Children's Early Productions Research Articles

Linking language to sensory experience: Onomatopoeia in early language development.

A key question in developmental research concerns how children learn associations between words and meanings in their early language development. Given a vast array of possible referents, how does the child know what a word refers to? We contend that onomatopoeia (e.g. knock, meow), where a word's sound evokes the sound properties associated with its meaning, are particularly useful in children's early vocabulary development, offering a link between word and sensory experience not present in arbitrary forms. We suggest that, because onomatopoeia evoke imagery of the referent, children can draw from sensory experience to easily link onomatopoeic words to meaning, both when the referent is present as well as when it is absent. We use two sources of data: naturalistic observations of English-speaking caregiver-child interactions from 14 up to 54months, to establish whether these words are present early in caregivers' speech to children, and experimental data to test whether English-speaking children can learn from onomatopoeia when it is present. Our results demonstrate that onomatopoeia: (a) are most prevalent in early child-directed language and in children's early productions, (b) are learnt more easily by children compared with non-iconic forms and (c) are used by caregivers in contexts where they can support communication and facilitate word learning.

A lexical advantage in four-year-old children's word repetition.

This study examined a potential lexicality advantage in young children's early speech production: do children produce sound sequences less accurately in nonwords than real words? Children aged 3;3-4;4 completed two tasks: a real word repetition task and a corresponding nonword repetition task. Each of the 23 real words had a paired consonant-vowel sequence in the nonword in word-initial position (e.g., 'su' in ['sutkes] 'suitcase' and ['sudrɑs]). The word-initial consonant-vowel sequences were kept constant between the paired words. Previous work on this topic compared different sequences of paired sounds, making it hard to determine if those results were due to a lexical or phonetic effect. Our results show that children reliably produced consonant-vowel sequences in real words more accurately than nonwords. The effect was most pronounced in children with smaller receptive vocabularies. Together, these results reinforce theories arguing for interactions between vocabulary size and phonology in language development.

Five-Year-olds' Acoustic Realization of Mandarin Tone Sandhi and Lexical Tones in Context Are Not Yet Fully Adult-Like

Large numbers of children around the world are learning tone languages, but few studies have examined the acoustic properties of children's early tone productions. Even more scarce are acquisition studies on tone sandhi, a tone change phenomenon which alters the surface realization of lexical tones. Two studies using perceptual coding report the emergence of lexical tone and tone sandhi at around 2 years (Li and Thompson, 1977; Hua and Dodd, 2000). However, the only acoustic study available shows that 3-year-olds are not yet adult-like in their lexical tone productions (Wong, 2012). This raises questions about when children's productions become acoustically adult-like and how their tone productions differ from those of adults. These questions were addressed in the current study which compared Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers' (3–5-year-olds) tone productions to that of adults. A picture naming task was used with disyllabic real words familiar to pre-schoolers. Overall children produced appropriate tone contours for all tones, i.e., level for tone 1, rising for tones 2, 3 and full sandhi, falling for tone 4 and half sandhi. However, children's productions were not adult-like for tones 3, 4, and the sandhi forms, in terms of coordinating pitch range, slope and curvature, with little evidence of development across ages. These results suggest a protracted process in achieving adult-like acoustic realization of both lexical and sandhi tones.

Development of phonetic complexity in Arabic, Berber, English and French

AbstractThe goal of this study is to provide crosslinguistic data on the acquisition of phonetic complexity among children acquiring four different languages: Tunisian Arabic, Tashlhiyt Berber, English, and French. Using an adaptation of Jakielski's (2000) Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC), we carried out an analysis to assess phonetic complexity of children's early vocabulary in the four languages. Four different samples from each language were analyzed: 50 words selected from an adult dictionary of each language, 50 words from child-directed speech, 50 words targeted by the child, and the child's actual pronunciations of those 50 words. Globally, we hypothesized that children's early productions would be shaped by universal articulatory constraints, but also by the language they are exposed to, depending on its phonological complexity. Our findings show that Arabic displays higher degrees of complexity compared to Berber, English and French, and that children acquiring Arabic target and produce more complex words than children learning Berber, English and French.

