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Children's acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian: contrasting the roles of frequency and positional salience in maternal language*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2014
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.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014
Footnotes
This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, NICHD. The authors would like to thank Anna Thornton for helpful discussions about linguistic issues.
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