Elena Lieven

Dados Biográficos

ID793790
NOMEElena Lieven
PRENOMESElena
SOBRENOMELieven
ASSINATURALIEVEN E
AFILIAÇÕESUniversity of Manchester
ORCID0000-0002-2270-8910
VERIFICADOSim
TOTAL DE OBRAS86
TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES158
TOTAL COMO AUTOR86
TOTAL COMO EDITOR0
PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO1983
ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO2024
ÍNDICE H7

  • The acquisition of English modal constructions

    Open AccessKimberley BELL, Silke Brandt et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2024

    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…

  • Communicative function in child directed speech

    Open AccessChen Zhao, Ludovica Serratrice et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2024

    Language development can be framed as the process of learning how to mean (Halliday, 1975). From this perspective, the role of communicative function is central to the language-learning process with development being guided by interaction with experienced others. In the current study, we present a detailed analysis of the communicative functions used in interaction with prelinguistic infants aged 10–12 months from three cultural groups living in …

  • 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…

  • A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Early Prelinguistic Gesture Development and Its Relationship to Language Development

    Open AccessThea Cameron‐Faulkner, Nivedita Malik et al.ARTICLEChild Development2021

    Many Western industrialized nations have high levels of ethnic diversity but to date there are very few studies which investigate prelinguistic and early language development in infants from ethnic minority backgrounds. This study tracked the development of infant communicative gestures from 10 to 12 months (n = 59) in three culturally distinct groups in the United Kingdom and measured their relationship, along with maternal utterance frequency a…

  • Entrenchment and productivity

    Antje Endesfelder Quick, Stefan Hartmann et al.ARTICLEApplied Linguistics Review2021

    This paper investigates the role of input in the code-mixing (CM) of a German-English bilingual child between the age of 2;3 until 3;11. Supporting a usage-based approach to linguistic theory, multiword units are shown to play an important role in language acquisition scenarios, both in the input children receive as well as in their own early language production. The current study combines findings from Child-directed-speech (CDS) and children’s …

  • 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…

  • Entrenchment effects in code-mixing

    Open AccessAntje Endesfelder Quick, Ad Backus et al.ARTICLECognitive Linguistics2021Citada por: 1Referências: 10

    Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636; Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a lang…

  • A comparison of the pragmatic patterns in the spontaneous because- and if-sentences produced by children and their caregivers

    Open AccessHeather C P Lemen, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Pragmatics2021Referências: 7

    Findings from corpus (e.g. Diessel, 2004) and comprehension (e.g. De Ruiter et al., 2018) studies show that children produce the adverbial connectives because and if long before they seem able to understand them. However, although children's comprehension is typically tested on sentences expressing the pragmatic relationship which Sweetser (1990) calls "Content", children also hear and produce sentences expressing "Speech–Act" relationships (e.g.…

  • 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…

  • Similarity, analogy and development in radical exemplar theory

    Open AccessElena Lieven, Alissa L Ferry et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2020

    During language acquisition children generalise at multiple layers of granularity. Ambridge argues that abstraction-based accounts suffer from lumping (over-general abstractions) or splitting (over-precise abstractions). Ambridge argues that the only way to overcome this conundrum is in a purely exemplar/analogy-based system in which generalisations are based on similarity to individual exemplars. However, to move our understanding forward, radic…

  • Identifying partially schematic units in the code-mixing of an English and German speaking child

    Open AccessAntje Endesfelder Quick, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLELinguistic Approaches to…2018

    Intra-sentential code-mixing presents a number of puzzles for theories of bilingualism. In this paper, we examine the code-mixed English-German utterances of a young English-German-Spanish trilingual child between 1;10 – 3;1, using both an extensive diary kept by the mother and audio recordings. We address the interplay between lexical and syntactic aspects of language use outlined in the usage-based approach (e.g. Tomasello, 2003 ). The data sug…

  • Constructively combining languages

    Open AccessAntje Endesfelder Quick, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLELinguistic Approaches to…2018

