Matthew Rispoli
Biographic Data
| ID | 8914311 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Rispoli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Rispoli |
| SIGNATURE | RISPOLI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kansas |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5369-3790 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Spontaneous Lexical Overlap in Early Conversations
This study piloted CHIPUTIL, an automated tool in CLAN for analysing sequential lexical overlap in parent–child conversations. In a sample of 44 dyads (child age M = 1;9), child spontaneous lexical overlap was positively associated with parent imitations and expansions, across the conversation and within sequential turns. Children were more than twice as likely to respond with lexical overlap when parents first produced an imitation or expansion.…
It’s Mine, . . . It’s Mine
A phenomenon called “repetition reduction” can increase articulation rate in adults by facilitating phonetic and motor processes, which indicates flexibility in the control of articulation rate. Young children, who speak much slower, may not have the same speech motor flexibility resulting in the absence of the repetition reduction effect. In this study, we tested whether spontaneous repetitions of young children are produced with a faster articu…
Diversity matters
The contribution of parent input to children's subsequent expressive verb diversity was explored in twenty typically developing toddlers with small verb lexicons. Child developmental factors and parent input measures (i.e. verb quantity, verb diversity, and verb-related structural cues) at age 1;9 were examined as potential predictors of children's verb production in spontaneous language samples at age 2;3. Parent verb input diversity, rather tha…
Case marking uniformity in developmental pronoun errors
The purpose of this study was to determine if children acquire grammatical case as a unified system or in a piecemeal fashion. In English language acquisition, many children make developmental errors in marking case on subject position pronouns (e.g., Me do it, Him like it). It is unknown whether children who produce pronoun case errors with first person pronouns also produce errors with third person pronouns. This finding would be expected if ca…
A lifespan perspective on individual differences in grammatical abilities
Preview this article: A lifespan perspective on individual differences in grammatical abilities, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/lab.2.3.05had-1.gif
When children reach beyond their grasp
This research addresses the question of why some children are disposed to making a large number of pronoun case errors and others are not. The answer proposed is that when pronoun paradigm building outstrips the development of INFL, children become especially vulnerable to erring in the choice of pronominal word form, resulting in pronoun case error. On the other hand, when pronoun paradigm building proceeds more conservatively, the risk of error…
Theory and methods in the study of the development of case and agreement
Two recent papers Wexler, Schütze & Rice (1998) and Rispoli (1999 a ) reach different conclusions concerning the relationship between finiteness marking and pronoun case errors. Wexler et al. claim they are linked, whereas Rispoli finds little evidence for such a linkage. Wexler et al. discounted data from children who made pronoun case errors in 100% of their attempts at a subject pronoun, whereas Rispoli (1999 a ) included data from such childr…
Towards a more precise model of pronoun case error
In my paper Patterns of Pronoun Case Error (Rispoli, 1998b), I documented two aspects of pronoun case errors arising out of principles of lexical retrieval that are operative during the acquisition of the word specific pronoun case paradigms of English. The two aspects were; (a) the ‘double-cell effect,’ a supercharging of the her for she error rate; and (b) the ‘antagonism’ between the stereotypic objective for nominative replacement (e.g. him f…
Rethinking innateness
Review essay on: E LMAN , J., B ATES , E., J OHNSON , M., K ARMILOFF -S MITH , A., P ARISI , D. & P LUNKETT , K. Rethinking innateness: a connectionist perspective on development . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1996). Pp. 447. I believe that the field of developmental psycholinguistics suffers from two major weaknesses. The first is its impressionistic and inexact formulations. The second is its divisive polarizations. One can see the reasons for the…
Case and agreement in English language development
This study examines the relationship between third person singular (3Psg) subject pronoun case and agreement, focusing on the hypothesis that these two grammatical subsystems develop together. This hypothesis is broken down into two separate, empirically testable hypotheses: (a) that correct subject case pronoun production and the production of agreement are correlated, and (b) that at the sentence level, correct case is dependent on the presence…
Patterns of pronoun case error
