Anat Ninio
Biographic Data
| ID | 143641 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anat Ninio |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anat |
| FAMILY NAME | Ninio |
| SIGNATURE | NINIO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6797-5687 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 47 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Complement or adjunct? The syntactic principle English-speaking children learn when producing determiner–noun combinations in their early speech
In children acquiring various languages, the early mastery of determiners strongly predicts syntactic development. What makes determiners important is not yet clear as there is a linguistic controversy regarding their syntactic behaviour. Some consider determiners to be similar to adjectives and to modify common nouns, while others consider the common nouns their complements. This article aims to find out which of the two basic syntactic operatio…
Learning to structure sentences through the acquisition of grammatical words
Until recently, grammatical words such as determiners, auxiliary verbs and prepositions have been considered marginal for the early stages of syntactic development. Lately the trend has turned, and recently some authors have been arguing for the opposite view, according to which grammatical words or functional words (FWs) have a central role in syntactic development. This special issue is devoted to the hypothesis that FWs bootstrap syntactic dev…
Learning to produce complement predicates with shared semantic subjects
Many sentences of adult English are analytic constructions, namely clauses with a matrix verb complemented by a dependent predicate that does not have an expressed syntactic subject. Examples are subject and object control, raising to subject or object, periphrastic tense, aspect and modality, copular predication and do-support. In this article the authors test a suggestion derived from Dependency Grammar that despite differences in detail, all s…
Learning transitive verbs from single-word verbs in the input by young children acquiring English
The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding input to a blind child revealed the context of single-word parental verbs to be more transparent than th…
Bids for joint attention by parent–child dyads and by dyads of young peers in interaction
Before they are 3;0–3;6, children typically do not engage with peers in focused interaction, although they do with adults. With parents, children interact around the ‘here-and-now’. We hypothesize that young peers do not attempt to establish joint attention to present objects. Using the CHILDES database, we compared attention-directives produced by parents to children, children to peers, and children to parents. Of 391 English-speaking parents, 8…
Learning a generative syntax from transparent syntactic atoms in the linguistic input
We examined parents' two-word utterances expressing core syntactic relations in order to test the hypothesis that they may enable children to derive the atoms of hierarchical syntax, namely, the asymmetrical Merge/Dependency relation between pairs of words, and, in addition, to identify variables serving generative syntactic rules. Using a large English-language parental corpus, we located all two-word utterances containing a verb and its subject…
On the Testing of Piaget’s Hypothesis of Topological Primacy in Representational Space by Copying Geometrical Figures
This paper discusses the paradigm of testing Piaget’s hypothesis of topological primacy in representational space by copying geometrical figures. It is shown that geometrical figures and their copies are not considered as actual spaces in this paradigm, but merely as representations of spaces. However, the attainment of symbolic representation of abstract concepts might exhibit a temporal order which stems to an unknown degree from the relative d…
James Russell (2004) What is language development? Rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatist approaches to the acquisition of syntax . Oxford
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Testing the role of semantic similarity in syntactic development
The study explored early syntactic development, and tested the hypothesis that children use similarity of meaning in order to move beyond the learning of individual item-based multiword constructions. The first 6 types of verb–object (VO) constructions in Hebrew-speaking children were analysed for the occurrence of transfer of learning and facilitation, as well as for the semantic similarity of the direct objects (DO). Longitudinal naturalistic s…
Accelerated learning without semantic similarity
The hypothesis was tested that transfer and facilitation of learning in early syntactic development does not rely on semantic analogy among the items. The study focused on the verb-indirect object (VI) construction. Longitudinal naturalistic speech corpora of 14 Hebrew-speaking children (1;04–2;08) were analyzed, 9 females and 5 males, White and predominantly middle class. There was facilitation of learning among the first 10 verbs in the VI patt…
Young children's difficulty with adjectives modifying nouns
In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that children have a basic problem in mastering the attributive relation because it involves a two-step logical–semantic integration process of the head-noun and the attributive adjective. Hebrew-speaking children were asked to interpret highly familiar adjective–noun combinations by selecting a photo that depicted the correct referent. In Experiment 1 there were four choices for each adjective–noun pai…
Pragmatic keywords and the first combining verbs in children's speech
