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Abstract: How does linguistic structure affect children’s acquisition of early number word meanings? Previous studies have tested this question by comparing how children learning languages with different grammatical representations of number learn the meanings of labels for small numbers, like 1, 2, and 3. For example, children who acquire a language with singular-plural marking, like English, are faster to learn the word for 1 than children learning a language that lacks the singular-plural distinction, perhaps because the word for 1 is always used in singular contexts, highlighting its meaning. These studies are problematic, however, because reported differences in number word learning may be due to unmeasured cross-cultural differences rather than specific linguistic differences. To address this problem, we investigated number word learning in four groups of children from a single culture who spoke different dialects of the same language that differed chiefly with respect to how they grammatically mark number. We found that learning a dialect which features “dual” morphology (marking of pairs) accelerated children’s acquisition of the number word two relative to learning a “non-dual” dialect of the same language.
Found in: ključnih besedah
Summary of found: ...How does linguistic structure affect children’s acquisition of early number word meanings? Previous studies...
Keywords: števila, številke, slovnično število, dvojina, narečja, usvajanje, učenje, slovenščina, angleščina, numbers, grammatical number, dual, dialects, acquisition, learning, Slovenian, English
Published: 10.08.2016; Views: 4090; Downloads: 233
Fulltext (1,38 MB)

Found in: ključnih besedah
Keywords: Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), double-mirror Schwarzschild-Couder medium-size telescopes (MST-2M) for CTA, data acquisition system
Published: 02.03.2017; Views: 3175; Downloads: 188
Fulltext (533,75 KB)

Found in: ključnih besedah
Keywords: CTA, data acquisition, Python interface
Published: 16.02.2018; Views: 2339; Downloads: 139
Fulltext (326,04 KB)

Abstract: Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragmatic enrichment, rather than lexically. For example, the word one may gain its exact interpretation because the presence of the immediate successor two licenses the pragmatic inference that one implies “one, and not two”. To investigate the possible role of pragmatic enrichment in the development of exact representations, we looked outside the test case of number to grammatical morphological markers of quantity. In particular, we asked whether children can derive an exact interpretation of singular noun phrases (e.g., “a button”) when their language features an immediate “successor” that encodes sets of two. To do this, we used a series of tasks to compare English-speaking children who have only singular and plural morphology to Slovenian-speaking children who have singular and plural forms, but also dual morphology, that is used when describing sets of two. Replicating previous work, we found that English-speaking preschoolers failed to enrich their interpretation of the singular and did not treat it as exact. New to the present study, we found that 4- and 5-year-old Slovenian-speakers who comprehended the dual treated the singular form as exact, while younger Slovenian children who were still learning the dual did not, providing evidence that young children may derive exact meanings pragmatically.
Found in: ključnih besedah
Summary of found: ... Acquisition of quantity expressions, Acquisition of exactness, Pragmatics...
Keywords: Acquisition of quantity expressions, Acquisition of exactness, Pragmatics of grammatical number, Inferences on quantity, Dual, Slovenian
Published: 13.12.2020; Views: 1655; Downloads: 0
Fulltext (1,33 MB)

Abstract: In this talk I present the results of an experimental study of young children's acquisition and use of the principle Maximize Presupposition (MP) in the context of the propositional attitude predicates (equivalent to) know and think. MP operates in the domain of pragmatics in order to distinguish among semantically equivalent propositions which have different presuppositional load in a given context (Heim 1991, Sauerland 2008). Given its nature, demonstrating a speaker’s sensitivity to MP is contingent on knowledge about presuppositional content within a relevant set of alternatives. We use a felicity judgement task to test the ability of 5- and 7-year-old Slovenian-speaking children to derive the factive presupposition of know and the pragmatic inference trigerred by think in accord with MP. The older group of children outperformed the younger group in both conditions manifesting a ceiling performance, while the younger group showed a more mixed pattern. Our results suggest that the anti-factivity inference is mastered on a par with the ability to derive the presupposition of factivity, as predicted by contemporary pragmatic theories. The discussion will also include questions about the influence of bilingualism on developing pragmatic abilities, negative transfer in the domain of pragmatics and its dependence on cross-linguistic morpho-syntactic variation among translational equivalents.
Found in: ključnih besedah
Summary of found: ...of an experimental study of young children's acquisition and use of the principle Maximize Presupposition...
Keywords: Maximize Presupposition, implicated presupposition, early bilingualism, language acquisition, attitude verb
Published: 15.09.2021; Views: 1162; Downloads: 40
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