This paper addresses the question of whether the rate and patterns of pronoun case error are influenced by the composition of an individual pronoun's paradigm. Twenty-nine children, aged 2;6 to 4;0 were audiotaped for two 1-hour sessions, interacting with their primary caregivers engaged in free play, book reading and family album viewing. It was found that her was overextended for she at a significantly higher rate than him for he and them for t…
Pronoun case overextensions and paradigm building
Pronoun case errors, or overextensions, like *me want it are characteristic of English child language. This paper explores a hypothesis that the morphological structure of a pronoun influences the pattern of these errors. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) attempts to analyse English pronoun case forms into stems and affixes, but cannot because of their irregularity. Nevertheless the LAD extracts a phonetic core for each pronoun (e.g. /m-/ for…
Discourse and the acquisition of eat
English has several classes of transitive verbs which can optionally appear without an undergoer. Despite their similar syntactic sub-categorization, there are at least three different semantic subclasses that allow undergoer omission. Information sources based on surface structure, for example, syntactic bootstrapping, cannot inform the child of the semantic representation of these verbs. The focus of this paper is the acquisition of a single En…
The mosaic acquisition of grammatical relations
The view that grammatical relations have substantial essence, designated as ‘subject’ or ‘object’ has difficulty in accounting for the variety of naturally acquirable grammatical relations. The acquisition of grammatical relations is examined from a theoretical framework, ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR, in which grammatical relations are decomposed into two separate types of structure: logical (semantic) structure and information (pragmatic) structur…
The acquisition of verb subcategorization in a functionalist framework
This paper takes a functionalist perspective on the development of verb subcategorization, concentrating on a subclass of action verbs. The acquisition of verb subcategorization is viewed as the construction of logical structures (LSs) for the predicate in which a verb can appear. The LS motivates a verb's syntactic specifications through linking rules which reflect, in part, universals, and, in part, language specific generalizations. Crucial in…
Lexical assignability and perspective switch
This paper explores how children learn the range of aspect inflections to which a verb is amenable. The data considered are from observations of three Japanese boys aged between 1; 10 and 2; 1. Analyses focus on the children's mastery of Aktionsart specific intersentential patterns. For example, in one pattern, a caregiver asks nani shiteiru ? ‘What is someone or something doing’. The conventional answer is with the continuative -te iru form of a…
Acquisition of complementation
This study concerns the acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs that take a second verb in their complements. The acquisition of complementation began between two and three years of age in this longitudinal study of four children's spontaneous speech. The results of the study showed that (1) complement types and complementizer connectives and (2) the discourse contexts in which complementation occurred were specific t…
Encounters with Japanese verbs
Familial Japanese has a high rate of noun phrase ellipsis and optional case marking. Because of these traits, caregiver sentences seldom allow for the specification of thematic roles and their syntactic encod ing. A model is proposed for the acquisition of the transitive and intransitive action verb classes in Japanese. The child matches action verbs to three semantic causal types: self-agentive, non-agentive, or causal agentive events. The model…
Encounters with Japanese Verbs
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1988), pp. 213-222
The acquisition of the transitive and intransitive action verb categories in Japanese
The goal of this study was to use evidence from production data to identify three dimensions along which Japanese children may dis criminate transitive from intransitive verbs. The three dimensions are: (1) case marking, (2) locus of change animacy, as indicated by theme animacy, and (3) planning, as indicated by the appropriate use of verb suffixes denoting request, desire, and prohibition. Production data from two Japanese boys were used in clu…
Incomplete and continuing
The purpose of this paper is to argue against a proposal to adopt formal linguistic theory to the psychological problem children face in acquiring the semantic domains of tense and aspect. As semantic rather than syntactic categories, tense and aspect vary between languages. Without universal statements about meaning, we have no reason to substitute a linguistic analysis for psychological theory. The only real alternative, then, is to attempt to …
Child language and linguistic theory
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
No prominent works on this page.