    Language development in bilingual children is often related to differing levels of proficiency. Objective measurements of bilingual development include for example mean length of utterance (MLU). MLU is almost always calculated for each language context (including both monolingual and code-mixed utterances). In the current study, we analyzed the MLUs of three German-English bilingual children, aged 2;3–3;11 separately for the monolingual and code…

  • Keeping it simple

    Open AccessClaire Noble, Claire H NOBLE et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2018

    The positive effects of shared book reading on vocabulary and reading development are well attested (e.g., Bus, van Ijzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995). However, the role of shared book reading in grammatical development remains unclear. In this study, we conducted a construction-based analysis of caregivers’ child-directed speech during shared book reading and toy play and compared the grammatical profile of the child-directed speech generated durin…

  • How do language-specific characteristics affect the acquisition of different relative clause types? Evidence from Finnish

    Open AccessMinna Kirjavainen, Evan Kidd et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2017

    We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested children's comprehension of subject, object, and two types of oblique relatives. No difference was found in t…

  • Syntactic and semantic coordination in finite complement-clause constructions

    Open AccessBahar Koymen, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2016

    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…

  • Converging and competing cues in the acquisition of syntactic structures

    Open AccessClaire Noble, Faria Iqbal et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2016

    In two studies we use a pointing task to explore developmentally the nature of the knowledge that underlies three- and four-year-old children's ability to assign meaning to the intransitive structure. The results suggest that early in development children are sensitive to a first-noun-as-causal-agent cue and animacy cues when interpreting conjoined agent intransitives. The same children, however, do not appear to rely exclusively on the number of…

  • Young children use shared experience to interpret definite reference

    Open AccessDaniel Schmerse, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2015

    We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an action. In subsequent interactions children were asked to get ‘the X’ or ‘a X’. When children were in…

  • The Relationship Between Infant Holdout and Gives, and Pointing

    Open AccessThea Cameron‐Faulkner, A L Theakston et al.ARTICLEInfancy2015

    We provide an analysis of holdout and giving ( H o& G ) behaviours in prelinguistic infants and investigate their relationship with index finger pointing. The frequency of H o& G s at 10 and 11 months along with the length of the following social interaction correlated with index finger pointing at 12 months. We conclude that H o& G s are a precursor to index finger pointing and that this provides support for social‐pragmatic approaches to commun…

  • Explanatory adequacy is not enough

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLELanguage2015Citada por: 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…

  • Discourse Particles and Belief Reasoning

    Daniel Schmerse, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Semantics2014

    Discourse particles typically express the attitudes of interlocutors with respect to the propositional content of an utterance – for example, marking whether or not a speaker believes the content of the proposition that she uttered. In German, the particle doch – which has no direct English translation – is commonly used to correct a belief that is thought to be common ground among those present. We asked whether German adults and 5-year-olds are…

  • First language development

    Open AccessElena LievenARTICLEJournal of Child Language2014

    I first outline three major developments in child language research over the past forty years: the use of computational modelling to reveal the structure of information in the input; the focus on quantifying productivity and abstraction; and developments in the explanation of systematic errors. Next, I turn to what I consider to be major outstanding issues: how the network of constructions builds up and the relationship between social and cogniti…

  • The communicative contexts of grammatical aspect use in English

    Open AccessPercy Ibbotson, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2014

    In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker - ing . Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative context of the child performing actions. On average…

  • The semantics of the transitive causative construction

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Claire Noble et al.ARTICLECognitive Linguistics2014Referências: 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…

  • Young children’s understanding of denial

    Keith Austin, A L Theakston et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2014Citada por: 5Referências: 6

    Although a fair amount is known about young children's production of negation, little is known about their comprehension. Here, we focus on arguably the most complex basic form, denial, and how young children understand denial, when it is expressed in response to a question with gesture, single word, or sentence. One hundred twenty-six children in 3 age groups (Ms = 1 year 9 months, 2 years 0 months, and 2 years 4 months) witnessed an adult look …