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Children’s Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs in Italian: Contrasting The Roles of Frequency and Positional Salience in Maternal Language
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Abstract:
Because of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on children’s acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this issue in a sample of 26 mother-child dyads whose spontaneous conversations were recorded, transcribed, and coded at 1;4 and 1;8. The percentages of nouns occurring in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4 predicted children’s production of noun types at 1;8. For verbs, children’s growth rates were positively predicted by the percentages of input verbs occurring in utterance-initial position, but negatively predicted by the percentages of verbs located in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4. These findings clearly illustrate that the effects of positional salience vary across lexical categories.
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Article
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URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000913000597
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24524564
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5822718/
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