Silke Brandt
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3842557 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Silke Brandt |
| PRENOMES | Silke |
| SOBRENOME | Brandt |
| ASSINATURA | BRANDT S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3363-8740 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 19 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 14 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 19 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2008 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
The Comprehension of Headed and Headless Relative Clauses in Mandarin
For head-initial languages like English, there is a strong consensus that subject relative clauses (RCs) are acquired earlier and are processed more easily than object RCs. However, for head-final languages like Mandarin, theoretical predictions and findings are in conflict on whether there is a universal subject preference. Moreover, less attention has been given to language-specific factors like the omission of head nouns that might influence R…
Easy as ABC. Functional-pragmatic factors explain “binding-principle” constraints on pronoun interpretation
Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. himself ) are driven by real-world likelihood. • Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. he, him ) are driven by topicality. • Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. he, him ) are driven by discourse-pragmatics. • Innate binding principles may be unnecessary to explain pronoun interpretation. How do English-speakers interpret pronouns (e.g., himself, him and he ) in sentences such as Samuel told Oliver abo…
The role of iconicity in children's production of adverbial clauses
Young children's comprehension of adverbial clauses is significantly affected by iconicity, which refers to whether the order of information in the sentence reflects the order of events in the real world. In contrast, clause order (main-subordinate vs. subordinate-main) and input frequency of specific adverbial clauses do not seem to play independent roles (De Ruiter et al., 2018). The present study tests children's sentence production across fou…
Do complement clauses with first- or third-person perspective support false-belief reasoning? A training study with English-speaking 3-year-olds
To investigate whether acquisition of the perspective-marking grammar of complement-clause constructions supports progression in children's false-belief reasoning, we conducted a training study with 76 English-speaking 3-year-olds from the North-West of England (age range: 3;0-3;10 years, 50% female, 80% White). Children were randomly assigned to one of three maximally comparable training conditions, and in a 4-week eight-session program, all chi…
The influence of three-gendered grammatical systems on simultaneous bilingual cognition
This paper examines the linguistic relativity principle (Whorf, 1956) by investigating the impact of grammatical gender on cognition in simultaneous bilinguals of three-gendered Ukrainian and Russian. It examines whether speakers of three-gendered languages show grammatical gender effects on categorisation, empirically addressing claims that such effects are insignificant due to the presence of the neuter gender (Sera et al., 2002). We conducted …
Between Two Grammatical Gender Systems
This study examines the impact of grammatical gender on memory recall among simultaneous bilinguals with two three‐gendered languages (Ukrainian and Russian). Ukrainian−Russian bilinguals and English monolingual controls were tested on their ability to remember names assigned to objects with either matching or mismatching grammatical genders across their two languages. Results showed that bilinguals recalled names more accurately when the biologi…
The acquisition of English modal constructions
The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense mother-child corpora at age 3 and 4. We examined the influence on acquisition of input features including form…
Does evidentiality support source monitoring and false belief understanding? A cross-linguistic study with Turkish- and English-speaking children
This study investigates the impact of evidentiality on source monitoring and the impact of source monitoring on false belief understanding (FBU), while controlling for short-term memory, age, gender, and receptive vocabulary. One hundred (50 girls) monolingual 3- and 4-year-olds from Turkey and the UK participated in the study in 2019. In Turkish, children's use of direct evidentiality predicted their source monitoring skills, which, in turn, pre…
What makes a complement false? Looking at the effects of verbal semantics and perspective in Mandarin children’s interpretation of complement-clause constructions and their false-belief understanding
Research focusing on Anglo-European languages indicates that children’s acquisition of the subordinate structure of complement-clause constructions and the semantics of mental verbs facilitates their understanding of false belief, and that the two linguistic factors interact. Complement-clause constructions support false-belief development, but only when used with realis mental verbs like ‘think’ in the matrix clause (de Villiers, Jill. 2007. The…
Preschool children’s use of meta-talk to make rational collaborative decisions
In collaborative decision-making, partners compare reasons behind conflicting proposals through meta-talk. We investigated UK-based preschoolers’ (mixed socioeconomic status) use of meta-talk (Data collection: 2018–2020). In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old peer dyads (N = 128, 61 girls) heard conflicting claims about an animal from two informants. One prefaced her claim with “I know”; the other with “I think”. Dyads identified the more reliable inform…
Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions
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…
Do complement clauses really support false-belief reasoning? A longitudinal study with English-speaking 2- to 3-year-olds
To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds (23 female, Time 1 age range = 33-41 months) from middle-class families in the North-West of England…
Interactions between givenness and clause order in children’s processing of complex sentences
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…
Do children really acquire dense neighbourhoods
Children learn high phonological neighbourhood density words more easily than low phonological neighbourhood density words (Storkel, 2004). However, the strength of this effect relative to alternative predictors of word acquisition is unclear. We addressed this issue using communicative inventory data from 300 British English-speaking children aged 12 to 25 months. Using Bayesian regression, we modelled word understanding and production as a func…
