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Children's acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian: contrasting the roles of frequency and positional salience in maternal language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2014

EMIDDIA LONGOBARDI ,
CLELIA ROSSI-ARNAUD ,
PIETRO SPATARO ,
DIANE L. PUTNICK  and
MARC H. BORNSTEIN
EMIDDIA LONGOBARDI*
Affiliation:
Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Italy
CLELIA ROSSI-ARNAUD
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Italy
PIETRO SPATARO
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Italy
DIANE L. PUTNICK
Affiliation:
Child and Family Research, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
MARC H. BORNSTEIN
Affiliation:
Child and Family Research, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Emiddia Longobardi, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Italy, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185, Rome. tel: +39 06 49917908; fax: +39 06 49917910; e-mail: emiddia.longobardi@uniroma1.it
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Abstract

Because of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on children's acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this issue in a sample of twenty-six mother–child dyads whose spontaneous conversations were recorded, transcribed, and coded at 1;4 and 1;8. The percentages of nouns occurring in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4 predicted children's production of noun types at 1;8. For verbs, children's growth rates were positively predicted by the percentages of input verbs occurring in utterance-initial position, but negatively predicted by the percentages of verbs located in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4. These findings clearly illustrate that the effects of positional salience vary across lexical categories.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 95 - 121
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, NICHD. The authors would like to thank Anna Thornton for helpful discussions about linguistic issues.

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