Elena V M Lieven

Biographic Data

ID819210
NAMEElena V M Lieven
GIVEN NAMESElena V M
FAMILY NAMELieven
SIGNATURELIEVEN E V M
AFFILIATIONS2University of Manchester
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS33
TOTAL CITATIONS31
AUTHOR COUNT33
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1983
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX4

  • The influence of pragmatic function on children's comprehension of complex because- and if-sentences

    Open AccessHeather C P Lemen, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEFrontiers in Language Sciences2024

    Introduction In complex adverbial sentences, the connectives because and if can perform different pragmatic functions (e.g. Content, Speech-Act), although this is often overlooked in studies investigating children's acquisition of these connectives. In this study, we investigated whether pragmatic variation is responsible for some of the difficulty young children have in understanding because - and if -sentences and tested the extent to which pat…

  • Many ways to decline a noun

    Open AccessVirve‐anneli Vihman, FELIX ENGELMANN et al.ARTICLELanguage and Cognition2021

    Aims This study investigated three- to five-year-olds’ ability to generalise knowledge of case inflection to novel nouns in Estonian, which has complex morphology and lacks a default declension pattern. We explored whether Estonian-speaking children use similar strategies to adults, and whether they default to a preferred pattern or use analogy to phonological neighbours. Method We taught children novel nouns in nominative or allative case and el…

  • Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions

    Open AccessLaura de Ruiter, Heather C P Lemen et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2021

    We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials “after”, “before”, “because”, and “if” in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00–4;07). In comparing mothers’ and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these us…

  • Interactions between givenness and clause order in children’s processing of complex sentences

    Open AccessLaura E De Ruiter, Laura de Ruiter et al.ARTICLECognition2020

    Understanding complex sentences that contain multiple clauses referring to events in the world and the relations between them is an important development in children's language learning. A number of theoretical positions have suggested that factors like syntactic structure (clause order), iconicity (whether the order of clauses reflects the order of events), and givenness (whether information is shared between speakers) affect ease of comprehensi…

  • Explanatory adequacy is not enough

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLELanguage2015Cited by: 1

    In this response to commentators on our target article ‘Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn’t help’, we argue that the fatal flaw in most UG-based approaches to acquisition is their focus on describing the adult end-state in terms of a particular linguistic formalism. As a consequence, such accounts typically neglect to link acquisition to the language that the learner actually hears, instead assuming that she is able, by mean…

  • The semantics of the transitive causative construction

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Claire Noble et al.ARTICLECognitive Linguistics2014References: 2

    Adults and children aged 3;0–3;6 were presented with ungrammatical NVN uses of intransitive-only verbs (e.g., * Bob laughed Wendy ) and asked – by means of a forced-choice pointing task – to select either a causal construction-meaning interpretation (e.g., ‘Bob made Wendy laugh’) or a non-causal sentence-repair interpretation (e.g., ‘Bob laughed at Wendy’). Both age groups chose casual construction-meaning interpretations on at least 82% of trial…

  • Child language acquisition

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLELanguage2014Cited by: 4

    In many different domains of language acquisition, there exists an apparent learnability problem to which innate knowledge of some aspect of universal grammar (UG) has been proposed as a solution. The present article reviews these proposals in the core domains of (i) identifying syntactic categories, (ii) acquiring basic morphosyntax, (iii) structure dependence, (iv) subjacency, and (v) the binding principles. We conclude that, in each of these d…

  • The attention-grammar interface

    Open AccessPercy Ibbotson, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLECognitive Linguistics2013Cited by: 1References: 7

    We investigated whether children (3- and 4-year-olds) and adults can use the active passive alternation – essentially a choice of subject – in a way that is consistent with the eye-gaze of the speaker. Previous work suggests the function of the subject position can be grounded in attentional mechanisms (Tomlin 1995, 1997). Eye-gaze is one powerful source of directing attention that we know adults and young children are sensitive to; furthermore, …

  • The development of abstract syntax

    Open AccessCaroline F Rowland, Franklin Chang et al.ARTICLECognition2012

    Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by taking a developmental approach to structural priming. Using a dialog comprehension-to-production paradi…

  • Productivity of a Polish child's inflectional noun morphology

    Open AccessGrzegorz Krajewski, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEMorphology2012Cited by: 4References: 39

  • Child Language Acquisition

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Elena Lieven et al.BOOKChild Language Acquisition2011

    Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction to the two major contrasting theoretical approaches: generativist and constructivist. For each debate…

  • Lexical frequency and exemplar-based learning effects in language acquisition

    Open AccessEvan Kidd, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLELanguage Sciences2010Cited by: 6References: 24

