Letitia Naigles
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 739414 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Letitia Naigles |
| PRENOMES | Letitia |
| SOBRENOME | Naigles |
| ASSINATURA | NAIGLES L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Connecticut |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2168-9700 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 120 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1990 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
From Noun Bias to Verb Sensitivity
This paper examines whether noun bias serves as an early default mechanism in lexical acquisition among Japanese toddlers, despite Japanese being categorized as a “verb-friendly” language. In Experiment 1, using two complementary methods—the Japanese MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory and an Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) study—we investigated developmental changes in word-mapping tendencies among two age groups of Japanes…
Associations Between Joint Attention, Supported Joint Engagement and Language in TD Children and Children with ASD
Joint Attention (JA) and Supported Joint Engagement (Supported JE) have each been reported to predict later language development in typically developing (TD) children and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this longitudinal study including 33 TD children (20 months at V1) and 30 children with ASD (33 months at V1), the contributions of JA and Supported JE to later language, assessed via standardized tests and spontaneous speech, wer…
The Development of Turn‐Taking Skills in Typical Development and Autism
Social interaction depends on turn‐taking and adapting to one's conversational partner, yet little is known about the typical and atypical development of these abilities. We investigated this in a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech in 64 parent–child dyads: 32 typically developing children (20.27 months at start, six girls, 24 White) and 32 with autism (linguistically matched, 32.76 months, four girls, 31 White). Contrary to prior studies,…
Comparing apples to manzanas and oranges to naranjas
The valid assessment of vocabulary development in dual‐language‐learning infants is critical to developmental science. We developed the Dual Language Learners English‐Spanish (DLL‐ES) Inventories to measure vocabularies of U.S. English‐Spanish DLLs. The inventories provide translation equivalents for all Spanish and English items on Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) short forms; extended inventories based on CDI long forms; and Spanish la…
Caregiver linguistic alignment to autistic and typically developing children
BACKGROUND: Language development is a highly interactive activity. However, most research on linguistic environment has focused on the quantity and complexity of linguistic input to children, with current models showing that complexity facilitates language in both typically developing (TD) and autistic children. AIMS: After reviewing existing work on caregiver engagement of children's utterances, we aim to operationalize such engagement with auto…
Parents’ talk about conceptual categories with infants
Children’s exposure to talk about conceptual categories plays a powerful role in shaping their conceptual development. However, it remains unclear when parents begin to talk about categories with young children and whether such talk relates to children’s language skills. This study examines relations between parents’ talk about conceptual categories and infants’ expressive language development. Forty-seven parent-infant dyads were videotaped play…
What categorical induction variability reveals about typical and atypical development
Categorical induction abilities are robust in typically developing (TD) preschoolers, while children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) frequently perform inconsistently on tasks asking for the transference of traits from a known category member to a new example based on shared category membership. Here, TD five-year-olds and six-year-olds with ASD participated in a categorical induction task; the TD children performed significantly better and …
Children with ASD use joint attention and linguistic skill in pronoun development
Producing pronouns involves linguistic and social-cognitive knowledge because children must learn words and understand pronouns’ changing referents. This study examined pronoun production longitudinally in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 15), whose social-cognition might impair pronoun use, and in typically developing (TD; n = 18) children. Modeling the effect of joint attention (JA; a social-cognitive factor) and a name bi…
Phonetic discrimination mediates the relationship between auditory brainstem response stability and syntactic performance
Atypical language development matters
This commentary critiques Ambridge’s radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children’s capacity for abstraction at the grammatical level is not reducible to their lexical or pragmatic abilities. Moreover, the children’s capacity for…
Dense home-based recordings reveal typical and atypical development of tense/aspect in a child with delayed language development
Studies investigating the development of tense/aspect in children with developmental disorders have focused on production frequency and/or relied on short spontaneous speech samples. How children with developmental disorders use future forms/constructions is also unknown. The current study expands this literature by examining frequency, consistency, and productivity of past, present, and future usage, using the Speechome Recorder, which enables c…
The role of maternal input in the development of wh -question comprehension in autism and typical development
Social deficits have been implicated in the language delays and deficits of children with autism (ASD); thus, the extent to which these children use language input in social contexts similarly to typically developing (TD) children is unknown. The current study investigated how caregiver input influenced the development of wh -question comprehension in TD children and language-matched preschoolers with ASD. Children were visited at four-month inte…