Building phonological lexical representations

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how much detail young children's word representations contain. We investigate early representations of place of articulation and voicing contrasts, inspired by previously attested asymmetrical patterns in children's early word productions. We tested Dutch-learning 20- and 24-month-olds’ perception of these fundamentally different contrasts in a mispronunciation-detection paradigm. Our results show that different kinds and directions of phonological changes yield different effects. Both 20- and 24-month-olds noticed coronal mispronunciations of labials, but not vice versa. The 24-month-olds noticed voiced mispronunciations of voiceless stops, but not vice versa, while the 20-month-olds failed to notice any voicing mispronunciations. We argue that early lexical representations are specified in very systematic ways, that not all phonological contrasts are encoded at the same time and that the phonological system of a language determines which contrasts are specified first in the representations of early words.

Control in Mandarin-speaking children's early naturalistic production

The present research uses longitudinal production data from four monolingual Mandarin-speaking children under age 2 to investigate the acquisition of complement control in Mandarin Chinese. The main purpose of the research is to explore whether control is available to Mandarin children in early language development and to capture the emergence of control structures in child Mandarin. Our analysis of the data obtained in 145 weekly or biweekly audio- and video-taped sessions demonstrate that children produce control sentences as early as before 2. They have produced control sentences with a variety of control verbs. A scrutiny of the way in which these control sentences are used and what children do and do not do in some contexts reveals that properties of control in adult grammar also surface in early control sentences. Children's early control sentences respect structural constraints such as the generalized control rule and the overtness requirement on object control. They never omit matrix objects in object control structures. Early control sentences also suggest differences from two superficially similar structures, i.e. the serial verb construction and coordination, in various aspects. Young children's control sentences exhibit universal as well as language-specific properties of development. We take such findings as cross-linguistic evidence for early child control and for the continuity view of language acquisition.

Theoretical implications of children's early production of Romanian Accusative clitics

This study examines the acquisition route of object clitics with a view to identifying to what extent language acquisition data can shed light on the old debate with respect to the first Merge position of clitics: in the V-domain or in a higher position in the functional layer of the clause. The analysis of three longitudinal corpora of monolingual Romanian and the results of two elicited production tasks reveal an early stage when Accusative clitics occur exclusively in post-verbal position followed by a stage when the production rate is higher in post-verbal than in pre-verbal position. Building on the assumption that acquisition stages are ‘intermediate’ grammars which represent sub-grammars of the adult system, we argue in favour of a first Merge position of object clitics in the V-domain. In support of this claim the results obtained in a task eliciting the production of 3rd person Accusative clitics as well as the response pattern in a 2nd vs. 3rd person accusative clitic production task reveal an effect on early clitics of feature mismatch between the antecedent of the clitic and the subject of the clause.

Early language-specificity of children's event encoding in speech and gesture: evidence from caused motion in Turkish

Previous research on language development shows that children are tuned early on to the language-specific semantic and syntactic encoding of events in their native language. Here we ask whether language-specificity is also evident in children's early representations in gesture accompanying speech. In a longitudinal study, we examined the spontaneous speech and cospeech gestures of eight Turkish-speaking children aged one to three and focused on their caused motion event expressions. In Turkish, unlike in English, the main semantic elements of caused motion such as Action and Path can be encoded in the verb (e.g. sok- ‘put in’) and the arguments of a verb can be easily omitted. We found that Turkish-speaking children's speech indeed displayed these language-specific features and focused on verbs to encode caused motion. More interestingly, we found that their early gestures also manifested specificity. Children used iconic cospeech gestures (from 19 months onwards) as often as pointing gestures and represented semantic elements such as Action with Figure and/or Path that reinforced or supplemented speech in language-specific ways until the age of three. In the light of previous reports on the scarcity of iconic gestures in English-speaking children's early productions, we argue that the language children learn shapes gestures and how they get integrated with speech in the first three years of life.

