The Early Acquisition of Verb Meaning in German by Normally Developing and Language Impaired Children  

Oleh:

Schulz, Petra ; Wymann, Karin ; Penner, Zvi

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Brain and Language (Full Text) vol. 77 no. 3 (2001), page 407-418.
Topik: endstate; event structure; German; language impairment; normally developing children; truth–value judgment; verb lexicon
Fulltext: 77_03_Schulz.pdf (75.32KB)

Isi artikel

The research reported here focuses on the early acquisition of event structure in German. Based on longitudinal studies from 5 normally developing (ND) and 6 language-impaired (LI) children, a model of ‘‘event structural bootstrapping’’ is presented that spells out how ND children log into the verb lexicon. They project a target-consistent event tree, depicting the head-of-event of transitions. Young LI children, failing to employ this bootstrapping strategy, resort to radically underspecified event representations. The results from a truth–value judgment experiment with 16 ND and 16 LI children showed that ND children perform correctly on transitional verbs, while LI children perform at chance level on the same tasks. These findings are accounted for by the model of event structural bootstrapping to the extent that LI children lack an explicit representation of the head-of-event.

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