Give some, keep some, put some: The language of sharing in children.

Sensitivity to linguistic cues, in theory, can change the interpretation of social and game theoretical behavior. We tested this in a pair of experiments with children aged 4 and 5 years. Children were asked to give some, keep some, or put some stickers for themselves or for another player (a puppet) after collaborative activities. We found that the direction of the verb did influence how selfish the younger children were. We also had children tidy up the toys after each activity to determine their interpretation of some. Children could derive the pragmatic scalar implicature linked to some (i.e., interpreting it as meaning not all), and they did so particularly when it affected them personally. These findings have important implications for the stability of other-regarding preferences and the importance of instructions in games.

The acquisition of English modal constructions: a corpus-based analysis.

The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense mother-child corpora at age 3 and 4. We examined the influence on acquisition of input features including form-function mapping frequency and the number of functions a modal signifies, using innovative methodological controls for other aspects of the input (e.g., form frequency) and child characteristics (e.g., age as a proxy for socio-cognitive development). The children were more likely to produce the frequent modals and form-function mappings of their input but modals with fewer functions in caregiver speech did not promote acquisition of these forms. Our findings support usage-based approaches to language acquisition and demonstrate the importance of applying appropriate controls when investigating relationships between input and development.

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Early Prelinguistic Gesture Development and Its Relationship to Language Development.

Many Western industrialized nations have high levels of ethnic diversity but to date there are very few studies which investigate prelinguistic and early language development in infants from ethnic minority backgrounds. This study tracked the development of infant communicative gestures from 10 to 12 months (n = 59) in three culturally distinct groups in the United Kingdom and measured their relationship, along with maternal utterance frequency and responsiveness, to vocabulary development at 12 and 18 months. No significant differences were found in infant gesture development and maternal responsiveness across the groups, but relationships were identified between gesture, maternal responsiveness, and vocabulary development.

Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions: an analysis of two dense corpora.

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations.

How the input shapes the acquisition of verb morphology: Elicited production and computational modelling in two highly inflected languages.

The aim of the present work was to develop a computational model of how children acquire inflectional morphology for marking person and number; one of the central challenges in language development. First, in order to establish which putative learning phenomena are sufficiently robust to constitute a target for modelling, we ran large-scale elicited production studies with native learners of Finnish (N = 77; 35-63 months) and Polish (N = 81; 35-59 months), using a novel method that, unlike previous studies, allows for elicitation of all six person/number forms in the paradigm (first, second and third person; singular and plural). We then proceeded to build and test a connectionist model of the acquisition of person/number marking which not only acquires near adult-like mastery of the system (including generalisation to unseen items), but also yields all of the key phenomena observed in the elicited-production studies; specifically, effects of token frequency and phonological neighbourhood density of the target form, and a pattern whereby errors generally reflect the replacement of low frequency targets by higher-frequency forms of the same verb, or forms with the same person/number as the target, but with a suffix from an inappropriate conjugation class. The findings demonstrate that acquisition of even highly complex systems of inflectional morphology can be accounted for by a theoretical model that assumes rote storage and phonological analogy, as opposed to formal symbolic rules.

Keeping it simple: the grammatical properties of shared book reading.

The positive effects of shared book reading on vocabulary and reading development are well attested (e.g., Bus, van Ijzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995). However, the role of shared book reading in grammatical development remains unclear. In this study, we conducted a construction-based analysis of caregivers' child-directed speech during shared book reading and toy play and compared the grammatical profile of the child-directed speech generated during the two activities. The findings indicate that (a) the child-directed speech generated by shared book reading contains significantly more grammatically rich constructions than child-directed speech generated by toy play, and (b) the grammatical profile of the book itself affects the grammatical profile of the child-directed speech generated by shared book reading.

How do language-specific characteristics affect the acquisition of different relative clause types? Evidence from Finnish.

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested children's comprehension of subject, object, and two types of oblique relatives. No difference was found in the children's performance on different structures, including a lack of previously widely reported asymmetry between subject and object relatives. However, children's comprehension was modulated by animacy of the head referent. Study 3 tested children's production of the same RC structures using sentence repetition. Again we found no subject-object asymmetry. The pattern of results suggested that distributional frequency patterns and the relative complexity of the relativizer contribute to the difficulty associated with particular RC structures.

Children's understanding of first- and third-person perspectives in complement clauses and false-belief tasks.

De Villiers (Lingua, 2007, Vol. 117, pp. 1858-1878) and others have claimed that children come to understand false belief as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker's epistemic attitude toward that proposition. In the current study, English-speaking children of 3 and 4years of age (N=64) were asked to interpret propositional attitude constructions with a first- or third-person subject of the propositional attitude (e.g., "I think the sticker is in the red box" or "The cow thinks the sticker is in the red box", respectively). They were also assessed for an understanding of their own and others' false beliefs. We found that 4-year-olds showed a better understanding of both third-person propositional attitude constructions and false belief than their younger peers. No significant developmental differences were found for first-person propositional attitude constructions. The older children also showed a better understanding of their own false beliefs than of others' false beliefs. In addition, regression analyses suggest that the older children's comprehension of their own false beliefs was mainly related to their understanding of third-person propositional attitude constructions. These results indicate that we need to take a closer look at the propositional attitude constructions that are supposed to support children's false-belief reasoning. Children may come to understand their own and others' beliefs in different ways, and this may affect both their use and understanding of propositional attitude constructions and their performance in various types of false-belief tasks.

