Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions: an analysis of two dense corpora.

Laura E De Ruiter,Silke Brandt,Elena V M Lieven,Heather C P Lemen,Anna L Theakston

doi:10.1017/s0305000920000641

Laura E De Ruiter, Silke Brandt + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000920000641

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Abstract

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations.

Highlights

Once children move beyond the earlier stages of language learning and start producing multi-clause sentences, this allows them to make the relationship between what they are referring to in the world more linguistically explicit (Braunwald, 1985)
The aim of the paper is to analyse the relationship between the input and children’s own production of adverbials in spontaneous speech to (i) examine whether children’s patterns of learning are in line with a usage-based approach to acquisition and (ii) provide detailed information about the nature of spontaneously produced adverbial sentences and how they compare to the test sentences used in a range of experimental studies
We first present results describing the overall pattern of use of the four adverbials in the input and the children’s speech before turning to their structural and pragmatic properties, and discussing to what extent the distributions may shed light on the experimental findings

Summary

Introduction

Once children move beyond the earlier stages of language learning and start producing multi-clause sentences, this allows them to make the relationship between what they are referring to in the world more linguistically explicit (Braunwald, 1985). Using relative clauses, they learn to add more information about the referent. They learn to add more information about the referent Using adverbial clauses, they learn to talk about the relationship between events in the world. Children’s acquisition of sentences with adverbial clauses ( ‘adverbial sentences’) has been an active research field since the early 1970s The study of how children learn to use these structures provides an important insight into the developmental interaction between their grammatical knowledge and how this relates to real world semantics and discourse organisation.

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