Anna Theakston

Dados Biográficos

ID8525385
NOMEAnna Theakston
PRENOMESAnna
SOBRENOMETheakston
ASSINATURATHEAKSTON A
AFILIAÇÕESUniversity of Manchester
VERIFICADONão
TOTAL DE OBRAS14
TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES0
TOTAL COMO AUTOR14
TOTAL COMO EDITOR0
PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO2003
ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO2025
ÍNDICE H0

  • The role of iconicity in children's production of adverbial clauses

    Open AccessShijie Zhang, Silke Brandt et al.ARTICLECognition2025

    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…

  • 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…

  • Does evidentiality support source monitoring and false belief understanding? A cross-linguistic study with Turkish- and English-speaking children

    Open AccessBirsu Kandemirci, A L Theakston et al.ARTICLEChild Development2023

    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…

  • 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…

  • Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference

    Open AccessMichael C Frank, Katie Alcock et al.ARTICLEAdvances in Methods and Practices…2020

    Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) as…

  • Intention or Attention Before Pointing

    Open AccessLaura Boundy, Thea Cameron‐Faulkner et al.ARTICLEInfancy2019

    Gestures are the first signs of intentional communication within prelinguistic infants and can reflect various motives, including a declarative motive to share attention and interest. The ability to use gestures declaratively has been linked to later language development; therefore, it is important to understand the origins of this motive. Previous research has focused on the use of declarative pointing at around 12 months; however, other potenti…

  • 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…

  • Authors' response

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Evan Kidd et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2015

    Peer-reviewed

  • 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…

  • Naturalistic Data

    Open AccessMinna Kirjavainen, A L Theakston et al.CHAPTEREncyclopedia of Applied Linguistics2012

    Data collection is an important part of language research.

  • Can input explain children's me-for-I errors

    Open AccessMinna Kirjavainen, A L Theakston et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2009

    English-speaking children make pronoun case errors producing utterances where accusative pronouns are used in nominative contexts ( me do it ). We investigate whether complex utterances in the input ( Let me do it ) might explain the origin of these errors. Longitudinal naturalistic data from seventeen English-speaking two- to four-year-olds was searched for 1psg accusative-for-nominative case errors and for all 1psg preverbal pronominal contexts…

  • I want hold Postman Pat

    Open AccessMinna Kirjavainen, A L Theakston et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2009

    Infinitival-to omission errors (e.g., * I want hold Postman Pat) are produced by many English-speaking children early in development. This article aims to explain these omissions by investigating the emergence of infinitival-to, and its production/omission in obligatory contexts. A series of corpus analyses were conducted on the naturalistic data from one to 13 children between the ages of approximately 2;0 and 3;1 testing three hypotheses from t…

  • What part of no do children not understand? A usage-based account of multiword negation

    Open AccessThea Cameron‐Faulkner, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2007

    The study investigates the development of English multiword negation, in particular the negation of zero marked verbs (e.g. no sleep , not see , can't reach ) from a usage-based perspective. The data was taken from a dense database consisting of the speech of an English-speaking child (Brian) aged 2;3–3;4 (MLU 2·05–3·1) and his mother. The focus of the study was the emergence and usage of negators in the child's and mother's speech (e.g. no , not…

  • Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations

    Open AccessCeri Savage, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Science2003

    The current studies used a priming methodology to assess the abstractness of children's early syntactic constructions. In the main study, 3‐, 4‐ and 6‐year‐old children were asked to describe a prime picture by repeating either an active or a passive sentence, and then they were left to their own devices to describe a target picture. For half the children at each age, the prime sentences they repeated had high lexical overlap with the sentence th…