Syntactic and semantic coordination in finite complement-clause constructions: a diary-based case study.

This study investigates the coordination of matrix and subordinate clauses within finite complement-clause constructions. The data come from diary and audio recordings which include the utterances produced by an American English-speaking child, L, between the ages 1;08 and 3;05. We extracted all the finite complement-clause constructions that L produced and compared the grammatical acceptability of these utterances with that of the simple sentences of the same length produced within the same two weeks and with that of the simple sentences containing the same verb produced within the same month. The results show that L is more likely to make syntactic errors in finite complement-clause constructions than she does in her simple sentences of the same length or with the same verb. This suggests that the errors are more likely to arise from the syntactic and semantic coordination of the two clauses rather than limitations in performance or lexical knowledge.

Converging and competing cues in the acquisition of syntactic structures: the conjoined agent intransitive.

In two studies we use a pointing task to explore developmentally the nature of the knowledge that underlies three- and four-year-old children's ability to assign meaning to the intransitive structure. The results suggest that early in development children are sensitive to a first-noun-as-causal-agent cue and animacy cues when interpreting conjoined agent intransitives. The same children, however, do not appear to rely exclusively on the number of nouns as a cue to structure meaning. The pattern of results indicates that children are processing a number of cues when inferring the meaning of the conjoined agent intransitive. These cues appear to be in competition with each other and the cue that receives the most activation is used to infer the meaning of the construction. Critically, these studies suggest that children's knowledge of syntactic structures forms a network of organization, such that knowledge of one structure can impact on interpretation of other structures.

Teaching versus enforcing game rules in preschoolers' peer interactions.

Children use normative language in two key contexts: when teaching others and when enforcing social norms. We presented pairs of 3- and 5-year-old peers (N=192) with a sorting game in two experimental conditions (in addition to a third baseline condition). In the teaching condition, one child was knowledgeable, whereas the other child was ignorant and so in need of instruction. In the enforcement condition, children learned conflicting rules so that each child was making mistakes from the other's point of view. When teaching rules to an ignorant partner, both age groups used generic normative language ("Bunnies go here"). When enforcing rules on a rule-breaking partner, 3-year-olds used normative utterances that were not generic and aimed at correcting individual behavior ("No, this goes there"), whereas 5-year-olds again used generic normative language, perhaps because they discerned that instruction was needed in this case as well. Young children normatively correct peers differently depending on their assessment of what their wayward partners need to bring them back into line.

Young children use shared experience to interpret definite reference.

We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an action. In subsequent interactions children were asked to get 'the X' or 'a X'. When children were instructed with the definite article they chose the shared object significantly more often than when they were instructed with the indefinite article in which case children's choice was at chance. The findings show that in their third year children use shared experiences to interpret the speaker's communicative intention underlying her referential choice. The results are discussed with respect to children's representation of linguistic categories and the role of joint action for establishing common ground.

Children's norm enforcement in their interactions with peers.

This study investigates how children negotiate social norms with peers. In Study 1, 48 pairs of 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 96) and in Study 2, 48 pairs of 5- and 7-year-olds (N = 96) were presented with sorting tasks with conflicting instructions (one child by color, the other by shape) or identical instructions. Three-year-olds differed from older children: They were less selective for the contexts in which they enforced norms, and they (as well as the older children to a lesser extent) used grammatical constructions objectifying the norms ("It works like this" rather than "You must do it like this"). These results suggested that children's understanding of social norms becomes more flexible during the preschool years.

First language development: a usage-based perspective on past and current research.

I first outline three major developments in child language research over the past forty years: the use of computational modelling to reveal the structure of information in the input; the focus on quantifying productivity and abstraction; and developments in the explanation of systematic errors. Next, I turn to what I consider to be major outstanding issues: how the network of constructions builds up and the relationship between social and cognitive development and language learning. Finally, I briefly consider a number of other areas of importance to a psychologically realistic understanding of children's language development.

The communicative contexts of grammatical aspect use in English.

In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative context of the child performing actions. On average, 30% of verbal descriptions refer to child actions that are grounded in the here-and-now. Of these utterances, there are two features of the communicative context that reliably map onto the functions of the imperfective, namely, that events are construed as ongoing and from within. The findings are discussed with reference to how the context in which a child hears aspectual language may limit the degrees of freedom on what these constructions mean.

The Knowledge of Autism Questionnaire-UK: Development and Initial Psychometric Evaluation.

