Conference proceeding
Syntactic Frames and Morphological Cues in the Acquisition of Adjectives in Child English and Child Russian
Proceedings of the Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol.33(1), pp.187-198
01/01/2009
Abstract
The bootstrapping or facilitation of the interpretation & syntactic categorization of novel words as property-denoting adjectives is investigated in an experiment in which children acquiring English & Russian (N = 22 each, aged 2:4-4:7) were presented with six sets of familiar toys; each set contained (1) training objects & one test object that shared a specific property & (2) a test object that lacked the property. Ss were divided into a coordination condition & a morphology condition; the novel property-denoting adjectives were presented as simple predicate complements in the latter condition & as part of a coordinated predicate complement in the former. Results show that, as expected, Ss performed equally well across languages in the coordination condition; surprisingly, the probability of correct responses did not differ by syntactic frame in either language, despite the structural ambiguity of simple predicate adjectives in English & the morphological cue provided by adjective endings in Russian. J. Hitchcock
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Syntactic Frames and Morphological Cues in the Acquisition of Adjectives in Child English and Child Russian
- Creators
- Elena Gavruseva
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol.33(1), pp.187-198
- ISSN
- 1080-692X
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/2009
- Academic Unit
- Linguistics
- Record Identifier
- 9984222748002771
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