Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:57:03.509Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The influence of input on connective acquisition: a growth curve analysis of English because and German weil*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2012

ROSIE VAN VEEN ,
JACQUELINE EVERS-VERMEUL ,
TED SANDERS  and
HUUB VAN DEN BERGH
ROSIE VAN VEEN*
Affiliation:
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS – Utrecht University
JACQUELINE EVERS-VERMEUL
Affiliation:
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS – Utrecht University
TED SANDERS
Affiliation:
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS – Utrecht University
HUUB VAN DEN BERGH
Affiliation:
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS – Utrecht University; Graduate School of Teaching and Learning – Amsterdam University
*
Address for correspondence: Rosie van Veen, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Trans 10, NL – 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands. tel. +31 30 253 8692; fax +31 30 253 6000; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The current study used growth curve analysis to study the role of input during the acquisition of the English causal connective because and its German counterpart weil. The corpora of five German and five English children and their adult caretakers (age range 0;10–4;3) were analyzed for the amount as well as for the type of connective use – imitated, elicited, and independent. The growth curves showed that children's elicited use developed faster than their independent use; imitations were rare. Adult connective input was not found to function as a scaffold of children's connective use. Rather, the adult why/warum-questions played an important role in the acquisition of because and weil. In turn, children also used why/warum-questions to elicit causal responses from their caretakers, which shows that children were responsible for a great part of their own input.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 5 , November 2013 , pp. 1003 - 1031
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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.)

Footnotes

[*]

The first, second, and third author's research was enabled by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific research, through NWO-Vici-grant 277-70-003, awarded to Ted Sanders. Furthermore, we would like to thank Rosemarie Rigol, Heike Behrens, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, for sharing their data with us.

References

REFERENCES

Behrens, H. (2006). The input–output relationship in first language acquisition. Language and Cognitive Processes 21, 2–24.Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K. & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. Journal of Child Language 7, 235–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Braunwald, S. (1997). The development of BECAUSE and SO: connecting language, thought, and social understanding. In Costermans, J. & Fayol, M. (eds.), Processing interclausal relationships: studies in the production and comprehension of text. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Chouinard, M. M. & Clark, E. V. (2003). Adult reformulations of child errors as negative evidence. Journal of Child Language 30, 637–69.Google ScholarPubMed
Clark, E. V. (1978). Discovering what words can do. In Farkas, D., Jacobsen, W. M. & Todrys, K. W. (eds.), Papers from the parasession on the lexicon. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. & Murphy, G. L. (1982). Audience design in meaning and reference. In LeNy, J. F. & Kintsch, W. (eds.), Language and comprehension. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company.Google Scholar
De Villiers, J. & De Villiers, P. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistics Research 2, 267–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Diessel, H. (2004). The acquisition of complex sentences. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Evers-Vermeul, J. & Sanders, T. (2009). The emergence of Dutch connectives: how cumulative cognitive complexity explains the order of acquisition. Journal of Child Language 36, 829–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Evers-Vermeul, J. & Sanders, T. (2011). Discovering domains – on the acquisition of causal connectives. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1645–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farrar, M. J. (1992). Negative evidence and grammatical morpheme acquisition. Developmental Psychology 28, 90–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrod, S. & Pickering, M. J. (2004) Why is conversation so easy? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, 8–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garvey, C. (1984). Children's talk. Oxford: O.U.P.Google Scholar
Goldstein, H. (1979). The design and analysis of longitudinal studies: their role in the measurement of change. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, H. (1999). Multilevel statistical models. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Günthner, S. (1993). ‘…weil – man kann es ja wissenschaftlich untersuchen’ – Diskurspragmatische Aspekte der Wortstellung in WEIL-Sätzen. Linguistische Berichte 143, 37–59.Google Scholar
Hood, L., Bloom, L. & Brainerd, C. J. (1979). What, when, and how about why: a longitudinal study of early expressions of causality. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 44, 1–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keller, R. (1995). The epistemic weil. In Stein, D. & Wright, S. (eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation: linguistic perspectives. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Kirjavainen, M., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. (2009). Can input explain children's me-for-I errors? Journal of Child Language 36, 1091–114.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Klee, T., Schaffer, M., May, S., Membrino, I. & Mougey, K. (1989). A comparison of the age–MLU relation in normal and specifically language-impaired preschool children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 54, 226–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kuczaj, S. (1976). -ing, -s and -ed: a study of the acquisition of certain verb inflections. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
McCabe, A. & Peterson, C. (1997). Meaningful ‘mistakes’: the systematicy of children's connectives in narrative discourse and the social origins of this usage about the past. In Costermans, J. & Fayol, M. (eds.), Processing interclausal relationships: studies in the production and comprehension of text. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Menard, S. (2002). Applied logistic regression analysis (2nd ed.) (Quantative Applications in the Social Sciences, 106). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J. F. & Chapman, R. S. (1981). The relation between age and mean length of utterance in morphemes. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 24, 154–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miller, M. (1979). The logic of language development in early childhood. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Naigles, L. R. & Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use. Journal of Child Language 25, 95–120.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Peterson, C., Jesso, B. & McCabe, A. (1999). Encouraging narratives in preschoolers: an intervention study. Journal of Child Language 26, 49–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pit, M. (2003). How to express yourself with a causal connective: subjectivity and causal connectives in Dutch, German and French. Amsterdam: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quené, H. & Van den Bergh, H. (2004). On multi-level modeling of data from repeated measures designs: a tutorial. Speech Communication 43, 103–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quené, H. & Van den Bergh, H. (2008). Examples of mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects and with binomial data. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 413–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, J. (1983). Talking about the there and then: the emergence of displaced reference in parent–child discourse. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language, Vol. 4. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Sanders, T. (2005). Coherence, causality and cognitive complexity in discourse. In Aurnague, M., Bras, M., Le Draoulec, A. & Vieu, L. (eds.). Proceedings/Actes SEM-05, First International Symposium on the exploration and modelling of meaning: Biarritz, France.Google Scholar
Sanders, T., Spooren, W. & Noordman, L. (1992). Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes 15, 1–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandhofer, C. M., Smith, L. B. & Luo, J. (2000). Counting nouns and verbs in the input: differential frequencies, different kinds of learning? Journal of Child Language 27, 561–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saxton, M. (2000). Negative evidence and negative feedback: immediate effects on the grammaticality of child speech. First Language 20, 221–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoll, S. & Gries, S. T. (2009). How to measure development in corpora? An association strength approach. Journal of Child Language 36, 1075–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Suppes, P. (1974). The semantics of children's language. American Psychologist 29, 103–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theakston, A. L. & Lieven, E. V. M. (2008). The influence of discourse context on children's provision of auxiliary BE. Journal of Child Language 35, 129–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van den Bergh, H. & Rijlaarsdam, G. (1996). The analysis of writing process data: a mini-longitudinal study. In Levy, M. C. & Ransdell, S. (eds.), The science of writing. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Van Veen, R., Evers-Vermeul, J., Sanders, T. & Van den Bergh, H. (2009). Parental input and connective acquisition in German: a growth-curve analysis. First Language 29, 267–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. In Cole, M. (Trans.), Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wijnen, F., Kempen, M. & Gillis, S. (2001). Root infinitives in Dutch early child language: an effect of input? Journal of Child Language 28, 629–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wood, D., Bruner, J. S. & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Child Psychiatry 17, 89–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed