
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Zhao, Shuyan; Ren, Jie; Frank, Michael C.; Zhou, Peng – Language Learning and Development, 2021
The present study reports a large, cross-sectional study of Mandarin-speaking children's ability to compute quantity implicatures. To chart the developmental trajectory of this pragmatic ability, we tested 225 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4-8 years on their interpretations of scalar and non-scalar implicatures, as well as numerals. Scalar…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Case Studies, Pragmatics, Language Skills
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Dracos, Melisa; Requena, Pablo; Miller, Karen – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in…
Descriptors: Spanish, Language Acquisition, Verbs, Semantics
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Horowitz, Alexandra C.; Frank, Michael C. – Child Development, 2016
This study investigated whether children can infer category properties based on how a speaker describes an individual (e.g., saying something is a "small zib" implies that zibs are generally bigger than this one). Three- to 5-year-olds (N = 264) from a university preschool and a children's museum were tested on their ability to make this…
Descriptors: Inferences, Cues, Performance, Task Analysis
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Minai, Utako; Jincho, Nobuyuki; Yamane, Naoto; Mazuka, Reiko – Journal of Child Language, 2012
Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such…
Descriptors: Semantics, Language Acquisition, Child Language, Form Classes (Languages)
Heizmann, Tanja – ProQuest LLC, 2012
This thesis investigates children's acquisition of exhaustivity across four structures: quantifiers, single questions, multiple questions and clefts. Two languages, English and German, are probed. Exhaustivity needs some sort of plural set to be mentioned without leaving out a member of that set. This dissertation provides experimental data…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, English, German, Language Research
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Nippold, Marilyn A. – Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2009
Purpose: This study examined language productivity and syntactic complexity in school-age children in relation to their knowledge of the topic of discussion--the game of chess. Method: Children (N = 32; mean age = 10;11 [years;months]) who played chess volunteered to be interviewed by an adult examiner who had little or no experience playing…
Descriptors: Speech Communication, Form Classes (Languages), Children, Games
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Hall, D. Geoffrey; Corrigall, Kathleen; Rhemtulla, Mijke; Donegan, Eleanor; Xu, Fei – Child Development, 2008
Infants watched an experimenter retrieve a stuffed animal from an opaque box and then return it. This happened twice, consistent with either 1 animal appearing on 2 occasions or 2 identical-looking animals each appearing once. The experimenter labeled each object appearance with a different novel label. After infants retrieved 1 object from the…
Descriptors: Toys, Child Development, Cognitive Processes, Infants
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
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