The Acquisition Of Reference

Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children’s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on the acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of referential acquisition will make the volume appealing to a wide audience of researchers, including linguists and psycholinguists working on phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of language development. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted by several of the contributors will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the relevance of typological differences. The state-of-the-art approach makes the research accessible to specialist and non-specialist researchers alike, and will provide an invaluable resource for graduate-level courses.

This book discusses to what extent errors young children make with their interpretation of definite articles and pronouns are due to their immature pragmatic skills, and to what extent incomplete syntactic development plays a role.

This book brings together contributions by prominent researchers in the fields of language processing and language acquisition on topics of common interest: how people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend such referential expressions, and how children acquire the ability to refer and to understand reference.

This book describes the repertoire and uses of referring expressions by French-speaking children and their interlocutors in naturally occurring dialogues at home and at school, in a wide range of communicative situations and activities. Through the lens of an interactionist and dialogical perspective, it highlights the interaction between the formal aspects of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes, the discourse-pragmatic dimension, and socio-discursive, interactional and dialogical factors. Drawing on this multidimensional theoretical and methodological framework, the first part of the book deals with the relation between reference and grammar, while the second part is devoted to the role of the communicative experience. Progressively, a set of arguments is brought out in favor of a dialogical and interactionist account of children’s referential development. This theoretical stance is further discussed in relation to other approaches of reference acquisition. Thus, this volume provides researchers and students with new perspectives and methods for the study of referring expressions in children.

How people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend reference, and how children acquire an understanding of and an ability to use reference. This volume brings together contributions by prominent researchers in the fields of language processing and language acquisition on topics of common interest: how people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend such referential expressions, and how children acquire the ability to refer and to understand reference. The contributors first discuss issues related to children's acquisition and processing of reference, then consider evidence of adults' processing of reference from eye-tracking methods (the visual-world paradigm) and from corpora and reading experiments. They go on to discuss such topics as how children resolve ambiguity, children's difficulty in understanding coreference, the use of eye movements to physical objects to measure the accessibility of different referents, the uses of probabilistic and pragmatic information in language comprehension, antecedent accessibility and salience in reference, and neuropsychological data from the event-related potential (ERP) recording literature.

First published in 1986. This edition offers a grammatical sketch of French, with occasional comments on how other Romance languages diverge from this picture; a brief account of the sources available on language acquisition by children; and a summary of the overall course of development in children acquiring the major Romance languages. The remainder of the review takes up different facets of the language acquisition process in more detail.

This book provides a snapshot of the field of language acquisition at the beginning of the 21st Century. It represents the multiplicity of approaches that characterize the field and provides a review of current topics and debates, as well as addressing some of the connections between sub-fields and possible future directions for research.