Introduction
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
Japanese two-year-olds use morphosyntax to learn novel verb meanings
Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Göksun, Küntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument number and case markings in learning novel verbs. Children watched videos of novel causative and non-…
Verb argument structure acquisition in young children
Two-, three- and four-year-old English learners enacted sentences that were missing a direct object (e.g. *The zebra brings.). Previous work has indicated that preschoolers faced with such ungrammatical sentences consistently alter the usual meaning of the verb to fit the syntactic frame (enacting ‘zebra comes’); older children are more likely to repair the syntax to fit the meaning of the verb (enacting ‘zebra brings something’; Naigles, Gleitma…
Turkish children use morphosyntactic bootstrapping in interpreting verb meaning
How might syntactic bootstrapping apply in Turkish, which employs inflectional morphology to indicate grammatical relations and allows argument ellipsis? We investigated whether Turkish speakers interpret constructions differently depending on the number of NPs in the sentence, the presence of accusative case marking and the causative morpheme. Data were collected from 60 child speakers and 16 adults. In an adaptation of Naigles, Gleitman & Gleit…
Conversational correlates of children's acquisition of mental verbs and a theory of mind
The purpose of this study was to conduct a detailed examination of the ways mothers use mental verbs in conversations with three- and four-year-old children, and to link these usages to the children's developing understanding of mental verbs and a theory of mind. Sixty three- and four-year-olds, either attending preschool (PS) or not (NPS) were given tasks assessing mental verb distinctions and false belief. Their mothers' mental verb use was cod…
The Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese
The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in multiple frames? Over 6,000 child-directed utterances were parsed. Analyses revealed that transitive …
Comprehension matters
MacWhinney (2004) has provided a clear and welcome synthesis of many strands of the recent research addressing the logical problem of first language acquisition from a non-nativist or non-generative grammar framework. The strand that I will comment on is the one MacWhinney calls the ‘pivot’ of his proposal, namely, that acquiring a grammar is primarily a function of learning ITEM - BASED PATTERNS (e.g. pp. 23–29, 41, passim ). These item-based pa…
How Children Use Input to Acquire a Lexicon
The contributions of social processes and computational processes to early lexical development were evaluated. A re-analysis and review of previous research cast doubt on the sufficiency of social approaches to word learning. An empirical investigation of the relation of social–pragmatic and data-providing features of input to the productive vocabulary of sixty-three 2-year-old children revealed benefits of data provided in mother–child conversat…
Language-general and language-specific influences on children's acquisition of argument structure
This research investigates language-general and language-specific properties of the acquisition of argument structure. Ten French preschoolers enacted forty sentences containing motion verbs; sixteen sentences were ungrammatical in that the syntactic frame was incompatible with the standard argument structure for the verb (e.g. * Le tigre va le lion = * The tiger goes the lion ). Previous work (Naigles, Fowler & Helm; Naigles, Gleitman & Gleitman…
Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use
This study investigated the extent to which the nature of verb input accounts for the order in which children acquire verbs. We assessed the nature of verb input using a combined sample of the speech of 57 mothers addressing their Stage I children. We assessed the order of verb acquisition using as our database a combined sample of those children's speech 10 weeks later and using as our measure of order of acquisition the frequency of verb occurr…
Caregiver speech and children's use of nouns versus verbs
This paper examines naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine if variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. It contrasts two PRO-DROP languages, Italian and Mandarin, with English. Naturalistic speech samples from six 2;0 English-, six 1;11 Italian-, and ten 1;10 Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. Adult-to-chil…
A Toddler's Life
Overextensions in comprehension and production revisited
This study investigated overextensions in comprehension and production using a new method (the preferential-looking paradigm) in which children ( N = 99, mean age (younger) = 1;9, mean age (older) = 2;3) were asked to find the referent that matched the label they were given. Both Real Referent (in which there was a match) and Anomalous (in which there was no match) trials were included, as well as nonverbal control trials. During the Real Referen…
Children use syntax to learn verb meanings
Verb learning is clearly a function of observation of real-world contingencies; however, it is argued that such observational information is insufficient to account fully for vocabulary acquisition. This paper provides an experimental validation of Landau & Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure; namely, that children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. Pairs of actions were presented simultaneously with a nonsense verb…
Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use