  • The influence of discourse context on children's provision of auxiliary BE

    Open AccessA L Theakston, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2008

    Children pass through a stage in development when they produce utterances that contain auxiliary BE ( he's playing ) and utterances where auxiliary BE is omitted ( he playing ). One explanation that has been put forward to explain this phenomenon is the presence of questions in the input that model S-V word order (Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello, 2003). The current paper reports two studies that investigate the role of the input in children's use a…

  • Tense over time

    Open AccessJulian M Pine, Gina Conti-Ramsden et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2008

    The Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM) predicts that English-speaking children will show similar patterns of provision across different tense-marking morphemes (Rice, Wexler & Hershberger, 1998). The aim of the present study was to test this prediction by examining provision rates for third person singular present tense and first and third person singular forms of copula BE and auxiliary BE in longitudinal data from eleven English-speaking chi…

  • Note of clarification on the coding of light verbs in ‘Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax’ (Journal of Child Language 31, 61–99)

    Open AccessA L Theakston, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2006

    In our recent paper, ‘Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax’ ( Journal of Child Language 31 , 61–99), we presented data from two-year-old children to examine the question of whether the semantic generality of verbs contributed to their ease and stage of acquisition over and above the effects of their typically high frequency in the language to which children are exposed. We adopted two different categorization schemes…

  • Investigating the abstractness of children's early knowledge of argument structure

    Open AccessKATHLEEN MCCLURE, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2006

    In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop ‘weak’ or ‘partial’ representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around verbs in Tomasello's (1992) case study of Travis, with those of 10 children (Stage I–II) in a year-length…

  • The acquisition of auxiliaries BE and Have

    Open AccessA L Theakston, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2005

    Auxiliary syntax is recognized to be one of the more complex aspects of language that children must acquire. However, there is much disagreement among researchers concerning children's early understanding of auxiliaries, with some researchers advocating a relatively abstract grammar as the basis for auxiliary syntax, while others view the acquisition of auxiliary syntax as the gradual accumulation of linguistic knowledge, initially tied to indivi…

  • Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model

    Open AccessJulian M Pine, Caroline F Rowland et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2005

    One of the most influential recent accounts of pronoun case-marking errors in young children's speech is Schütze & Wexler's (1996) Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). The ATOM predicts that the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects will be so low that such errors can be reasonably disregarded as noise in the data. The present study tests this prediction on data from 12 children between the ages of 1;8.22 and 3;0.10. This is done,…

  • The acquisition of auxiliary syntax

    Open AccessA L Theakston, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLECognitive Linguistics2005Cited by: 7References: 4

    This study examined patterns of auxiliary provision and omission for the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in a longitudinal data set from 11 children between the ages of two and three years. Four possible explanations for auxiliary omission—a lack of lexical knowledge, performance limitations in production, the Optional Infinitive hypothesis, and patterns of auxiliary use in the input—were examined. The data suggest that although none of these accounts pr…

  • Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax

    Open AccessA L Theakston, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2004

    In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency determines the early acquisition of particular lexical items. The present study evaluates the relative i…

  • Determinants of acquisition order in wh-questions

    Open AccessCaroline F Rowland, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2003

    Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by two interlocking linguistic factors; the syntactic fu…

  • Going, going, gone

    Open AccessA L Theakston, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2002

    This study investigated different accounts of early argument structure acquisition and verb paradigm building through the detailed examination of the acquisition of the verb Go . Data from 11 children followed longitudinally between the ages of 2;0 and 3;0 were examined. Children's uses of the different forms of Go were compared with respect to syntactic structure and the semantics encoded. The data are compatible with the suggestion that the chi…

  • The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of verb-argument structure

    Open AccessA L Theakston, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2001

    This study investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Valian (1991) claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames because they do not require a direct object argument. Children who understand this distinction are expected to produce a lower proportion of transitive verb utterances early in development in comparison wi…

  • Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category

    Open AccessJulian M Pine, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLELinguistics1998Cited by: 5

    In this study data from the first six months of 12 children's multiword speech were used to test the validity of Valians (1991) syntactic performance-limitation account andTomasello's (1992) verb-island account of early multiword speech with particular reference to the development of the English verb category.The results provide evidence for appropriate use of verb morphology, auxiliary verb structures, pronoun case marking, and SVO word order fr…

  • Slot and frame patterns and the development of the determiner category

    Open AccessJulian M Pine, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEApplied Psycholinguistics1997

    There has been a growing trend in recent years toward the attribution of adultlike syntactic categories to young, language-learning children. This has derived support from studies which claim to have found positive evidence for syntactic categories in the speech of young children (e.g., Valian, 1986). However, these claims contradict the findings of previous research which have suggested that the categories underlying children's early multiword s…