The first two transitive verbs and the first two intransitive verbs which begin word-combinations in the speech of children acquiring Hebrew were examined for their use as expressions of communicative intents in an independent speech sample of mothers and of children. It was found that the first-combining verbs tend to be used as constants or keywords of communicative intents. Syntagmatic relations apparently emerge from pragmatic relations betwe…
Model learning in syntactic development
Previous findings suggest that in natural language, frequency may be inherently correlated with generality, prototypicality or simplicity. The most frequently used instances in each domain may be the “best models” of that domain, so that the effect of input frequency is to have children learn the best exemplars of a domain first. To test this hypothesis, the first intransitive verbs to participate in multiword combinations were investigated, base…
Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity
The first verbs to participate in VO and SVO combinations, and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinatory patterns over different verbs were investigated. The longitudinal language observations of 16 children, one acquiring English, the others Hebrew, were examined. The children were observed once a week for 3–12 months, the observations starting when the children were still in the single-word stage (1;1–2;1) and ending when they …
Pragmatic Development
Compiler Grammar
Cet article presente les grandes lignes d'un modele procedural de syntaxe, a travers une vaste metaphore informatique. La syntaxe est comparee a un compilateur qui traduit les programmes informatiques en langage interpretable par l'ordinateur. Les operations combinatoires de base du systeme linguistique sont 3 options combinatoires existant pour les couples logiques predicat-argument. La relation syntaxique de dependance est montree pour represen…
Predicting the order of acquisition of three-word constructions by the complexity of their dependency structure
It was hypothesized that the complexity of the dependency structure of different 3- and 4-word constructions predicts the order of their acquisition. Analysis of an English-speaking child's first 102 sentence types of more than 2 words strongly supported this prediction: the earliest sentences rarely involved constructions in which members of a dependency pair were not immediately adjacent to each other. The findings suggest that dependency theor…
Predicting the order of acquisition of three-word constructions by the complexity of their dependency structure
It was hypothesized that the complexity of the dependency structure of different 3- and 4-word constructions predicts the order of their acquisition. Analysis of an English-speaking child's first 102 sentence types of more than 2 words strongly supported this prediction: the earliest sentences rarely involved constructions in which members of a dependency pair were not immediately adjacent to each other. The findings suggest that dependency theor…
On the fringes of the system
Analysis of the utterances of 16 beginning speakers revealed that the great majority of linguistic forms they had acquired consisted of forms lacking syntactic combinatorial properties in adult language. The results support the hypothesis that young children are unable to learn linguistic signs which are integrated into the linguistic system by a complex network of interrelationships. Rather, they are limited to such forms which are sustained by …
The relation of children's single word utterances to single word utterances in the input
The reported study investigated the relation between children's single-word utterances and maternal single-word utterances expressing similar communicative intents. Twenty-four Hebrew-speaking dyads (the children about 1;6) were videotaped for 30 min in an unstructured session. Single-word utterances were analysed for their communicative intent and the relationship of the expression to the underlying intent was defined in the form of realization …
The roots of narrative
The illocutionary aspect of utterances∗
The first part of this paper criticizes Austin's and Searle's claim that utterances have illocutionary force. It is shown that illocutionary force is the sense of illocutionary descriptive terms, but illocutionary verbs are not names of a definite aspect of utterances. In the second and third parts an alternative account of the illocutionary aspect of utterances is offered, an account which sees illocution as the way in which utterances meaningfu…
The meaning of children's first words
Joint book reading as a multiple vocabulary acquisition device
Anat NinioHebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, IsraelThis study investigated serial effects in recurrent ostensive definitions of wordsin the context of joint picture-book reading by 20 mother-infant dyads. Contentanalysis revealed a number of labeling formats, among them simple labeling bythe mother or by the infant, elicitation of labeling by what-questions, elicitationof pointing by where-questions, and elicited and spontaneous imitation…
Picture-Book Reading in Mother-Infant Dyads Belonging to Two Subgroups in Israel
Joint book reading as a multiple vocabulary acquisition device
Anat NinioHebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, IsraelThis study investigated serial effects in recurrent ostensive definitions of wordsin the context of joint picture-book reading by 20 mother-infant dyads. Contentanalysis revealed a number of labeling formats, among them simple labeling bythe mother or by the infant, elicitation of labeling by what-questions, elicitationof pointing by where-questions, and elicited and spontaneous imitation…
Effects of Ethnic Origin and Parental SES on WPPSI Performance of Pre-School Children in Israel
