Syntactic Priming in 3- and 4-Year-Old Children: Evidence for Abstract Representations of Transitive and Dative Forms

Developmental Psychology

Volumn 43, Issue 6, 2007, Pages 1334-1346

  Shimpi, Priya M ^a   Gámez, Perla B ^a   Huttenlocher, Janellen ^a   Vasilyeva, Marina ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

children; priming; syntax

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; FEMALE; HUMAN; LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT; LANGUAGE TEST; MALE; METHODOLOGY; PRESCHOOL CHILD; PSYCHOLOGICAL MODEL; SEMANTICS; TEACHING;

CHILD, PRESCHOOL; FEMALE; HUMANS; LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT; LANGUAGE TESTS; MALE; MODELS, PSYCHOLOGICAL; SEMANTICS; TEACHING;

EID: 36349013790     PISSN: 00121649     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.43.6.1334     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Abbot-Smith K., Lieven E., and Tomasello M. Training 2;6-year-olds to produce the transitive construction: The role of frequency, semantic similarity, and shared syntactic distribution. Developmental Science 7 (2004) 48-55
2. Adams A., and Gathercole S. Phonological working memory and speech production in preschool children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 38 (1995) 403-414
3. Bock K. Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18 (1986) 355-387
4. Bock K. Structure in language: Creating form in talk. American Psychologist 45 (1990) 1221-1236
5. Bock K., and Griffin Z. The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 129 (2000) 177-192
6. Bock K., Loebell H., and Morey R. From conceptual roles to structural relations: Bridging the syntactic cleft. Psychological Review 99 (1992) 150-171
7. Branigan H., Pickering M., and Cleland A. Syntactic coordination in dialogue. Cognition 75 (1999) 13-25
8. Branigan H., Pickering M., Liversedge S., Stewart A., and Urbach T.P. Syntactic priming: Investigating the mental representation of language. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 24 (1995) 489-506
9. Brooks P., and Tomasello M. Young children learn to produce passives with nonce verbs. Developmental Psychology 35 (1999) 29-44
10. Carminati, M. N., Van Gompel, R. P., Scheepers, C., & Arai, M. (2007, March). Syntactic priming in the comprehension of ditransitive structures: New findings. Paper presented at the 20th annual CUNY conference on Human Sentence Processing, La Jolla, CA.
11. Childers B., and Tomasello M. The role of pronouns in young children's acquisition of the English transitive construction. Developmental Psychology 37 (2001) 739-748
12. Conwell E., and Demuth K. Early syntactic productivity: Evidence from dative shift. Cognition 103 (2007) 163-179
13. Fernandes K., Marcus G., Di Nubila J., and Vouloumanos A. From semantics to syntax and back again: Argument structure in the third year of life. Cognition 100 (2006) B10-B20
14. Fisher C. Partial sentence structure as an early constraint on language acquisition. In: Landau B., Sabini J., Jonides J., and Newport E.L. (Eds). Perception, Cognition, and Language: Essays in honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman (2001), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 275-290
15. Fisher C. The role of abstract syntactic knowledge in language acquisition: A reply to Tomasello (2000). Cognition 82 (2002) 259-278
16. Fisher C. Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of abstract structure in 2.5-year-olds interpretations of novel verbs. Developmental Science 5 (2002) 56-65
17. Gathercole S., Willis C., Baddeley A., and Emslie H. The Children's Test of Nonword Repetition: A test of phonological working memory. Memory 2 (1994) 103-127
18. Gertner Y., Fisher C., and Eisengart J. Learning words and rules: Abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science 17 (2006) 684-691
19. Gleitman L. The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1 (1990) 3-55
20. Gropen J., Pinker S., Hollander M., Goldberg R., and Wilson R. The learnability and acquisition of the dative alternation in English. Language 65 (1989) 203-257
21. Harris F.N., and Flora J.A. Children's use of get passives. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 11 (1982) 297-311
22. Hirsh-Pasek K., and Golinkoff R. The preferential looking paradigm reveals emerging language comprehension. In: McDaniel D., McKee C., and Cairns H. (Eds). Methods for assessing children's syntax (1996), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 105-124
23. Huttenlocher J., Vasilyeva M., and Shimpi P. Syntactic priming in young children. Journal of Memory and Language 50 (2004) 182-195
24. Israel M., Johnson C., and Brooks P. From states to events: The acquisition of English passive participles. Cognitive Linguistics 11 (2000) 103-129
25. Landau B., and Gleitman L. Language and experience: Evidence from the blind child (1985), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
26. Lempert H. Animacy constraints on preschool children's acquisition of syntax. Child Development 60 (1989) 237-245
27. Lieven E., Pine J., and Baldwin G. Lexically-based learning and the development of grammar in early multi-word speech. Journal of Child Language 24 (1997) 187-219
28. McClure K., Pine J.M., and Lieven E.V.M. Investigating the abstractness of children's early knowledge of argument structure. Journal of Child Language 33 (2006) 693-720
29. Naigles L. Children use syntax to learn verb meaning. Journal of Child Language 17 (1990) 357-374
30. Naigles L., and Kako E. First contact in verb acquisition: Defining a role for syntax. Child Development 64 (1993) 1665-1687
31. Pickering M.J., and Branigan H.P. The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 39 (1998) 633-651
32. Savage C., Lieven E., Theakston A., and Tomasello M. Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations: Lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children. Developmental Science 6 (2003) 557-567
33. Tomasello M. First verbs: A case study of early grammatical development (1992), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England
34. Tomasello M. Do young children have adult syntactic competence?. Cognition 74 (2000) 209-253
35. Tomasello M., and Abbot-Smith K. A tale of two theories: Response to Fisher. Cognition 83 (2002) 207-214
36. Tomasello M., and Akhtar N. What paradox? A response to Naigles. Cognition 88 (2003) 317-323
37. Tomasello M., and Brooks P. Young children's earliest transitive and intransitive constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 9 (1998) 379-395
38. Vasilyeva M., Huttenlocher J., and Waterfall H. Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels of preschoolers. Developmental Psychology 42 (2006) 164-174
39. Whitehurst G., Ironsmith M., and Goldfein M. Selective imitation of the passive construction through modeling. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 17 (1974) 288-302