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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod



Academic Paper


Title: The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses
Author: Anna R Weighall
Institution: Sheffield Hallam University
Author: Gerry T. M. Altmann
Homepage: http://homepage.mac.com/gerry_altmann/gindex.html
Institution: University of York
Linguistic Field: Cognitive Science; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics
Subject Language: English
Abstract: An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several referents) met the pragmatic assumptions of relativization. Comprehension of the main and relative clauses of centre-embedded and right-branching structures was compared for each context. Pragmatically appropriate contexts exerted a positive effect on relative clause comprehension, but children with higher memory spans demonstrated a further benefit for main clauses. Comprehension for centre-embedded main clauses was found to be very poor, independently of either context or memory span. The results suggest that children have access to adult-like linguistic processing mechanisms, and that sensitivity to extralinguistic cues is evident in young children and develops as cognitive capacity increases.

CUP at LINGUIST

This article appears in Journal of Child Language Vol. 38, Issue 3, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .



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