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Context-specificity and generalization in the acquisition of pronominal distinctions*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Shulamuth Chiat
Shulamuth Chiat
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Abstract

The pronoun system provides a fruitful area for investigating the conditions under which children make linguistic generalizations. Pronouns are defined by a complex of semantic, syntactic, and morphological distinctions whose interaction is only partially consistent. In the course of acquiring them, children often make systematic errors which reflect novel generalizations from the adult input. A distributional analysis was applied to the errors made by 48 children in marking distinctions of person, possession, and case in their spontaneous use of pronouns. The analysis indicated that children do not make maximal generalizations which extend a particular feature to all related contexts. Rather, they acquire specific complexes of features, and are quite conservative in extrapolating from one feature complex to another.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , February 1981 , pp. 75 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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Footnotes

[*]

This paper is based on research undertaken for a Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr N. V. Smith at University College London, and with the financial support of the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain. Address for correspondence: School for the Study of Disorders of Human Communication, 86 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA.

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