ERIC Number: EJ1048325
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015-Jan
Pages: 27
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Children's Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs in Italian: Contrasting the Roles of Frequency and Positional Salience in Maternal Language
Longobardi, Emiddia; Rossi-Arnaud, Clelia; Spataro, Pietro; Putnick, Diane L.; Bornstein, Marc H.
Journal of Child Language, v42 n1 p95-121 Jan 2015
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.
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Nouns, Verbs, Parent Child Relationship, Mothers, Prediction, Incidence, Form Classes (Languages), Infants, Linguistic Input, Coding, Speech Communication
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (NIH)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A