Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T07:58:46.963Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Induction and the acquisition of English auxiliaries: the effects of differentially enriched input*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Marilyn Shatz ,
Erika Hoff-Ginsberg  and
Douglas Maciver
Marilyn Shatz*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Erika Hoff-Ginsberg
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Douglas Maciver
Affiliation:
University of California Los Angeles
*
Human Performance Center, 330 Packard Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48104, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Children aged 2;0 to 2;6 participated in a longitudinal study examining their acquisition of the English auxiliary system following a six-week period in which they were exposed to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Groups of children received enrichment utterances with the auxiliary could either in first position in the sentence, in middle position, or in both positions. Children in the front position group were significantly advanced over the other experimental groups in acquiring modal auxiliaries but not non-modals. However, none of the experimental groups differed significantly from a baseline group which received no additional could input. The implications of these findings for understanding the mechanisms of auxiliary acquisition and the nature of children's grammatical categories are discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , February 1989 , pp. 121 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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

*

This research was supported in part by NIMH grant MH30996 to the first author and by NIH traineeships to the second and third authors under grant HD07109. We thank Melissa Bowerman and Susan Gelman for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

References

REFERENCES

Baker, C. L. (1981). Learnability and the English auxiliary system. In Baker, C. L. & McCarthy, J. J. (eds), The logical problem of language acquisition. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baker, N. D. & Nelson, K. E. (1984). Recasting and related conversational techniques for triggering syntactic advances by young children. First Language 5. 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnes, S., Gutfreund, M., Satterly, D. & Wells, G. (1983). Characteristics of adult speech which predict children's language development. Journal of Child Language 10. 65–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bohrnstedt, G. W. (1969). Observations on the measurement of change. In Borgatta, E. (ed.), Sociological methodology 1969. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cazden, C. (1965). Environmental assistance to the child's acquisition of grammar. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Cronbach, L. J. & Furby, R. (1970). How should we measure ‘change’ – or should we? Psychological Bulletin 74. 68–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunnett, C. W. (1955). A multiple comparison procedure for comparing several treatments with a control. Journal of the American Statistical Association 50. 1096–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunnett, C. W. (1964). New tables for multiple comparisons with a control. Biometrics 20. 482–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fletcher, P. (1983). From sound to syntax: a learning guide. Keynote address, Wisconsin Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders. Madison, Wisconsin.Google Scholar
Fletcher, P. (1985). A child's learning of English. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Furrow, D., Nelson, K. & Benedict, H. (1979). Mothers' speech to children and syntactic development: some simple relationships. Journal of Child Language 6. 423–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garcia, E. C. (1967). Auxiliaries and the criterion of simplicity. Language 43. 853–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gleitman, L. R., Newport, E. L. & Gleitman, H. (1984). The current status of the motherese hypothesis. Journal of Child Language 11. 43–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1985). Some contributions of mothers' speech to their children's syntactic growth. Journal of Child Language 12. 367–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1986). Function and structure in maternal speech: their relation to the child's development of syntax. Developmental Psychology 22. 155–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1987). Why some properties of maternal speech benefit language growth (and others do not). Poster presented to the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Baltimore, Maryland.Google Scholar
Hoff-Ginsberg, E. & Shatz, M. (1982). Linguistic input and the child's acquisition of language. Psychological Bulletin 92. 3–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hyams, N. (1986). Language acquisition and the theory of parameters. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kessler, R. C. (1977). The use of change scores as criteria in longitudinal survey research. Quality and Quantity 11. 43–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirk, R. E. (1968). Experimental design: procedures for the behavioral sciences. Monterey CA: Brooks/Cole.Google Scholar
Kuczaj, S. A. & Maratsos, M. P. (1983). Initial verbs of yes-no questions: a different kind of grammatical category. Developmental Psychology 19. 440–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. (1982). The child's construction of grammatical categories. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Myers, J. L. (1979). Fundamentals of experimental design. (3rd edition.) Boston: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. E. (1977). Facilitating children's syntax acquisition. Developmental Psychology 13. 101–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, K. E., Carskaddon, G. & Bonvillian, J. D. (1973). Syntax acquisition: impact of experimental variation in adult verbal interaction with the child. Child Development 44. 497–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, K. E., Denninger, M., Kaplan, B. J. & Bonvillian, J. D. (1979). Varied angles on how children progress in syntax. Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. San Francisco.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. E., Denninger, M. M., Bonvillian, J. D., Kaplan, B. J. & Baker, N. (1984). Maternal input adjustments and non-adjustments as related to children's linguistic advances and to language acquisition theories. In Pellegrini, A. & Yawkey, T. (eds), The development of oral and written language in social contexts. Norwood NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Newport, E. L., Gleitman, H. & Gleitman, L. R. (1977). Mother, I'd rather do it myself: some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds), Talking to children. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Palmer, F. R. (1986). Mood and modality. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Richards, B. (1986). Yes/no questions in input and their relationship with rate of auxiliary verb development in young children. Unpublished manuscript, University of Durham.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheffé, H. (1959). The analysis of variance. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Shatz, M. (1979). How to do things by asking: form-function pairings in mothers' questions and their relation to children's responses. Child Development 50. 1093–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1973). Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In Ferguson, C. & Slobin, D. (eds), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Steele, S., Akmajian, A., Demers, R., Jelinek, E., Kitagawa, C., Oehrle, R. & Wasow, T. (1981). An encyclopedia of AUX: a study in cross-linguistic equivalence. Cambridge MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar