Children's Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs in Italian: Contrasting the Roles of Frequency and Positional Salience in Maternal Language

Autor/inn/en	Longobardi, Emiddia; Rossi-Arnaud, Clelia; Spataro, Pietro; Putnick, Diane L.; Bornstein, Marc H.
Titel	Children's Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs in Italian: Contrasting the Roles of Frequency and Positional Salience in Maternal Language
Quelle	In: Journal of Child Language, 42 (2015) 1, S.95-121 (27 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0305-0009
DOI	10.1017/S0305000913000597
Schlagwörter	Child Language; Language Acquisition; Nouns; Verbs; Parent Child Relationship; Mothers; Prediction; Incidence; Form Classes (Languages); Infants; Linguistic Input; Coding; Speech Communication + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? 'Children''s language'; Kindersprache; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Parents-child relationship; Parent-child-relation; Parent-child relationship; Eltern-Kind-Beziehung; Mother; Mutter; Vorhersage; Vorkommen; Analytischer Sprachbau; Infant; Toddler; Toddlers; Kleinkind; Sprachbildung; Codierung; Programmierung
Abstract	Because of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on children's acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this issue in a sample of twenty-six mother-child dyads whose spontaneous conversations were recorded, transcribed, and coded at 1;4 and 1;8. The percentages of nouns occurring in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4 predicted children's production of noun types at 1;8. For verbs, children's growth rates were positively predicted by the percentages of input verbs occurring in utterance-initial position, but negatively predicted by the percentages of verbs located in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4. These findings clearly illustrate that the effects of positional salience vary across lexical categories. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10