Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-31T15:49:06.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Conveying information about adjective meanings in spoken discourse*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2008

ROBERTA CORRIGAN
ROBERTA CORRIGAN*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Educational Psychology, Enderis 749, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examined information about adjective meanings available in adults' spoken discourse in the original 27 CHILDES corpora of typically developing English-speaking children. In order to increase the probability that adjectives would be novel to children to whom they were addressed, only rare adjectives were examined (those that occurred ⩽5 times in the corpus, N=878). Contexts surrounding adjectives (±3 utterances on either side of the target) were scored for linguistic clues to meaning, including related language, compare/contrast and evaluative information. Linguistic contexts contained more information in adult–child conversations than in adult–adult conversations. There were differences among information categories. For example, explicit definitions were relatively rare compared to other types of information and were far less frequent than reported in structured laboratory situations. Findings highlight the importance of looking at adult input in situations where teaching word meaning is not an explicit goal.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 159 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Akhtar, N. & Montague, L. (1999). Early lexical acquisition: The role of cross-situational learning. First Language 19, 347–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackwell, A. (2005). Acquiring the English adjective lexicon: relationships with input properties and adjectival semantic typology. Journal of Child Language 2, 535–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, J., Davies, P. & Richman, B. (1971). The American Heritage word frequency book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Corrigan, R. (2002). The influence of evaluation and potency on perceivers' causal attributions. European Journal of Social Psychology 32, 363–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fellbaum, C. (1998). Wordnet. An electronic lexical database. Cambridge, MA: MIT.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A. (2003). Learning to listen for meaning in the second year of life. Invited symposium at the meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)s, Denver, CO, February.Google Scholar
Gelman, S., Coley, J., Rosengren, K., Hartman, E. and Pappas, A. (1998) Beyond labeling: The role of maternal input in the acquisition of richly structured categories. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child development 63(1), 1–148.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
General Inquirer website (2005). http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~inquirer/Google Scholar
Graham, S., Welder, A. & McCrimmon, A. (2003). Hot dogs and zavy cats: Preschoolers' and adults' expectations about familiar and novel adjectives. Brain and Language 84(1), 16–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hall, D. G. & Moore, C. (1997). Red bluebirds and black greenflies: Preschoolers' understanding of the semantics of adjectives. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 67(2), 236–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hall, D., Burns, T. & Pawluski, J. (2003). Input and word learning: caregivers' sensitivity to lexical category distinctions. Journal of Child Language 30, 711–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hayes, D. (2003). Lexguide-2003. A guide to the lexical analysis of texts using QLEX or QANALYSIS. Cornell University Sociology Technical Report Services, #2003-1, May.Google Scholar
Hoff, E. & Naigles, L. (2002). How children use input to acquire a lexicon. Child Development 73, 418–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hunston, S. & Sinclair, J. (2000). A local grammar of evaluation. In Hunston, S. and Thompson, G. (eds) Evaluation in text, 74–101. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, M. & Mewhort, D. (2007). Representing word meaning and order information in a composite holographic lexicon. Psychological Review 114, 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kamps, J. & Marx, M. (2002). Words with attitude. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Global Word Net, 332–41. CIIL, Mysore, India. http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kamps/publications/Google Scholar
Klibanoff, R. & Waxman, S. (2000). Basic level object categories support the acquisition of novel adjectives: evidence from preschool-aged children. Child Development 71, 649–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Landauer, T. & DuMais, S. (1997). A solution to Plato's problem: The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, indication and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review 104, 211–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Layton, T. & Stick, S. (1979). Comprehension and production of comparatives and superlatives. Journal of Child Language 6, 511–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Li, P. & Shirai, Y. (2000). The acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lund, K. & Burgess, C. (1996). Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers 23, 203–08.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacArthur-Bates. Communicative Development Inventory (2005). www.sci.sdsu.edu/cdi/index.htm.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project, 3rd ed.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Manders, K. & Hall, D. (2002). Comparison, basic-level categories, and the teaching of adjectives. Journal of Child Language 29(4), 923–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mintz, T. (2005) Linguistic and conceptual influences on adjective acquisition in 24- and 36-month olds. Developmental Psychology 41, 17–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mintz, T. H. & Gleitman, L. R. (2002). Adjectives really do modify nouns: the incremental and restricted nature of early adjective acquisition. Cognition 84, 267–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MRC Psycholinguistic database (2005). http://www.psy.uwa.edu.au/mrcdatabase/uwa_mrc.htmGoogle Scholar
Nagy, W. and Scott, J. 2000. Vocabulary processes. In Kamil, M. and Mosenthal, P. (eds) Handbook of reading research, Vol. 3, 269–84. Mahweh, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Osgood, C., Suci, G. & Tannenbaum, P. (1957). The measurement of meaning. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Pennebaker, J., Francis, M. & Booth, R. (2001). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Rindskopf, D. (1996). Partitioning Chi-Square: Something old, something new, something borrowed, but nothing BLUE. In Von Eye, A. and Clogg, C. (eds) Categorical variables in developmental research. Methods of analysis, 183–202. San Diego: Academic.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandhofer, C., Smith, L. & Luo, J. (2000). Counting nouns and verbs in the input: different frequencies, different kinds of learning? Journal of Child Language 30, 609–35.Google Scholar
Shore, W. & Kempe, V. (1999). The role of sentence context in accessing partial knowledge of word meanings. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 28, 145–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Skolnick, D. & Fernald, A. (2003). Incidental word learning by two-year-olds. Presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), Tampa, FL, April.Google Scholar
Thompson, G. & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: an introduction. In Hunston, S. & Thompson, G. (eds) Evaluation in text. Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Vonk, R. (1996). Negativity and potency effects in impression formation. European Journal of Social Psychology 2, 851–65.3.0.CO;2-9>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waxman, S. & Klibanoff, R. (2000). The role of comparison in the extension of novel adjectives. Developmental Psychology 35, 571–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weizman, Z. & Snow, C. (2001). Lexical input as related to children's vocabulary acquisition: effects of sophisticated exposure and support for meaning. Developmental Psychology 37, 265–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed