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Exposure and feedback in language acquisition: adult construals of children's early verb-form use in Hebrew

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2018

Lyle LUSTIGMAN  and
Eve V. CLARK
Lyle LUSTIGMAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, San Jose State University
Eve V. CLARK
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
*
*Corresponding author: Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 95192, USA. E-mail: lyle.lustigman@sjsu.edu
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Abstract

This study focuses on adult responses to children's verb uses, the information they provide, and how they change over time. We analyzed longitudinal samples from four children acquiring Hebrew (age-range: 1;4–2;5; child verb-forms = 8,337). All child verbs were coded for inflectional category, and for whether and how adults responded to them. Our findings show that: (a) children's early verbs were opaque with no clear inflectional target (e.g., the child-form tapes corresponds to letapes ‘to-climb’, metapes ‘is-climbing’, yetapes ‘will-climb’), with inflections added gradually; (b) most early verbs were followed by adult responses using the same lexeme; and (c) as opacity in children's verbs decreased, adults made fewer uses of the same lexeme in their responses, and produced a broader array of inflections and inflectional shifts. In short, adults are attuned to what their children know and respond to their early productions accordingly, with extensive ‘tailor-made’ feedback on their verb uses.

Keywords

early verb formsadult responsesstructural opacitystructural relationsfeedback
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 241 - 264
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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