Segmental and positional effects on children's coda production: comparing evidence from perceptual judgments and acoustic analysis

Children's early productions are highly variable. Findings from children's early productions of grammatical morphemes indicate that some of the variability is systematically related to segmental and phonological factors. Here, we extend these findings by assessing 2-year-olds' production of non-morphemic codas using both listener decisions and acoustic analyses. Results showed that utterance position and coda manner influence perception, in that more stop codas were perceived utterance-finally compared to utterance-medially but fricative codas were perceived equally across utterance positions. Acoustic analyses showed some convergence to listeners' perception in that there were more cues associated with stops utterance-finally compared to utterance-medially. However, there was some divergence between the two methods in that acoustic cues to coda segments were also present in the majority of cases where a coda was not perceived. These findings provide insight into both the nature of children's emerging phonological representations and the effectiveness of coda transcription across segment types.

Who is afraid of constructivism?

Both generative and constructivist researchers agree that children are able to form abstractions and produce novel grammatically patterned utterances. Both approaches are able to explain such abilities, and hence their existence does not entail an innate Universal Grammar. However, generativists and constructivists differ in their views on the nature of early generalisations: while generative researchers assume that adult-like linguistic representations are present from the very beginning, constructivists argue that children begin with relatively specific, low level schemas and gradually extract more abstract patterns. There is considerable empirical evidence for the latter position. Moreover, constructivist theories provide a better explanation for principled behaviour—not just the observed patterns, but also the absence of certain constructions in children's early productions and various developmental asynchronies.

I'll never grow up: continuity in aspect representations

Children's early production typically favors prototypical groupings of temporal-aspectual features; children prefer to say telic, perfective, past combinations (e.g., broke) and atelic, imperfective present combinations (e.g., riding). The current experiments examine the extent to which adults also favor these prototypical groups in a comprehension task (Experiment 1) and a sentence comparison task (Experiment 2). The results show that, like children, adults find prototypical combinations easier to understand, particularly in low-information contexts. Moreover, adults judge prototypical combinations as better sentences than nonprototypical sentences. The results are argued to support continuity in aspectual representations. The differences between children and adults is linked to the proposed origin of the prototypes themselves, namely, information processing demands.

The acquisition of gender labels in infancy: Implications for gender-typed play.

Two aspects of children's early gender development-the spontaneous production of gender labels and gender-typed play-were examined longitudinally in a sample of 82 children. Survival analysis, a statistical technique well suited to questions involving developmental transitions, was used to investigate the timing of the onset of children's gender labeling as based on mothers' biweekly telephone interviews regarding their children's language from 9 through 21 months. Videotapes of children's play both alone and with mother during home visits at 17 and 21 months were independently analyzed for play with gender-stereotyped and gender-neutral toys. Finally, the relation between gender labeling and gender-typed play was examined. Children transitioned to using gender labels at approximately 19 months, on average. Although girls and boys showed similar patterns in the development of gender labeling, girls began labeling significantly earlier than boys. Modest sex differences in play were present at 17 months and increased at 21 months. Gender labeling predicted increases in gender-typed play, suggesting that knowledge of gender categories might influence gender typing before the age of 2.

On the role of pragmatics in child-directed speech for the acquisition of verb morphology

The important role that pragmatics plays in the acquisition of morphology has been hardly studied. In this contribution we focus on the pragmatic strategies of adult caretakers in their reactions to children's early morphological productions in three different languages (French, German, Lithuanian). The most relevant distinction proposed is that between metadiscursive and conversational reactions, i.e. between reactions on linguistic form and on content. In contrast to the latter, the former represent interruptions of the flow of interaction. The distribution of these two types of reactions provides the child with abundant direct and indirect positive and negative evidence about whether his/her preceding morphological production has been well formed or ill formed. Among these reactions, which may consist in reformulations, expansions, and others, we emphasize particularly repetitions and their pragmatic functions and show that they are partially specific to child-directed speech. A special type of young children's morphological productions are bare infinitives. In contrast to their grammar-theoretical accounts in generative studies, we follow a pragmatic approach, based on child-directed speech and caretakers’ reactions, which evidences the caretakers’ tolerance of ambiguity and thus the importance of inferential work in child-adult interactions. Despite great grammatical differences between French, German and Lithuanian, the pragmatic strategies used by caretakers are very similar in quality and quantity.