Tools to measure autism knowledge are needed to assess levels of understanding within particular groups of people and to evaluate whether awareness-raising campaigns or interventions lead to improvements in understanding. Several such measures are in circulation, but, to our knowledge, there are no psychometrically-validated questionnaires that assess contemporary autism knowledge suitable to the UK context. We aimed to produce a brief measure to assess between-respondent variability and within-respondent change over time. A pool of questionnaire items was developed and refined through a multi-stage iterative process involving autism experts and a lay sample. Attention was paid to face validity, clarity, consensus on correct responses, and appropriate difficulty levels. Initial validation data was obtained from a lay sample of 201 people. Difficulty and discrimination ability were assessed using item response theory and low-performing items were removed. Dimensionality was evaluated with exploratory factor analysis, which revealed a one-factor structure of the questionnaire. Further items were removed where they did not load strongly on their main factor. This process resulted in a final 14-item questionnaire called the Knowledge of Autism Questionnaire-UK. Internal consistency was satisfactory, and the final questionnaire was able to distinguish between parents of autistic people and those without an affiliation to autism. The KAQ-UK is a new, freely-available measure of autism knowledge that could be used to assess between-respondent variability and within-respondent change over time. Further evaluation and validation of its measurement properties are required.

Children's ability to answer different types of questions.

Young children answer many questions every day. The extent to which they do this in an adult-like way - following Grice's Maxim of Quantity by providing the requested information, no more no less - has been studied very little. In an experiment, we found that two-, three- and four-year-old children are quite skilled at answering argument-focus questions and predicate-focus questions with intransitives in which their response requires only a single element. But predicate-focus questions for transitives - requiring both the predicate and the direct object - are difficult for children below four years of age. Even more difficult for children this young are sentence-focus questions such as "What's happening?", which give the child no anchor in given information around which to structure their answer. In addition, in a corpus study, we found that parents ask their children predicate-focus and sentence-focus questions very infrequently, thus giving children little experience with them.

Error patterns in young German children's wh-questions.

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in wh-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of wh-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children frequently omit the initial wh-word. A lexical analysis of wh-less questions revealed that children are more likely to omit the wh-word was ('what') than other wh-words (e.g. wo 'where'). In the second study, we performed an acoustic analysis of sixty wh-questions that one mother produced during her child's third year of life. The results show that the wh-word was is much less likely to be accented than the wh-word wo, indicating a relationship between children's omission of wh-words and the stress patterns associated with wh-questions. The findings are discussed in the light of discourse-pragmatic and metrical accounts of omission errors.

The Competition Between Processing and Discourse-Pragmatic Factors in Children's and Adults' Production of Adverbial When-Clauses.

PURPOSE: This is the first study to investigate the combined effects of processing-based factors (i.e., clause length and clause order) and discourse-pragmatic factors (i.e., information structure) on children's and adults' production of adverbial when-clauses. METHOD: In a sentence repetition task, 16 three-year-old and 16 five-year-old children as well as 17 adults listened to and watched an animated story and then were asked to repeat what they had just heard and seen. Each story contained an adverbial when-clause and its main clause. The sentences were manipulated for their clause order, information structure, and clause length. RESULTS: Adults tended to change main-when clause orders to when-main in their repetitions, and they showed a strong preference for the given-new order of information. In contrast, 3-year-olds tended to change when-main clause orders to main-when, and they showed a preference for the new-given order of information. In addition, 3-year-olds tended to produce short-long clause orders irrespective of what they had heard, whereas adults produced both short-long and long-short orders in line with the input. In general, 5-year-olds were more adultlike in their production compared to 3-year-olds. CONCLUSIONS: Young children were strongly affected by processing-based factors in their production of complex sentences. They tended to order main and when-clauses in a way that requires less planning and processing load. However, they have not yet attained an adultlike sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic factors. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24422635.

Origins of the human pointing gesture: a training study.

Despite its importance in the development of children's skills of social cognition and communication, very little is known about the ontogenetic origins of the pointing gesture. We report a training study in which mothers gave children one month of extra daily experience with pointing as compared with a control group who had extra experience with musical activities. One hundred and two infants of 9, 10, or 11 months of age were seen at the beginning, middle, and end of this one-month period and tested for declarative pointing and gaze following. Infants'ability to point with the index finger at the end of the study was not affected by the training but was instead predicted by infants' prior ability to follow the gaze direction of an adult. The frequency with which infants pointed indexically was also affected by infant gaze following ability and, in addition, by maternal pointing frequency in free play, but not by training. In contrast, infants' ability to monitor their partner's gaze when pointing, and the frequency with which they did so, was affected by both training and maternal pointing frequency in free play. These results suggest that prior social cognitive advances, rather than adult socialization of pointing per se, determine the developmental onset of indexical pointing, but socialization processes such as imitation and adult shaping subsequently affect both infants' ability to monitor their interlocutor's gaze while they point and how frequently infants choose to point.