Child language and linguistic theory
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
Incomplete and continuing
The purpose of this paper is to argue against a proposal to adopt formal linguistic theory to the psychological problem children face in acquiring the semantic domains of tense and aspect. As semantic rather than syntactic categories, tense and aspect vary between languages. Without universal statements about meaning, we have no reason to substitute a linguistic analysis for psychological theory. The only real alternative, then, is to attempt to …
The acquisition of the transitive and intransitive action verb categories in Japanese
The goal of this study was to use evidence from production data to identify three dimensions along which Japanese children may dis criminate transitive from intransitive verbs. The three dimensions are: (1) case marking, (2) locus of change animacy, as indicated by theme animacy, and (3) planning, as indicated by the appropriate use of verb suffixes denoting request, desire, and prohibition. Production data from two Japanese boys were used in clu…
Encounters with Japanese Verbs
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1988), pp. 213-222
Acquisition of complementation
This study concerns the acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs that take a second verb in their complements. The acquisition of complementation began between two and three years of age in this longitudinal study of four children's spontaneous speech. The results of the study showed that (1) complement types and complementizer connectives and (2) the discourse contexts in which complementation occurred were specific t…
Encounters with Japanese verbs
Familial Japanese has a high rate of noun phrase ellipsis and optional case marking. Because of these traits, caregiver sentences seldom allow for the specification of thematic roles and their syntactic encod ing. A model is proposed for the acquisition of the transitive and intransitive action verb classes in Japanese. The child matches action verbs to three semantic causal types: self-agentive, non-agentive, or causal agentive events. The model…
Lexical assignability and perspective switch
This paper explores how children learn the range of aspect inflections to which a verb is amenable. The data considered are from observations of three Japanese boys aged between 1; 10 and 2; 1. Analyses focus on the children's mastery of Aktionsart specific intersentential patterns. For example, in one pattern, a caregiver asks nani shiteiru ? ‘What is someone or something doing’. The conventional answer is with the continuative -te iru form of a…
The mosaic acquisition of grammatical relations
The view that grammatical relations have substantial essence, designated as ‘subject’ or ‘object’ has difficulty in accounting for the variety of naturally acquirable grammatical relations. The acquisition of grammatical relations is examined from a theoretical framework, ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR, in which grammatical relations are decomposed into two separate types of structure: logical (semantic) structure and information (pragmatic) structur…
The acquisition of verb subcategorization in a functionalist framework
This paper takes a functionalist perspective on the development of verb subcategorization, concentrating on a subclass of action verbs. The acquisition of verb subcategorization is viewed as the construction of logical structures (LSs) for the predicate in which a verb can appear. The LS motivates a verb's syntactic specifications through linking rules which reflect, in part, universals, and, in part, language specific generalizations. Crucial in…
Discourse and the acquisition of eat
English has several classes of transitive verbs which can optionally appear without an undergoer. Despite their similar syntactic sub-categorization, there are at least three different semantic subclasses that allow undergoer omission. Information sources based on surface structure, for example, syntactic bootstrapping, cannot inform the child of the semantic representation of these verbs. The focus of this paper is the acquisition of a single En…
Pronoun case overextensions and paradigm building
Pronoun case errors, or overextensions, like *me want it are characteristic of English child language. This paper explores a hypothesis that the morphological structure of a pronoun influences the pattern of these errors. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) attempts to analyse English pronoun case forms into stems and affixes, but cannot because of their irregularity. Nevertheless the LAD extracts a phonetic core for each pronoun (e.g. /m-/ for…
Patterns of pronoun case error
This paper addresses the question of whether the rate and patterns of pronoun case error are influenced by the composition of an individual pronoun's paradigm. Twenty-nine children, aged 2;6 to 4;0 were audiotaped for two 1-hour sessions, interacting with their primary caregivers engaged in free play, book reading and family album viewing. It was found that her was overextended for she at a significantly higher rate than him for he and them for t…
