Methodological issues in language acquisition research with very young children

1982 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Corrigan
2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Howard ◽  
Susan Roberts

Although we know that very young children watch television and indicate preferences for favourite programmes, very little research has been undertaken exploring the responses of such young viewers to media texts. Reasons for this are probably largely methodological — one cannot use the usual methods associated with social research with children who are in the early stages of language acquisition. In this article, the authors describe how they devised a unique technique for observing and recording the responses of 20 under two year-olds to a television text — Teletubbies. Faced with a large amount of rich textual data, they then developed a set of analytical criteria. The subsequent analysis revealed that very young children's responses to the chosen text were very diverse and included pleasure, parasocial and cognitive responses. In addition, new insights into very young children's attentional abilities were revealed.


1984 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Orlansky ◽  
John D. Bonvillian

A longitudinal study of sign language acquisition was conducted with 13 very young children (median age 10 months at outset of study) of deaf parents. The children's sign language lexicons were examined for their percentages of iconic signs at two early stages of vocabulary development. Iconic signs are those that clearly resemble the action, object, or characteristic they represent. Analysis of the subjects' vocabularies revealed that iconic signs comprised 30.8% of the first 10 signs they acquired. At age 18 months, the proportion of iconic signs was found to be 33.7%. The finding that a majority of signs in the subjects' early vocabularies were not iconic suggests that the role of iconicity in young children's acquisition of signs may have been overrated by some investigators, and that other formational features may be of greater importance in influencing young children's ability to acquire signs.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Darr

Since the 1990s, a new type of Holocaust story has been emerging in Israeli children's literature. This new narrative is directed towards very young children, from preschool to the first years of elementary school, and its official goal is to instil in them an authentic ‘first Holocaust memory’. This essay presents the literary characteristics of this new Holocaust narrative for children and its master narrative. It brings into light a new profile of both writers and readers. The writers were young children during the Holocaust, and first chose to tell their stories from the safe distance of three generations. The readers are their grand-children and their grand-children's peers, who are assigned an essential role as listeners. These generational roles – the roles of a First Generation of writers and of a Third Generation of readers – are intrinsically familial ones. As such, they mark a significant change in the profile of yet another important figure in the Israeli intergenerational Holocaust discourse, the agent of the Holocaust story for children. Due to the new literary initiatives, the task of providing young children with a ‘first Holocaust memory’ is transferred from the educational authority, where it used to reside, to the domestic sphere.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
A Emile J Hendriks ◽  
Ross L Ewen ◽  
Yoke Sin Hoh ◽  
Nazia Bhatti ◽  
Rachel M Williams ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jess Sullivan ◽  
Kathryn Davidson ◽  
Shirlene Wade ◽  
David Barner

When acquiring language, children must not only learn the meanings of words, but also how to interpret them in context. For example, children must learn both the logical semantics of the scalar quantifier some and its pragmatically enriched meaning: ‘some but not all’. Some studies have shown that this “scalar implicature” that some implies ‘some but not all’ poses a challenge even to nine-year-olds, while others find success by age three. We asked whether reports of children’s early successes might be due to the computation of exclusion inferences (like contrast or mutual exclusivity) rather than an ability to compute scalar implicatures. We found that young children (N=214; ages 4;0-7;11) sometimes prefer to compute symmetrical exclusion inferences rather than asymmetric scalar inferences when interpreting quantifiers. This suggests that some apparent successes in computing scalar implicature can actually be explained by less sophisticated exclusion inferences.


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