Syntactic and semantic coordination in finite complement-clause constructions
This study investigates the coordination of matrix and subordinate clauses within finite complement-clause constructions. The data come from diary and audio recordings which include the utterances produced by an American English-speaking child, L, between the ages 1;08 and 3;05. We extracted all the finite complement-clause constructions that L produced and compared the grammatical acceptability of these utterances with that of the simple sentenc…
German children's productivity with simple transitive and complement-clause constructions
The development of abstract schemas and productive rules in language is affected by both token and type frequencies. High token frequencies and surface similarities help to discover formal and functional commonalities between utterances and categorize them as instances of the same schema. High type frequencies and diversity help to develop slots in these schemas, which allow the production and comprehension of novel utterances. In the current stu…
Development of word order in German complement-clause constructions
We investigate the development of word order in German children's spontaneous production of complement clauses. From soon after their second birthday, young German children use both verb-final complements with complementizers and verb-second complements without complementizers. By their third birthday they use both kinds of complement clauses with a variety of complement-taking verbs. Early in development, however, verb-final complements and verb…
The discourse bases of relativization
Author: Brandt, Silke et al.; Genre: Journal Article; Issued: 2009; Title: The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses
The acquisition of German relative clauses
This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with main-clause word order. In the course of the developmen…
The discourse bases of relativization
Author: Brandt, Silke et al.; Genre: Journal Article; Issued: 2009; Title: The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses
Do complement clauses really support false-belief reasoning? A longitudinal study with English-speaking 2- to 3-year-olds
To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds (23 female, Time 1 age range = 33-41 months) from middle-class families in the North-West of England…
The influence of three-gendered grammatical systems on simultaneous bilingual cognition
This paper examines the linguistic relativity principle (Whorf, 1956) by investigating the impact of grammatical gender on cognition in simultaneous bilinguals of three-gendered Ukrainian and Russian. It examines whether speakers of three-gendered languages show grammatical gender effects on categorisation, empirically addressing claims that such effects are insignificant due to the presence of the neuter gender (Sera et al., 2002). We conducted …
German children's productivity with simple transitive and complement-clause constructions
The development of abstract schemas and productive rules in language is affected by both token and type frequencies. High token frequencies and surface similarities help to discover formal and functional commonalities between utterances and categorize them as instances of the same schema. High type frequencies and diversity help to develop slots in these schemas, which allow the production and comprehension of novel utterances. In the current stu…
Between Two Grammatical Gender Systems
This study examines the impact of grammatical gender on memory recall among simultaneous bilinguals with two three‐gendered languages (Ukrainian and Russian). Ukrainian−Russian bilinguals and English monolingual controls were tested on their ability to remember names assigned to objects with either matching or mismatching grammatical genders across their two languages. Results showed that bilinguals recalled names more accurately when the biologi…
Development of word order in German complement-clause constructions
We investigate the development of word order in German children's spontaneous production of complement clauses. From soon after their second birthday, young German children use both verb-final complements with complementizers and verb-second complements without complementizers. By their third birthday they use both kinds of complement clauses with a variety of complement-taking verbs. Early in development, however, verb-final complements and verb…
The acquisition of German relative clauses
This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with main-clause word order. In the course of the developmen…
The discourse bases of relativization
Author: Brandt, Silke et al.; Genre: Journal Article; Issued: 2009; Title: The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses
Development of word order in German complement-clause constructions
We investigate the development of word order in German children's spontaneous production of complement clauses. From soon after their second birthday, young German children use both verb-final complements with complementizers and verb-second complements without complementizers. By their third birthday they use both kinds of complement clauses with a variety of complement-taking verbs. Early in development, however, verb-final complements and verb…
German children's productivity with simple transitive and complement-clause constructions
The development of abstract schemas and productive rules in language is affected by both token and type frequencies. High token frequencies and surface similarities help to discover formal and functional commonalities between utterances and categorize them as instances of the same schema. High type frequencies and diversity help to develop slots in these schemas, which allow the production and comprehension of novel utterances. In the current stu…
Syntactic and semantic coordination in finite complement-clause constructions
This study investigates the coordination of matrix and subordinate clauses within finite complement-clause constructions. The data come from diary and audio recordings which include the utterances produced by an American English-speaking child, L, between the ages 1;08 and 3;05. We extracted all the finite complement-clause constructions that L produced and compared the grammatical acceptability of these utterances with that of the simple sentenc…
Do children really acquire dense neighbourhoods