Rethinking innateness
Review essay on: E LMAN , J., B ATES , E., J OHNSON , M., K ARMILOFF -S MITH , A., P ARISI , D. & P LUNKETT , K. Rethinking innateness: a connectionist perspective on development . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1996). Pp. 447. I believe that the field of developmental psycholinguistics suffers from two major weaknesses. The first is its impressionistic and inexact formulations. The second is its divisive polarizations. One can see the reasons for the…
Case and agreement in English language development
This study examines the relationship between third person singular (3Psg) subject pronoun case and agreement, focusing on the hypothesis that these two grammatical subsystems develop together. This hypothesis is broken down into two separate, empirically testable hypotheses: (a) that correct subject case pronoun production and the production of agreement are correlated, and (b) that at the sentence level, correct case is dependent on the presence…
Towards a more precise model of pronoun case error
In my paper Patterns of Pronoun Case Error (Rispoli, 1998b), I documented two aspects of pronoun case errors arising out of principles of lexical retrieval that are operative during the acquisition of the word specific pronoun case paradigms of English. The two aspects were; (a) the ‘double-cell effect,’ a supercharging of the her for she error rate; and (b) the ‘antagonism’ between the stereotypic objective for nominative replacement (e.g. him f…
Theory and methods in the study of the development of case and agreement
Two recent papers Wexler, Schütze & Rice (1998) and Rispoli (1999 a ) reach different conclusions concerning the relationship between finiteness marking and pronoun case errors. Wexler et al. claim they are linked, whereas Rispoli finds little evidence for such a linkage. Wexler et al. discounted data from children who made pronoun case errors in 100% of their attempts at a subject pronoun, whereas Rispoli (1999 a ) included data from such childr…
When children reach beyond their grasp
This research addresses the question of why some children are disposed to making a large number of pronoun case errors and others are not. The answer proposed is that when pronoun paradigm building outstrips the development of INFL, children become especially vulnerable to erring in the choice of pronominal word form, resulting in pronoun case error. On the other hand, when pronoun paradigm building proceeds more conservatively, the risk of error…
A lifespan perspective on individual differences in grammatical abilities
Preview this article: A lifespan perspective on individual differences in grammatical abilities, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/lab.2.3.05had-1.gif
Diversity matters
The contribution of parent input to children's subsequent expressive verb diversity was explored in twenty typically developing toddlers with small verb lexicons. Child developmental factors and parent input measures (i.e. verb quantity, verb diversity, and verb-related structural cues) at age 1;9 were examined as potential predictors of children's verb production in spontaneous language samples at age 2;3. Parent verb input diversity, rather tha…
Case marking uniformity in developmental pronoun errors
The purpose of this study was to determine if children acquire grammatical case as a unified system or in a piecemeal fashion. In English language acquisition, many children make developmental errors in marking case on subject position pronouns (e.g., Me do it, Him like it). It is unknown whether children who produce pronoun case errors with first person pronouns also produce errors with third person pronouns. This finding would be expected if ca…
It’s Mine, . . . It’s Mine
A phenomenon called “repetition reduction” can increase articulation rate in adults by facilitating phonetic and motor processes, which indicates flexibility in the control of articulation rate. Young children, who speak much slower, may not have the same speech motor flexibility resulting in the absence of the repetition reduction effect. In this study, we tested whether spontaneous repetitions of young children are produced with a faster articu…
Spontaneous Lexical Overlap in Early Conversations
This study piloted CHIPUTIL, an automated tool in CLAN for analysing sequential lexical overlap in parent–child conversations. In a sample of 44 dyads (child age M = 1;9), child spontaneous lexical overlap was positively associated with parent imitations and expansions, across the conversation and within sequential turns. Children were more than twice as likely to respond with lexical overlap when parents first produced an imitation or expansion.…
Linguistics (21 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Language Development and Disorders (16 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Verb (11 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (8 works) · Pronoun (7 works) · Subject pronoun (7 works)