First Language最新文献_第2页

Subject–verb agreement: Three experiments on Catalan 主谓一致：加泰罗尼亚语的三个实验

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2024-05-28 DOI: 10.1177/01427237241252873

Anna Gavarró, Alejandra Keidel

{"title":"Subject–verb agreement: Three experiments on Catalan","authors":"Anna Gavarró, Alejandra Keidel","doi":"10.1177/01427237241252873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237241252873","url":null,"abstract":"This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they performed above chance in all other scenarios, including plural third-person subjects and sentences with overt full DP subjects. This is reminiscent of the results of Pérez-Leroux for Spanish. In experiment 2, with the same design but involving numeral distractors, children’s performance was above chance level across all conditions from age 3 to 4. Then, in experiment 3, we moved to a younger age range with the help of eye-tracking techniques. The findings revealed that infants at 22 months had the ability to parse subject–verb agreement in sentences with third-person null subjects, and at 19 months there was evidence of parsing for third-person plural null subjects. These findings are inconsistent with the perception of children grappling with syntactic agreement computation. We argue that instances of underperformance in subject–verb agreement parsing identified in the literature often stem from task-related and pragmatic issues rather than core syntactic delay. If so, the putative asymmetry between early production of verbal inflection and late comprehension disappears; rather, the results suggest early establishment of matching operations and mastery of language-specific agreement properties before production starts.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141165520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Using cognitive measures from linguistic relativity research to assess thinking in Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children 利用语言相对论研究中的认知测量方法评估尤卡泰克玛雅-西班牙语双语儿童的思维能力

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2024-05-28 DOI: 10.1177/01427237241253315

Jaime Inocencio Chi Pech

{"title":"Using cognitive measures from linguistic relativity research to assess thinking in Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children","authors":"Jaime Inocencio Chi Pech","doi":"10.1177/01427237241253315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237241253315","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses cognitive measures previously developed within linguistic relativity research to explore the thinking patterns of Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children in the Yucatan peninsula. These measures were designed to detect cognitive patterns associated with specific language patterns. Here, these measures are used to test whether 12 Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children aged 9–11 years old differ cognitively from a similar sample of monolingual Maya children (nine Yucatec Maya-speaking and three Spanish-speaking). The study assesses cognitive associations for two language domains: number marking, a structure-based contrast, and spatial frames of reference, a usage-based contrast. For both number marking and spatial frames of reference, both bilingual and monolingual children provided cognitive responses more like Yucatec Maya monolingual speakers than like Spanish monolinguals. The study also assessed whether the results were affected by factors that have emerged in other studies of bilingual cognition: language status, social community, and language of assessment (‘language mode’). For number marking, there was an effect of the language of assessment, but not of social community or language status. For spatial frames of reference, there were effects of social community and language status but not of the language of assessment. Overall, the results suggest that Yucatec Maya's cognitive habits may continue for some time during the shift from Yucatec Maya monolingualism to bilingualism but with some sensitivity to these other factors. This study offers a positive outlook for efforts to maintain and revitalize the Yucatec Maya language in the Yucatan peninsula.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141165522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Establishing guidelines for MLU measurement in an agglutinating language: An illustration of Georgian 为凝集语言的多语言单元测量制定准则：以格鲁吉亚语为例

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2024-04-29 DOI: 10.1177/01427237241247930

Tinatin Tchintcharauli, Nino Tsintsadze, Teona Damenia, Tamar Kalkhitashvili, Nino Doborjginidze, Sigal Uziel-Karl

{"title":"Establishing guidelines for MLU measurement in an agglutinating language: An illustration of Georgian","authors":"Tinatin Tchintcharauli, Nino Tsintsadze, Teona Damenia, Tamar Kalkhitashvili, Nino Doborjginidze, Sigal Uziel-Karl","doi":"10.1177/01427237241247930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237241247930","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the applicability of mean length of utterance (MLU) as a language assessment measure for Georgian child language, as to-date, Georgian, a morphologically rich language with numerous inflectional categories, experiences an extensive lack of instruments for early language assessment. To this end, a set of guidelines for calculating Georgian MLU was developed based on the analysis of a longitudinal corpus of two Georgian-speaking children aged 12–35 months. This was supported by the findings of previous studies on Georgian acquisition. Furthermore, the guidelines were used to compare MLU in morphemes (MLU-m) with MLU in words (MLU-w) and MLU in syllables (MLU-s) to determine the most suitable method for assessing morphological development in Georgian. These results indicate that MLU-m closely aligns with the description of language development in Georgian children. MLU-s is useful for demonstrating early linguistic development, while MLU-w correlates with age but does not capture changes within words over time. Further testing on a larger corpus is needed to refine the guidelines for more accurate assessment of Georgian-speaking children.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140836103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

A prosodic account of complex predicate acquisition in Mam: A Mayan language 玛雅语中复杂谓词习得的前音解释：玛雅语

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2024-03-09 DOI: 10.1177/01427237241232741

