The Development and Acquiring of the Adjectives in English and Hebrew - Assignment Example

The Development and Acquiring of the Adjectives in English and Hebrew/SUMMARY/Order_1A The main goal of this study is to closely trace the acquisition of adjective in Hebrew in the context of natural speech production among Hebrew-speaking children. It likewise focuses on the diversification of semantic and morphological aspects of adjectives and the growth of syntactic elaboration in structures containing adjectives. This paper assumes in general that the absolute number of adjectives would increase with age. The authors, Dorit Ravid and Michal Nir expected to find basic-level, primary adjectives in the younger groups, and for these to diversify into a number of semantic and morphological classes as the children increase in age. This study also assumes that there is a growing diversity in all three domains of the study – semantics, morphology and syntax, and significant correlation between these domains. Early studies and surveys show that adjectives appear later in child speech than noun and verbs (Casseli, Bates, Casadio & Fenson, 1995; Dromi, 1987; Rice, 1990; Sommers, Kozarevich &Michaels, 1994). And according to Berman (1988), adjectives enter the child’s repertoire relatively later than verbs and nouns since they share features with both, and are thus less prototypical than verbs and nouns. The authors thus try to either negate or confirm such studies with further exploration on the uniqueness of adjective acquisition in the Hebrew language using an experimentation method among 50 kibbutz-reared children aged 2 to 6, all native speakers of Hebrew. The children were recorded during free play in the day care center and each was recorded twice, each time with a different playmate. This report is based on an overall number of 8, 038 utterances units, 1283 adjective tokens and 155 adjective types counted in all transcripts. Hebrew offers an interesting case of a language in which a morphological class has evolved, and the experimentation on children on how they acquired the Hebrew language reflects this process. After a careful study on the 50 children, the findings indeed show the growth of semantic diversification with age. Based on the experiment, the earliest semantic types to emerge are colors, dimensional adjectives and adjectives denoting external properties while the later-emerging semantic classes of adjectives in preschoolers are resultative, cognitive and ethnic-i suffixed adjectives. On morphology, the diversification hypothesis was also confirmed. Five morphological structures were used for the study and a one-way ANOVA shows a significant difference in the number of morphological categories in the five age groups (between 1 to 6). The study also shows significant findings on syntactic growth in adjective category. The elliptic adjectives decrease with age. The youngest group has high number of syntactically contextless adjectives because they are pre-syntactic. Another aspect of adjective growth in the syntactic domain is in the occurrence of structures with adjectives in the two possible syntactic positions: predicative and attributive. Study shows that there is great increase in the three oldest groups in the amount of attributive adjectives while in all age groups, predicative adjectives are more numerous than modifying adjectives. And the final aspect of syntactic growth is express in syntactic elaboration, that is modification and adjective conjoining. The study show that children differ in the amount and type of amount of adjective modification they produce. They also differ in elaboration but older children are in command of syntactic devices and attach different adjectives to the same noun. As predicted, the authors found an increase with age in both number and types of adjectives, especially in children ages 3 and over. The main finding of the study is the increase in adjective categories typical of each domain and relationship between diversification in different domains. Semantic categories diversify from the concrete to the more abstract and to categories that require integrating prior knowledge, processing ability and lexical command such as resultative and ethnic categories (Berman, 1994). The syntactic aspects of adjective production also diversify with age and reflect the growth of children’s ability to produce syntactically elaborate structures. This study also proved that semantic and syntactic growth are highly correlated, as well as the increase in morphological diversity. According to the authors, adjectives also overlap between the boundaries of non-linear Semitic root-and-pattern morphology and linear stem-and-suffix structures in the Hebrew language. Contrary to early findings, root-and-pattern precede linear i-suffixed denominal adjectives because of the inherent difference between the classes of nouns and adjectives in Hebrew. (end) References: Ravid, Dorit and Nir, Michal, On the Development of the Category of Adjective in Hebrew, Tel Aviv University, Israel (Please check others cited in the references of this paper; see original paper) Acquiring the English adjective lexicon: relationships with input properties and adjectival semantic typology/ SUMMARY/ Order_1B In this paper, the author, Aleka A. Blackwell of Middle Tennesee State University, investigates the relationship between the three properties of input, age of acquisition of English adjectives and the correlation