Children learn high phonological neighbourhood density words more easily than low phonological neighbourhood density words (Storkel, 2004). However, the strength of this effect relative to alternative predictors of word acquisition is unclear. We addressed this issue using communicative inventory data from 300 British English-speaking children aged 12 to 25 months. Using Bayesian regression, we modelled word understanding and production as a func…
Interactions between givenness and clause order in children’s processing of complex sentences
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…
Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions
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…
Do complement clauses really support false-belief reasoning? A longitudinal study with English-speaking 2- to 3-year-olds
To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds (23 female, Time 1 age range = 33-41 months) from middle-class families in the North-West of England…
Preschool children’s use of meta-talk to make rational collaborative decisions
In collaborative decision-making, partners compare reasons behind conflicting proposals through meta-talk. We investigated UK-based preschoolers’ (mixed socioeconomic status) use of meta-talk (Data collection: 2018–2020). In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old peer dyads (N = 128, 61 girls) heard conflicting claims about an animal from two informants. One prefaced her claim with “I know”; the other with “I think”. Dyads identified the more reliable inform…
Does evidentiality support source monitoring and false belief understanding? A cross-linguistic study with Turkish- and English-speaking children
This study investigates the impact of evidentiality on source monitoring and the impact of source monitoring on false belief understanding (FBU), while controlling for short-term memory, age, gender, and receptive vocabulary. One hundred (50 girls) monolingual 3- and 4-year-olds from Turkey and the UK participated in the study in 2019. In Turkish, children's use of direct evidentiality predicted their source monitoring skills, which, in turn, pre…
What makes a complement false? Looking at the effects of verbal semantics and perspective in Mandarin children’s interpretation of complement-clause constructions and their false-belief understanding
Research focusing on Anglo-European languages indicates that children’s acquisition of the subordinate structure of complement-clause constructions and the semantics of mental verbs facilitates their understanding of false belief, and that the two linguistic factors interact. Complement-clause constructions support false-belief development, but only when used with realis mental verbs like ‘think’ in the matrix clause (de Villiers, Jill. 2007. The…
The acquisition of English modal constructions
The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense mother-child corpora at age 3 and 4. We examined the influence on acquisition of input features including form…
The Comprehension of Headed and Headless Relative Clauses in Mandarin
For head-initial languages like English, there is a strong consensus that subject relative clauses (RCs) are acquired earlier and are processed more easily than object RCs. However, for head-final languages like Mandarin, theoretical predictions and findings are in conflict on whether there is a universal subject preference. Moreover, less attention has been given to language-specific factors like the omission of head nouns that might influence R…
Easy as ABC. Functional-pragmatic factors explain “binding-principle” constraints on pronoun interpretation
Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. himself ) are driven by real-world likelihood. • Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. he, him ) are driven by topicality. • Ambiguous pronoun interpretations (e.g. he, him ) are driven by discourse-pragmatics. • Innate binding principles may be unnecessary to explain pronoun interpretation. How do English-speakers interpret pronouns (e.g., himself, him and he ) in sentences such as Samuel told Oliver abo…
The role of iconicity in children's production of adverbial clauses
Young children's comprehension of adverbial clauses is significantly affected by iconicity, which refers to whether the order of information in the sentence reflects the order of events in the real world. In contrast, clause order (main-subordinate vs. subordinate-main) and input frequency of specific adverbial clauses do not seem to play independent roles (De Ruiter et al., 2018). The present study tests children's sentence production across fou…
Do complement clauses with first- or third-person perspective support false-belief reasoning? A training study with English-speaking 3-year-olds
To investigate whether acquisition of the perspective-marking grammar of complement-clause constructions supports progression in children's false-belief reasoning, we conducted a training study with 76 English-speaking 3-year-olds from the North-West of England (age range: 3;0-3;10 years, 50% female, 80% White). Children were randomly assigned to one of three maximally comparable training conditions, and in a 4-week eight-session program, all chi…
The influence of three-gendered grammatical systems on simultaneous bilingual cognition
This paper examines the linguistic relativity principle (Whorf, 1956) by investigating the impact of grammatical gender on cognition in simultaneous bilinguals of three-gendered Ukrainian and Russian. It examines whether speakers of three-gendered languages show grammatical gender effects on categorisation, empirically addressing claims that such effects are insignificant due to the presence of the neuter gender (Sera et al., 2002). We conducted …
Between Two Grammatical Gender Systems
This study examines the impact of grammatical gender on memory recall among simultaneous bilinguals with two three‐gendered languages (Ukrainian and Russian). Ukrainian−Russian bilinguals and English monolingual controls were tested on their ability to remember names assigned to objects with either matching or mismatching grammatical genders across their two languages. Results showed that bilinguals recalled names more accurately when the biologi…
Psychology (18 obras) · Linguistics (16 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (10 obras) · Computer Science (8 obras) · Philosophy (8 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (8 obras) · Cognitive psychology (6 obras) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (6 obras) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (6 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (5 obras)