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Adjective forms and functions in British English child-directed speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2019

Catherine DAVIES Open the ORCID record for Catherine DAVIES [Opens in a new window] ,
Jamie LINGWOOD  and
Sudha ARUNACHALAM
Catherine DAVIES
Affiliation:
University of Leeds, UK
Jamie LINGWOOD*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds, UK
Sudha ARUNACHALAM
Affiliation:
New York University, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Dr Jamie Lingwood, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. E-mail: j.lingwood@leeds.ac.uk
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Abstract

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds’ exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives in child-directed speech (CDS); and (ii) investigate how features of the input might scaffold adjective acquisition. In our novel corpus of UK English, adjectives occurred more frequently in prenominal than in postnominal (predicative) syntactic frames, though postnominal frames were more frequent for less-familiar adjectives. They occurred much more frequently with a descriptive than a contrastive function, especially for less-familiar adjectives. Our findings present a partial mismatch between the forms of adjectives found in real-world CDS and those forms that have been shown to be more useful for learning. We discuss implications for models of adjective acquisition and for clinical practice.

Keywords

child-directed speechadjectivescorpus analysis
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 47 , Special Issue 1: The Influence of Input Quality and Communicative Interaction on Language Development Part 1 , January 2020 , pp. 159 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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