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Lexically Restricted Utterances in Russian, German, and English Child-Directed Speech

Stoll, Sabine, Abbot-Smith, Kirsten, Lieven, Elena (2009) Lexically Restricted Utterances in Russian, German, and English Child-Directed Speech. Cognitive Science, 33 (1). pp. 75-103. ISSN 0364-0213. (doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2008.01004.x) (KAR id:25338)

Abstract

This study investigates the child-directed speech (CDS) of four Russian-, six German, and six English-speaking mothers to their 2-year-old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word-order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the initial strings of English CDS by Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003) would not be found in Russian or German CDS. However, despite differences between the three corpora that clearly derive from typological differences between the languages, the most significant finding of this study is a high degree of lexical restrictiveness at the beginnings of CDS utterances in all three languages.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2008.01004.x
Additional information: ISI Document Delivery No.: 453DD Times Cited: 1 Cited Reference Count: 59 Stoll, Sabine Abbot-Smith, Kirsten Lieven, Elena Psychology press Hove
Uncontrolled keywords: Child-directed speech Language learning Russian German English Lexical restrictedness Lexical strings Learning strings early vocabulary development language-acquisition connectionist model artificial language inversion errors word constructions grammar input combinations
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Human and Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User: Kirsten Abbot-Smith
Date Deposited: 14 Dec 2010 16:46 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:03 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/25338 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Abbot-Smith, Kirsten.

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8623-0664
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