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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

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Academic Paper

Title:	Definitions as a window to the acquisition of relative clauses
Author:	Naama Friedmann
Email:	click here to access email
Homepage:	http://www.tau.ac.il/~naamafr
Institution:	Tel-Aviv University
Author:	Dorit Aram
Institution:	Tel-Aviv University
Author:	Rama Novogrodsky
Institution:	Tel-Aviv University
Linguistic Field:	Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics; Syntax
Subject Language:	Hebrew
Abstract:	Definitions that children provide can be a valuable measure of their syntax, and specifically, of their ability to produce relative clauses. This research explored the acquisition of subject, object, and indirect object relative clauses in 121 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 8 years, 6 months (3;5–8;6). The children were asked to define 14 nouns, and their responses were collected and analyzed for various syntactic aspects. The main results were that children started using relative clauses in their definitions at age 3;8, and their use of relative clause increased consistently until they were 6 years old. Retesting 38 of the 6-year-olds at age 8;6 indicated no differences in several syntactic measures between their production of relative clauses at age 6 and 8;6, suggesting that the ability to produce relative clauses stabilizes around age 6. The participants made almost no grammatical errors at any of the ages, probably because they avoided the use of relative clauses when they had not mastered them yet. In the early stages participants produced mainly headless relatives, and with age the use of a relative head increased. The acquisition of relative clauses was not related to the ability to embed or to the ability to use pronouns: these abilities existed already in the youngest age group and remained constant throughout the age groups.

	This article appears in Applied Psycholinguistics Vol. 32, Issue 4, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .

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