A Hebrew translation of the Wechsler Preschool Primary Scale of Intelligence was administered to 1072 Israeli-born children aging 4 to 6 1/2 years. Groups originating from Israel, East Europe, Middle East and North Africa, all subdivided into High vs. Low SES groups, were identified. The eight groups differed significantly in the level but usually not in the pattern of the subtests' scores. First generation Oriental children performed relatively …
Developmental Trends in Directionality of Drawing in Jewish and Arab Israeli Children
Jewish and Arab Israeli children (n = 484), attending pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, were required to copy a vertical and a horizontal line. Partial samples were also tested using the WPPSI. It was found that Jewish and Arab children were similar in their preference for top-bottom directionality, but in copying the horizontal line Jewish children used mostly a left-right and Arab children used mostly a right-left stroke. Correlations with the …
The meaning of children's first words
The roots of narrative
Effects of Ethnic Origin and Parental SES on WPPSI Performance of Pre-School Children in Israel
A Hebrew translation of the Wechsler Preschool Primary Scale of Intelligence was administered to 1072 Israeli-born children aging 4 to 6 1/2 years. Groups originating from Israel, East Europe, Middle East and North Africa, all subdivided into High vs. Low SES groups, were identified. The eight groups differed significantly in the level but usually not in the pattern of the subtests' scores. First generation Oriental children performed relatively …
Developmental Trends in Directionality of Drawing in Jewish and Arab Israeli Children
Jewish and Arab Israeli children (n = 484), attending pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, were required to copy a vertical and a horizontal line. Partial samples were also tested using the WPPSI. It was found that Jewish and Arab children were similar in their preference for top-bottom directionality, but in copying the horizontal line Jewish children used mostly a left-right and Arab children used mostly a right-left stroke. Correlations with the …
The achievement and antecedents of labelling
The achievement of labelling was investigated in a longitudinal study of one mother–infant dyad, using video-recordings of their free play in a period between 0; 8 and 1; 6. Analysis of joint picture-book reading revealed that this activity had very early on the structure of a dialogue. The child's lexical labels might be regarded as more adult-like substitutes for earlier communicative forms that he had utilized in the dialogue. These were smili…
Picture-Book Reading in Mother-Infant Dyads Belonging to Two Subgroups in Israel
Ostensive definition in vocabulary teaching
Ostensive definitions of words are ambiguous as to their referent. In a study of 40 mother–infant dyads engaged in looking at picture-books, it was found that 95% of ostensive definitions referred to the whole object depicted, rather than to its parts, attributes or actions. On the rare occasions when mothers named parts of objects, they avoided misunderstanding of the level of reference either by naming the part immediately after naming the whol…
Joint book reading as a multiple vocabulary acquisition device
Anat NinioHebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, IsraelThis study investigated serial effects in recurrent ostensive definitions of wordsin the context of joint picture-book reading by 20 mother-infant dyads. Contentanalysis revealed a number of labeling formats, among them simple labeling bythe mother or by the infant, elicitation of labeling by what-questions, elicitationof pointing by where-questions, and elicited and spontaneous imitation…
The meaning of children's first words
The illocutionary aspect of utterances∗
The first part of this paper criticizes Austin's and Searle's claim that utterances have illocutionary force. It is shown that illocutionary force is the sense of illocutionary descriptive terms, but illocutionary verbs are not names of a definite aspect of utterances. In the second and third parts an alternative account of the illocutionary aspect of utterances is offered, an account which sees illocution as the way in which utterances meaningfu…
The roots of narrative
The relation of children's single word utterances to single word utterances in the input
The reported study investigated the relation between children's single-word utterances and maternal single-word utterances expressing similar communicative intents. Twenty-four Hebrew-speaking dyads (the children about 1;6) were videotaped for 30 min in an unstructured session. Single-word utterances were analysed for their communicative intent and the relationship of the expression to the underlying intent was defined in the form of realization …
On the fringes of the system
Analysis of the utterances of 16 beginning speakers revealed that the great majority of linguistic forms they had acquired consisted of forms lacking syntactic combinatorial properties in adult language. The results support the hypothesis that young children are unable to learn linguistic signs which are integrated into the linguistic system by a complex network of interrelationships. Rather, they are limited to such forms which are sustained by …
Predicting the order of acquisition of three-word constructions by the complexity of their dependency structure
It was hypothesized that the complexity of the dependency structure of different 3- and 4-word constructions predicts the order of their acquisition. Analysis of an English-speaking child's first 102 sentence types of more than 2 words strongly supported this prediction: the earliest sentences rarely involved constructions in which members of a dependency pair were not immediately adjacent to each other. The findings suggest that dependency theor…