This study investigated the extent to which the nature of verb input accounts for the order in which children acquire verbs. We assessed the nature of verb input using a combined sample of the speech of 57 mothers addressing their Stage I children. We assessed the order of verb acquisition using as our database a combined sample of those children's speech 10 weeks later and using as our measure of order of acquisition the frequency of verb occurr…
Input to verb learning
The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children use the syntactic frames in which verbs are presented as a source of information about their meaning. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which maternal type and diversity of verb frames are consistent with the requirements of that theory. The uses of 25 common verbs in the speech of 57 mothers to their 1- to 2-year-old children were tabulated and parsed for synta…
Preschool children pay attention to their addressees
The aim of this study was to examine whether preschool children take the gender of the addressee into account when disputing during peer exchanges. There are mixed findings on whether young children take their listeners into account (termed audience design); very little is known about whether the gender of the addressee is an influential variable on children's use of language, particularly during disputes. It was hypothesized that preschool child…
Learnability and Cognition
The Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese
The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in multiple frames? Over 6,000 child-directed utterances were parsed. Analyses revealed that transitive …
The Development of Turn‐Taking Skills in Typical Development and Autism
Social interaction depends on turn‐taking and adapting to one's conversational partner, yet little is known about the typical and atypical development of these abilities. We investigated this in a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech in 64 parent–child dyads: 32 typically developing children (20.27 months at start, six girls, 24 White) and 32 with autism (linguistically matched, 32.76 months, four girls, 31 White). Contrary to prior studies,…
First Language Acquisition
Children use syntax to learn verb meanings
Verb learning is clearly a function of observation of real-world contingencies; however, it is argued that such observational information is insufficient to account fully for vocabulary acquisition. This paper provides an experimental validation of Landau & Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure; namely, that children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. Pairs of actions were presented simultaneously with a nonsense verb…
Learnability and Cognition
Overextensions in comprehension and production revisited
This study investigated overextensions in comprehension and production using a new method (the preferential-looking paradigm) in which children ( N = 99, mean age (younger) = 1;9, mean age (older) = 2;3) were asked to find the referent that matched the label they were given. Both Real Referent (in which there was a match) and Anomalous (in which there was no match) trials were included, as well as nonverbal control trials. During the Real Referen…
Preschool children pay attention to their addressees
The aim of this study was to examine whether preschool children take the gender of the addressee into account when disputing during peer exchanges. There are mixed findings on whether young children take their listeners into account (termed audience design); very little is known about whether the gender of the addressee is an influential variable on children's use of language, particularly during disputes. It was hypothesized that preschool child…
Input to verb learning
The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children use the syntactic frames in which verbs are presented as a source of information about their meaning. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which maternal type and diversity of verb frames are consistent with the requirements of that theory. The uses of 25 common verbs in the speech of 57 mothers to their 1- to 2-year-old children were tabulated and parsed for synta…
A Toddler's Life
Caregiver speech and children's use of nouns versus verbs
This paper examines naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine if variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. It contrasts two PRO-DROP languages, Italian and Mandarin, with English. Naturalistic speech samples from six 2;0 English-, six 1;11 Italian-, and ten 1;10 Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. Adult-to-chil…
Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use
This study investigated the extent to which the nature of verb input accounts for the order in which children acquire verbs. We assessed the nature of verb input using a combined sample of the speech of 57 mothers addressing their Stage I children. We assessed the order of verb acquisition using as our database a combined sample of those children's speech 10 weeks later and using as our measure of order of acquisition the frequency of verb occurr…
How Children Use Input to Acquire a Lexicon
The contributions of social processes and computational processes to early lexical development were evaluated. A re-analysis and review of previous research cast doubt on the sufficiency of social approaches to word learning. An empirical investigation of the relation of social–pragmatic and data-providing features of input to the productive vocabulary of sixty-three 2-year-old children revealed benefits of data provided in mother–child conversat…
Language-general and language-specific influences on children's acquisition of argument structure
This research investigates language-general and language-specific properties of the acquisition of argument structure. Ten French preschoolers enacted forty sentences containing motion verbs; sixteen sentences were ungrammatical in that the syntactic frame was incompatible with the standard argument structure for the verb (e.g. * Le tigre va le lion = * The tiger goes the lion ). Previous work (Naigles, Fowler & Helm; Naigles, Gleitman & Gleitman…
Comprehension matters