of adjectival semantic typology and order of acquisition. The three properties of input that were closely analyzed in this paper are input frequency, syntactic diversity, and variety in noun-type occurrence. Blackwell says that studies on the property of input in the acquisition of nouns and verbs were already explored while less is known about the factors that influence the acquisition of adjectives. The author also points out that aside from the issue of acquisition of adjectives among children, the study of adjective class itself seems to be in the periphery of linguistic research – another issue in the lexical acquisition literature. The second goal of this study therefore is to focus on the development of semantic subcategories of the English adjective class. The method used in this study is experimentation and analyses of already available transcript on the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000). The author studied the adjective lexicon in the language transcript of Adam and Sarah (Brown, 1973) from age 2;3 to 5;0. The children were recorded in their homes while playing with their mothers and other family-members. According to the author, an adjective search list of 272 was also used to create the corpora of child and maternal adjective utterances. The data used are 7262 child utterances and 6318 maternal utterances. Each utterance was coded to indicate the adjective, its semantic class, syntactic position, the noun modified and the child’s age. The semantic coding reflects the meaning of the adjective and how its was used at a given time. The codes were categorized from human propensity, physical properties to specifics like texture, appearance, configuration, substantiality, dimension, colour, value, etc. After careful analyses and study, the author concluded that for both children, all three properties of the input were significantly correlated with order of acquisition. Blackwell says that the significant relationship between syntactic diversity and age of acquisition observed here suggests that syntactic bootstrapping may be relevant to the acquisition of adjectives as well. The more adjectival syntactic positions an adjective occurs in, the more transparent its lexical status might become to a child. However, Blackwell says only adjective frequency and syntactic diversity were significant predictors of age of acquisition in the regression model. The author explains that once the effects of these two factors were removed, diversity of noun co-occurrence is not a significant predictor of age acquisition. Meanwhile, semantic analyses revealed that the distribution of adjective types and tokens differed between the children and the mothers when the data were studied in terms of adjectival semantic types. Blackwell says that the results suggest that both properties of the input and semantic properties of the English adjective class play a significant role in its acquisition. The adjectives which enter into categorematic (the meaning of the adjective is independent from the noun) modification relationships with the nouns they modify are the ones acquired early than the syncategorematic (noun modified determines meaning of the adjective) modification. Another finding of this study, Blackwell says, is that even the light of a shared discourse context, child and maternal adjective used differed with respect to the number of different adjective types and adjective tokens of each semantic category produced in a given transcript. The child adjective utterances are not dependent on their mothers’ utterances perse. Children use their adjectives it a large extent to identify or comment on objects in their environment, Blackwell explains. (end) Analysis of the Two Papers/ COMPARE AND CONTRAST/ Order_1C Early studies on the lexical acquisition literature focus on the two basic lexical categories: nouns and verbs. Much has been recorded and published the development and acquisition of these two lexical classes using experimentation on children with their parents or age groups. But less has actually been produced to trace the path of development, growth and acquisition of adjective class. It is therefore noteworthy to look into the arguments and findings of two independent studies written and produced by different and independent authors, if only to determine the importance of acquisition of the adjective class and the factors that affect such acquisition. These studies are as follows: Acquiring the English adjective lexicon: relationships with input properties and adjectival semantic typology authored by Aleka A. Blackwell of Middle Tennessee State University and The Development and Acquiring of the Adjectives in English and Hebrew written by Dorit Ravid and Michal Nir of the Tel Aviv University in Israel. Both studies tried to answer several queries on the order of acquisition of the adjective class in relation to semantic diversification and typology, morphology, and syntactic development. The authors also used the same method, that is experimentation on children in their primary ages 1 to 6 and 2 to 6 to analyze patterns and derive conclusions for both studies. The only difference is that Blackwell used available database from CHILDES while Ravid and Nir directly conducted the experimentation with Hebrew children. Also, the two papers slightly differ on the secondary focus of studies. Blackwell concentrated on the acquisition of English adjective lexicon while the authors from Israel