Clifton Pye

{"title":"A prosodic account of complex predicate acquisition in Mam: A Mayan language","authors":"Clifton Pye","doi":"10.1177/01427237241232741","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237241232741","url":null,"abstract":"The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children’s ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of language development. The ubiquity of complex predicates in the adult language insures that children will produce complex predicates as some of their first words. The verb complex in Mam has obligatory inflections for aspect, person, and to a degree direction. The inflections vary in degree of attachment between syllable segments, affixes, and clitics. Inflections with vowels are phonologically free, while inflections without vowels attach as either syllable segments or affixes. The Mam verb complex requires the addition of a phrasal layer to prosodic models of lexical acquisition. The paper used this extended version of prosodic theory to make five predictions for the acquisition of the verb complex. The paper analyzes production data for three children between 2;0 and 2;8 acquiring the northern variety of Mam spoken in San Ildefonso Ixtahuacán, Guatemala. The children’s production data for both the intransitive and transitive verb complexes support all five predictions to some degree. The children produced prefixes more frequently on vowel-initial stems than on consonant-initial stems, and they produced imperative suffixes more frequently than prefixes on consonant-initial stems. The children exhibited developmental differences and produced phrasal contractions that the prosodic theory did not predict. The results underline the need to integrate prosody into models of morphosyntactic development, and highlight the significance of complex predicates for theories of language acquisition.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"135 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140073495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The acquisition of directionals in Q’anjob’al 在 Q'anjob'al 获取方向标

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1177/01427237241228693

Pedro Mateo Pedro

引用次数: 0

Fine motor skills and their link to receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, and narrative language skills 精细动作技能及其与接受词汇、表达词汇和叙事语言技能的联系

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2024-02-24 DOI: 10.1177/01427237241233084

Rebecca E. Winter, Heidrun Stoeger, Sebastian P. Suggate

引用次数: 0

On the universality of the subject preference in the acquisition of relative clauses across languages 论跨语言相对从句习得中主语偏好的普遍性

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2024-01-31 DOI: 10.1177/01427237241226734

Nozomi Tanaka, Elaine Lau, Alan L. F. Lee

引用次数: 0

Quantifying events or entities?—A corpus-based study of universal quantifiers in early child English and child-directed speech 量化事件还是实体？--基于语料库的儿童早期英语和儿童引导语中通用量词研究

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2024-01-30 DOI: 10.1177/01427237231225023

Xiangjun Deng, Xiaobei Zheng, Haoyan Ge

{"title":"Quantifying events or entities?—A corpus-based study of universal quantifiers in early child English and child-directed speech","authors":"Xiangjun Deng, Xiaobei Zheng, Haoyan Ge","doi":"10.1177/01427237231225023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237231225023","url":null,"abstract":"The acquisition of quantifiers is a central topic in cognitive science. The present study investigated the emergence, frequency, and non-target-like production of the universal quantifiers all, every, and each in child English from a linguistic perspective, based on the data from longitudinal naturalistic observation of 10 English-speaking children and their caregivers. We found that the use of these quantifiers as adverbs or in adverbials generally appeared earlier, and was more frequent, than their use as (pre)determiners in early child English. We also found that input frequency exerts a great influence on some aspects of the acquisition of universal quantifiers, for example, the frequency of the predeterminer all, but there are still some patterns that cannot be explained by mere input frequency, such as children’s initial preference for using universal quantifiers in A(dverbial)-quantification and their non-target forms. Their initial overreliance on A-quantification may be explained by event quantification being cognitively less demanding than entity quantification, and their non-target productions likely result from their developing grammatical systems. We argue that the acquisition of universal quantifiers involves multiple factors, such as cognitive complexity, children’s developing grammatical systems, and input frequency, interacting with each other.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139947313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech 在泰瑟尔塔人的自发言语中，几乎没有证据表明存在名词偏误

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2024-01-09 DOI: 10.1177/01427237231216571

Marisa Casillas, Ruthe Foushee, Juan Méndez Girón, Gilles Polian, Penelope Brown

{"title":"Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech","authors":"Marisa Casillas, Ruthe Foushee, Juan Méndez Girón, Gilles Polian, Penelope Brown","doi":"10.1177/01427237231216571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237231216571","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines whether children acquiring Tseltal (Mayan) demonstrate a noun bias – an overrepresentation of nouns in their early vocabularies. Nouns, specifically concrete and animate nouns, are argued to universally predominate in children’s early vocabularies because their referents are naturally available as bounded concepts to which linguistic labels can be mapped. This early advantage for noun learning has been documented using multiple methods and across a diverse collection of language populations. However, past evidence bearing on a noun bias in Tseltal learners has been mixed. Tseltal grammatical features and child–caregiver interactional patterns dampen the salience of nouns and heighten the salience of verbs, leading to the prediction of a diminished noun bias and perhaps even an early predominance of verbs. We here analyze the use of noun and verb stems in children’s spontaneous speech from egocentric daylong recordings of 29 Tseltal learners between 0;9 and 4;4. We find weak to no evidence for a noun bias using two separate analytical approaches on the same data; one analysis yields a preliminary suggestion of a flipped outcome (i.e. a verb bias). We discuss the implications of these findings for broader theories of learning bias in early lexical development.","PeriodicalId":47254,"journal":{"name":"First Language","volume":"21 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139441414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

In the ear of the viewer: Toward an auditory dominance in early word learning 在观众的耳边早期单词学习中的听觉优势

IF 1.9 2区文学

First Language Pub Date : 2023-12-29 DOI: 10.1177/01427237231217249

Mélanie Havy

引用次数: 0