MacWhinney (2004) has provided a clear and welcome synthesis of many strands of the recent research addressing the logical problem of first language acquisition from a non-nativist or non-generative grammar framework. The strand that I will comment on is the one MacWhinney calls the ‘pivot’ of his proposal, namely, that acquiring a grammar is primarily a function of learning ITEM - BASED PATTERNS (e.g. pp. 23–29, 41, passim ). These item-based pa…
The Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese
The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in multiple frames? Over 6,000 child-directed utterances were parsed. Analyses revealed that transitive …
Turkish children use morphosyntactic bootstrapping in interpreting verb meaning
How might syntactic bootstrapping apply in Turkish, which employs inflectional morphology to indicate grammatical relations and allows argument ellipsis? We investigated whether Turkish speakers interpret constructions differently depending on the number of NPs in the sentence, the presence of accusative case marking and the causative morpheme. Data were collected from 60 child speakers and 16 adults. In an adaptation of Naigles, Gleitman & Gleit…
Conversational correlates of children's acquisition of mental verbs and a theory of mind
The purpose of this study was to conduct a detailed examination of the ways mothers use mental verbs in conversations with three- and four-year-old children, and to link these usages to the children's developing understanding of mental verbs and a theory of mind. Sixty three- and four-year-olds, either attending preschool (PS) or not (NPS) were given tasks assessing mental verb distinctions and false belief. Their mothers' mental verb use was cod…
Verb argument structure acquisition in young children
Two-, three- and four-year-old English learners enacted sentences that were missing a direct object (e.g. *The zebra brings.). Previous work has indicated that preschoolers faced with such ungrammatical sentences consistently alter the usual meaning of the verb to fit the syntactic frame (enacting ‘zebra comes’); older children are more likely to repair the syntax to fit the meaning of the verb (enacting ‘zebra brings something’; Naigles, Gleitma…
Japanese two-year-olds use morphosyntax to learn novel verb meanings
Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Göksun, Küntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument number and case markings in learning novel verbs. Children watched videos of novel causative and non-…
Introduction
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
The role of maternal input in the development of wh -question comprehension in autism and typical development
Social deficits have been implicated in the language delays and deficits of children with autism (ASD); thus, the extent to which these children use language input in social contexts similarly to typically developing (TD) children is unknown. The current study investigated how caregiver input influenced the development of wh -question comprehension in TD children and language-matched preschoolers with ASD. Children were visited at four-month inte…
Dense home-based recordings reveal typical and atypical development of tense/aspect in a child with delayed language development
Studies investigating the development of tense/aspect in children with developmental disorders have focused on production frequency and/or relied on short spontaneous speech samples. How children with developmental disorders use future forms/constructions is also unknown. The current study expands this literature by examining frequency, consistency, and productivity of past, present, and future usage, using the Speechome Recorder, which enables c…
Children with ASD use joint attention and linguistic skill in pronoun development
Producing pronouns involves linguistic and social-cognitive knowledge because children must learn words and understand pronouns’ changing referents. This study examined pronoun production longitudinally in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 15), whose social-cognition might impair pronoun use, and in typically developing (TD; n = 18) children. Modeling the effect of joint attention (JA; a social-cognitive factor) and a name bi…
Phonetic discrimination mediates the relationship between auditory brainstem response stability and syntactic performance
Atypical language development matters
This commentary critiques Ambridge’s radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children’s capacity for abstraction at the grammatical level is not reducible to their lexical or pragmatic abilities. Moreover, the children’s capacity for…
What categorical induction variability reveals about typical and atypical development
Categorical induction abilities are robust in typically developing (TD) preschoolers, while children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) frequently perform inconsistently on tasks asking for the transference of traits from a known category member to a new example based on shared category membership. Here, TD five-year-olds and six-year-olds with ASD participated in a categorical induction task; the TD children performed significantly better and …
Caregiver linguistic alignment to autistic and typically developing children
BACKGROUND: Language development is a highly interactive activity. However, most research on linguistic environment has focused on the quantity and complexity of linguistic input to children, with current models showing that complexity facilitates language in both typically developing (TD) and autistic children. AIMS: After reviewing existing work on caregiver engagement of children's utterances, we aim to operationalize such engagement with auto…
Language Development and Disorders (27 obras) · Psychology (26 obras) · Linguistics (23 obras) · Developmental psychology (17 obras) · Reading and Literacy Development (15 obras) · Cognitive psychology (14 obras) · Language development (12 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (11 obras) · Verb (10 obras) · Autism (9 obras)