concentrated on the development and acquisition of adjectives in the Hebrew language, using therefore, kibbutz-reared children, all native speakers of Hebrew. In further contrast, Ravid and Nir likewise explored the uniqueness of the Hebrew language in relation to the development and acquisition of adjectives. Their study shows that the biblical Hebrew’s ethnic origins has an effect on the development of the adjective class. Meanwhile, both studies agree that semantic diversification and typology is correlated to the order of acquisition of the adjectives. Also, input frequency and syntactic diversity directly affects the order of acquisition. So as a child grows and becomes more aware and knowledgeable of his environ, the more he is exposed to adjectives and be able to modify adjectives, use language diversity and show syntactic growth. In the paper The Development and Acquiring of the Adjectives in English and Hebrew, the authors found an increase with age in both number and types of adjectives, especially in children ages 3 and over. The main finding of the study is the increase in adjective categories typical of each domain and relationship between diversification in different domains. Semantic categories diversify from the concrete to the more abstract and to categories that require integrating prior knowledge while the syntactic aspects of adjective production also diversify with age and reflect the growth of children’s ability to produce syntactically elaborate structures. This study also proved that semantic and syntactic growth are highly correlated, as well as the increase in morphological diversity. This is almost the same with some findings of Blackwell in the Acquiring the English adjective lexicon: relationships with input properties and adjectival semantic typology. Blackwell concluded that input frequency, syntactic diversity and variety in noun-typoe occurrence were significantly correlated with order of acquisition. Blackwell says that the significant relationship between syntactic diversity and age of acquisition suggests that syntactic bootstrapping may be relevant to the acquisition of adjectives as well. The more adjectival syntactic positions an adjective occurs in, the more transparent its lexical status might become to a child. Blackwell says that the results suggest that both properties of the input and semantic properties of the English adjective class play a significant role in its acquisition. (end) ADDITIONAL ACADEMIC PAPERS/ Analysis/ Order_1D The studies of language and lexicon acquisition literature are two wide areas of academic concern and both has a bearing on the further development of human speech and communication. In this paper, I will try to analyze and compare two totally different papers that both touches on important topics in language development. The first paper is the Acquisition of English Comparative Adjectives by J. Graziano-King and H.S. Cairns of the Department of English, Kingsborough Community College and The Acquisition of Noun-modifying Clauses in Japanese: A Comparison with Korean from the Japanese Study Website with reference to H. Ozeki and Y. Shirai. Although the papers are not directly the same, they, however, gives significant insights on language development, with special focus on noun-modifying clauses in Japanese and Korean. The first paper was based on an experiment investigating the acquisition of English comparative adjective forms. Seventy-two children, 4 and 7 years old, and 29 children ages 5;1 and 10;9 indicated their preferences for the synthetic or periphrastic comparative form for 16 adjectives in a forced-choice judgment task; their responses were compared to those of a group of adults. The two studies together support an acquisition trajectory of three stages. In the first stage, children show no preference for either form of the comparative; in the second, they adopt a suffixation rule; and in the third, they abandon the general rule and become conservative learners, eventually reaching the adult target. The second paper, however, showed how Japanese relative clauses (RCs) develop very differently from English RCs, with a comparison to Korean. The study was also based on database availed from interviews of Japanese children from CHILDES. The difference between the two is that in Korean, adjectives as predicates emerge late while they emerge earlier in Japanese. Although the study focuses on the differences of Japanese and Korean language, still it has the same theme as the first paper in a way that the study was conducted among children. It is quite clear to us that the study of language and its acquisition, no matter what lexical class or category, is most effective by tracing the stages of its metamorphosis from child language. In any part of the world, the most basic indicator of human learning is through the eyes of children. This gives us the conclusion that the study of child language is basic in the study of language acquisition and development. (end) References: Graziano-King J, Cairns HS. Acquisition of English comparative adjectives. Department of English, Kingsborough Community College, 2001 Oriental Boulevard, Brooklyn, New York 11235, USA. Retrieved June 28, 2006 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi? The acquisition of noun-modifying clauses in Japanese: A comparison with Korean. Retrieved June 28, 2006 from Japanese study website: http://imp.lss.wisc.edu/jk15conference/OzekiShirai.pdf Read More