Adjective forms and functions in British English child-directed speech

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.

Adjective forms and functions in British English child-directed speech

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.

Compositionality and Statistics in Adjective Acquisition: 4-year-olds Interpret Tall and Short Based on the Size Distributions of Novel Noun Referents

We investigated 4-year-olds’ understanding of adjective/nouncompositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpretingscalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall andshort itemsfrom nine novel objects called pimwits (1-9” in height), or from this arrayplus four taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind. Changingthe height distributions of the sets shifted children’s judgments of whatcounted as tall and short. However, when distractors differed in name andsurface features from targets, in Experiment 3, judgments did not shift. InExperiment 4, dissimilar distractors did affect judgments when theyreceived the same name as targets. We conclude that 4-year-olds deploy acompositional semantics that is sensitive to statistics and mediated bylinguistic labels.

Development of adjective frequencies across semantic classes

This paper is a longitudinal investigation of adjective use by children aged 1;8−2;8, speaking Dutch, German, French, Hebrew, and Turkish, and by their caregivers. Each adjective token in transcripts of spontaneous speech was coded for semantic class. The development of adjective use in each semantic class was analysed by means of a multilevel logistic regression. The results show that toddlers and their parents use adjectives more often as the child grows older. However, this holds only for semantic classes denoting concrete concepts, such as physical properties, colour, and size. Adjectives denoting more abstract properties are barely used by children and parents throughout the first year of adjective acquisition. The correlations between adjective frequencies in child speech and child-directed speech are very strong at the beginning, but decrease with time as the child develops independent adjective use. The composition of early adjective lexicons is very similar in the five languages under study.