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Semantic development in textual contexts during the school years: Noun Scale analyses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2006

DORIT RAVID
DORIT RAVID
Affiliation:
School of Education and the Department of Communications Disorders, Tel Aviv University
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Abstract

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre. Eighty Hebrew-speaking children (9;0 to 10;0), adolescents (12;0 to 13;0 and 16;0 to 17;0), and a group of adult university graduate students participated in the study. Each produced four different texts: a spoken and written narrative and a spoken and written expository, yielding a total of 320 texts. All lexical noun tokens in each of the 320 texts were analysed to determine their score on the Noun Scale. Results indicate that nominal density, which underlies much of the syntactic architecture of texts, increases dramatically in adolescence, towards adulthood. The paper analyses the developmental patterns of each of the ten Noun Scale categories, showing that the nominal lexicon of schoolaged children is already very different from that of young children in having only a small amount of genuinely concrete nouns, and these too only in narrative texts. The quantitative analysis shows that nouns grow more categorical and abstract with age and schooling, especially in adolescence. Written expository texts are the preferred habitat of abstract, categorical nouns from early on. The systematic qualitative analysis of noun tokens in their textual context demonstrates how the nominal lexicon undergoes fundamental changes that are affected by linguistic, cognitive and social development, in interaction with text genre and modality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , November 2006 , pp. 791 - 821
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The data-base analysed in this study constitutes part of a large-scale crosslinguistic project supported by a major grant from the Spencer Foundation, Chicago for the study of Developing Literacy in Different Languages and Different Contexts (Ruth Berman PI) in which closely comparable written and spoken texts were produced by schoolchildren and adults, native speakers of seven different languages (Berman & Verhoeven, 2002). The broad aims of the project were to shed light on the way in which children, adolescents, and adults construct texts – in the sense of monologic pieces of discourse; to examine the linguistic, cognitive, and communicative resources that they deploy in adapting their texts to different circumstances (in expository versus narrative discourse and in writing compared with speech); and to detect shared or different trends depending on the particular target language.