First Language current issue

Telephone-mediated communication effects on young children's oral and written narratives

Cameron, C. A., Hutchison, J. — 2009-09-29

This study tested the effectiveness of a telephone-mediated language intervention on enhancing young children’s recontextualization processes in narrative expression. A four-week training program was incorporated into a primary school language-arts curriculum to investigate whether telephone experience designed to heighten listener awareness would augment oral and written narrative skill development. Findings supported predictions that telephone experience would affect both oral and written narrative expression. The telephone intervention enhanced oral psycholinguistic and narrative productivity over the face-to-face comparison treatment. Older students wrote significantly more sophisticated stories than younger students and the telephone enriched the written narratives of older children more than did in-person training. These findings advance theory and highlight educational benefits of a focus on recontextualization processes in distanced communication for understanding and advancing the role of audience awareness in emergent literacy development.

Information structural constraints on children's early language production: The acquisition of the focus particle auch ('also') in German-learning 12- to 36-month-olds

Muller, A., Hohle, B., Schmitz, M., Weissenborn, J. — 2009-09-29

This article presents new findings for the acquisition of the focus particle auch (‘also’) in German-learning children. In a longitudinal study with 11 children between 1;00 and 3;00 years of age complemented by two experiments with children aged 2;4 and 2;8, the authors investigated children’s production of the accented and unaccented auch. The results confirm earlier findings of a temporal delay between the first occurrences of both auch-variants. Based on the empirical findings, an account for this asymmetry is proposed that relates it to a more general developmental tendency that is characterized by a growing linguistic explicitness in embedding a given utterance in its discourse context. It is suggested that the observed delay is caused by the type of relation between the particle and its related constituent: in contrast to the accented auch the unaccented auch is anaphorically related to the sentence topic. It is proposed that the initial omission reflects a general tendency in early child language to drop topic material.

'I like Barney': Preschoolers' spontaneous conversational initiations with peers

O'Neill, D. K., Main, R. M., Ziemski, R. A. — 2009-09-29

In the absence of scaffolding provided by adults or a play situation, what topics will preschoolers raise in attempting to begin conversations with each other? This study provides a first in-depth examination of preschoolers’ peer-to-peer conversational initiations. The snack-time conversations of a class of 25 preschool children were videotaped bi-weekly for 21 weeks; 507 conversational initiations were identified and classified according to a detailed coding scheme that included utterance type (e.g., comment, question), person or object referent, person referenced (e.g., self, listener), and, of particular interest, reference to mental states. Of all initiations, 77.5% referenced persons (41.2% listener) and almost 30% referenced mental states, suggesting preschoolers are using their developing understanding of mind in finding common ground with peers.

Social factors in the acquisition of a new word order

Chang, F., Kobayashi, T., Amano, S. — 2009-09-29

Present syntax acquisition tasks are not optimal for studying how children learn a new syntactic constraint and generalize it in sentence production. To address this issue, this study modified Akhtar’s production task where novel word orders were learned, so that it was more socially natural. Three- and four-year-old children were tested in this new task and the role of input factors was assessed. The new task was more effective at eliciting the novel word order, but the role of input factors differed from earlier studies. To trace the source of these differences, the study manipulated the social features directly in a second experiment. The results suggest that social knowledge contextualizes the influence of input factors in syntax acquisition.