Predicting the order of acquisition of three-word constructions by the complexity of their dependency structure
It was hypothesized that the complexity of the dependency structure of different 3- and 4-word constructions predicts the order of their acquisition. Analysis of an English-speaking child's first 102 sentence types of more than 2 words strongly supported this prediction: the earliest sentences rarely involved constructions in which members of a dependency pair were not immediately adjacent to each other. The findings suggest that dependency theor…
Compiler Grammar
Cet article presente les grandes lignes d'un modele procedural de syntaxe, a travers une vaste metaphore informatique. La syntaxe est comparee a un compilateur qui traduit les programmes informatiques en langage interpretable par l'ordinateur. Les operations combinatoires de base du systeme linguistique sont 3 options combinatoires existant pour les couples logiques predicat-argument. La relation syntaxique de dependance est montree pour represen…
Pragmatic Development
Model learning in syntactic development
Previous findings suggest that in natural language, frequency may be inherently correlated with generality, prototypicality or simplicity. The most frequently used instances in each domain may be the “best models” of that domain, so that the effect of input frequency is to have children learn the best exemplars of a domain first. To test this hypothesis, the first intransitive verbs to participate in multiword combinations were investigated, base…
Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity
The first verbs to participate in VO and SVO combinations, and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinatory patterns over different verbs were investigated. The longitudinal language observations of 16 children, one acquiring English, the others Hebrew, were examined. The children were observed once a week for 3–12 months, the observations starting when the children were still in the single-word stage (1;1–2;1) and ending when they …
Pragmatic keywords and the first combining verbs in children's speech
The first two transitive verbs and the first two intransitive verbs which begin word-combinations in the speech of children acquiring Hebrew were examined for their use as expressions of communicative intents in an independent speech sample of mothers and of children. It was found that the first-combining verbs tend to be used as constants or keywords of communicative intents. Syntagmatic relations apparently emerge from pragmatic relations betwe…
Young children's difficulty with adjectives modifying nouns
In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that children have a basic problem in mastering the attributive relation because it involves a two-step logical–semantic integration process of the head-noun and the attributive adjective. Hebrew-speaking children were asked to interpret highly familiar adjective–noun combinations by selecting a photo that depicted the correct referent. In Experiment 1 there were four choices for each adjective–noun pai…
Testing the role of semantic similarity in syntactic development
The study explored early syntactic development, and tested the hypothesis that children use similarity of meaning in order to move beyond the learning of individual item-based multiword constructions. The first 6 types of verb–object (VO) constructions in Hebrew-speaking children were analysed for the occurrence of transfer of learning and facilitation, as well as for the semantic similarity of the direct objects (DO). Longitudinal naturalistic s…
Accelerated learning without semantic similarity
The hypothesis was tested that transfer and facilitation of learning in early syntactic development does not rely on semantic analogy among the items. The study focused on the verb-indirect object (VI) construction. Longitudinal naturalistic speech corpora of 14 Hebrew-speaking children (1;04–2;08) were analyzed, 9 females and 5 males, White and predominantly middle class. There was facilitation of learning among the first 10 verbs in the VI patt…
James Russell (2004) What is language development? Rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatist approaches to the acquisition of syntax . Oxford
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
On the Testing of Piaget’s Hypothesis of Topological Primacy in Representational Space by Copying Geometrical Figures
This paper discusses the paradigm of testing Piaget’s hypothesis of topological primacy in representational space by copying geometrical figures. It is shown that geometrical figures and their copies are not considered as actual spaces in this paradigm, but merely as representations of spaces. However, the attainment of symbolic representation of abstract concepts might exhibit a temporal order which stems to an unknown degree from the relative d…
Learning a generative syntax from transparent syntactic atoms in the linguistic input
We examined parents' two-word utterances expressing core syntactic relations in order to test the hypothesis that they may enable children to derive the atoms of hierarchical syntax, namely, the asymmetrical Merge/Dependency relation between pairs of words, and, in addition, to identify variables serving generative syntactic rules. Using a large English-language parental corpus, we located all two-word utterances containing a verb and its subject…
Learning transitive verbs from single-word verbs in the input by young children acquiring English
The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding input to a blind child revealed the context of single-word parental verbs to be more transparent than th…
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