Is epenthesis a means to optimize feet? A reanalysis of the CLPF database

Fikkert (1994) analyzed a large corpus of Dutch children's early language production, and found that they often add targetless syllables to their words in order to create bisyllabic feet. In this note we point out a methodological problem with that analysis: in an important number of cases, epenthetic vowels occur at places where grammatical morphemes (e.g. plural and diminutive suffixes) may be expected. Hence, the seemingly targetless syllables may represent grammatical morphemes. A reanalysis of Fikkert's original data reveals that her rhythmic explanation cannot be maintained if those cases are excluded from the analysis.

The effect of sampling on estimates of lexical specificity and error rates

Studies based on naturalistic data are a core tool in the field of language acquisition research and have provided thorough descriptions of children's speech. However, these descriptions are inevitably confounded by differences in the relative frequency with which children use words and language structures. The purpose of the present work was to investigate the impact of sampling constraints on estimates of the productivity of children's utterances, and on the validity of error rates. Comparisons were made between five different sized samples of wh-question data produced by one child aged 2;8. First, we assessed whether sampling constraints undermined the claim (e.g. Tomasello, 2000) that the restricted nature of early child speech reflects a lack of adultlike grammatical knowledge. We demonstrated that small samples were equally likely to under- as overestimate lexical specificity in children's speech, and that the reliability of estimates varies according to sample size. We argued that reliable analyses require a comparison with a control sample, such as that from an adult speaker. Second, we investigated the validity of estimates of error rates based on small samples. The results showed that overall error rates underestimate the incidence of error in some rarely produced parts of the system and that analyses on small samples were likely to substantially over- or underestimate error rates in infrequently produced constructions. We concluded that caution must be used when basing arguments about the scope and nature of errors in children's early multi-word productions on analyses of samples of spontaneous speech.

The First Words Produced by Children in Bilingual English/Mandarin Chinese Environments

The first words produced by children in bilingual environments where English and Mandarin Chinese are spoken were investigated. The goal was to determine if verbs would appear in the children's early productions, which would be consistent with the findings for the first words produced by children in monolingual Mandarin Chinese environments. A greater number of nouns than verbs were produced as children's first words in both English and Mandarin Chinese. Although nouns were produced in both English and Chinese, verbs were produced only in Mandarin Chinese.

Introduction

Introduction Heather Goad and Yvan Rose 1. Introduction A significant portion of research conducted on the acquisition of phonology has traditionally focussed on segmental development, on the acquisition of contrasts, and on processes commonly affecting target sounds. While early generative research was primarily concerned with first language (L1) learners (Smith 1973; Ingram 1974), an important body of work was devoted to second language (L2) learners (Eckman 1977; Flege 1980) and to individuals exhibiting delayed or disordered phonological development as well (e.g., Grunwell 1975; Ingram 1976). In the 1970s and early 1980s, the segmental focus of work in acquisition was largely due to influence from theoretical research in generative phonology at the time, which accorded no formal status to the syllable or to hierachical representations more generally (Chomsky and Halle 1968). With the onset of nonlinear phonology (Goldsmith 1976; Kahn 1976) and subsequent development of highly articulated models of feature organization (Sagey 1986), the acquisition research on segment structure shifted to investigating the ways that feature organization could predict paths in the emergence of contrasts (Rice 1996; Brown and Matthews 1997) and appropriately constrain the rule components of developing grammars (Hancin-Bhatt 1994; Levelt 1994; Dinnsen 1998). The new focus on highly structured representations in theoretical phonology led to the development of nonlinear approaches to prosodic representation (Selkirk 1980; Clements and Keyser 1983). With this, some attention was turned to the acquisition of syllable structure, stress, and prosodic constraints on word shape in [End Page 139] both first (Spencer 1986; Fikkert 1994) and second language acquisition (Broselow 1984; Archibald 1993). Researchers also began to systematically investigate the role that prosodic factors play in segmental acquisition (e.g., Macken 1992). While nonlinear phonology standardly assumes that both segments and prosodic units are highly articulated, they constitute independent modules of the grammar. These modules can, of course, interact, but the architecture of the model predicts their behaviour to be largely autonomous. In the more recently developed Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993), the opposite view is taken as a starting point. In OT, where the principal source of explanation is a set of universal, rankable constraints, a single constraint can contain both segmental and prosodic information, and constraints which express segmental generalizations can be inter-ranked with those that express prosodic generalizations. In short, segmental-prosodic interaction is expected to be the norm. The interactive approach that defines OT is supported by work on positional effects in end-state grammars, namely, that the realization of segmental contrasts is often dependent on position in the string: a greater range of contrasts is observed in those positions that are strong, while loss or lack of contrast is observed in contexts that are weak. Strong-weak asymmetries are conventionally tied to structural considerations, that is, to prosodic licensing (Itô 1986; Goldsmith 1990; Harris 1997; in OT, see, e.g., Zoll 1998). Recently, however, other sources of explanation have been sought; strong-weak asymmetries have been attributed to the relative strength of perceptual cues (e.g., Steriade 1999; Côté 2000) or to psycholinguistic considerations (e.g., Beckman 1997). Regardless of the source of explanation for position-sensitive effects, an appeal to markedness enters into most accounts of the asymmetries observed. Specifically, faithfulness to segmental contrast is less likely to be respected in weak positions where markedness considerations take priority. Turning to acquisition, there is widespread recognition that in first language development, children's early productions are unmarked (Jakobson 1968; Demuth 1995; Gnanadesikan in press). In second language acquisition, where most research has focussed on the acquisition of aspects of grammar where the L1 is a subset of the L2, markedness has been shown to play an important role in shaping interlanguage (IL) outputs as well (Eckman 1977; Broselow, Chen, and Wang 1998). These two factors, the focus on position-sensitive effects and on the role of markedness in shaping grammars, serve to contextualize the theme of the current issue: segmental-prosodic interaction in phonological acquisition. Our goal has been to include articles that reflect different points of view on the formalization of this interaction. While some contributions discuss the effects of prosodic factors on learners' development, others appeal to alternative sources of explanation for...

