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The relation of children's single word utterances to single word utterances in the input*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Anat Ninio
Anat Ninio*
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
*
Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, Israel.
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Abstract

The reported study investigated the relation between children's single-word utterances and maternal single-word utterances expressing similar communicative intents. Twenty-four Hebrew-speaking dyads (the children about 1;6) were videotaped for 30 min in an unstructured session. Single-word utterances were analysed for their communicative intent and the relationship of the expression to the underlying intent was defined in the form of realization rules. Of 17,471 child utterances, 97·0% were realizations that were also used by mothers for expressing the same communicative intent. The most frequently modelled rule for an intent had the highest chance of being adopted by children, and the probability sharply decreased for the relatively less frequently modelled rules. The results suggest that children's single-word utterances are similar to, and probably learned from, single-word utterances of caretakers expressing the same specific communicative intents.

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Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , February 1992 , pp. 87 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by Grant No. 2467/81 from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel, to Anat Ninio and Carol Eckerman, by Grant No. 84–00267/1 from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel, to Anat Ninio and Catherine Snow, and by a grant from the Israeli Academy of Sciences.

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