Word length in syllables: evidence from early word production in Finnish

This study examines the phonological form of ten Finnish-speaking children's productive vocabulary in the period of transition into speech, with primary focus on the number of syllables in a word. The results showed that Finnish children produced relatively few monosyllables and a large number of disyllables in their early words. This seemed to reflect the predominance of disyllabic target words over monosyllabic ones in Finnish. Furthermore, it appeared that the reduction of disyllabic words was very uncommon, whereas polysyllabic words were considerably more often deformed. Finally, the polysyllabic words were quite often truncated in such a way that they fitted a trochaic pattern, which may partly be due to the fact that primary word stress in Finnish falls on the first syllable. Additionally, the segmental content of the target word and the use of a favourite template may have an effect on the selection of syllables. Thus, the present results suggest that the target language affects the syllabicity of children's early word productions and that differences in the linguistic features of the input may influence the strategies that children use when producing their first words.

Homonymy in the lexicons of young children acquiring American Sign Language.

The incidence of homonymy in children's early sign language production was examined in nine young children of deaf parents. Analysis of parental reports of how their children formed their signs revealed that all of the children produced homonymous forms (i.e., a single manual form used to represent two or more different adult target signs). Altogether, the children were reported as producing 26 sets of homonymous forms to represent 59 adult target signs. This incidence of homonymy in the children's early signing did not differ significantly from the incidence of homonymy previously reported in a study of normally developing children acquiring spoken language. This finding is interpreted as indicating an important similarity in language acquisition processes across language modalities. Analysis of the sign formational characteristics of the children's homonymous forms revealed that the children's signs and the adult target signs typically shared a common location aspect. The movement and handshape aspects of the adult target signs were less frequently retained in the children's homonymous forms.

Young children's acquisition of the handshape aspect of American Sign Language signs: Parental report findings

ABSTRACTThe acquisition of the handshape aspect of American Sign Language signs was examined longitudinally in nine young children of deaf parents. In monthly home visit sessions, the parents demonstrated on videotape how their children formed the different signs in their lexicons. According to these parental reports, handshapes were produced accurately in 49.8% of the children's different signs. Accuracy of handshape production typically improved with the children's increasing age and vocabulary size. Four basic handshapes (/5, G, B, A/) predominated in the children's early sign productions. Measures of the children's handshape production accuracy, ordinal position of initial production, and frequency of production were used to describe the order in which handshapes were most often acquired. It was also observed that the part of the hand involved in contacting a sign's location often affected the accuracy of the handshapes being produced.