Origins of Grammar : Evidence from Early Language Comprehension

by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

• ISBN13: 9780262581806
• ISBN10: 0262581809
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-07-16
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

The authors of The Origins of Grammar have pioneered one of the most important methodological advances in language learning in the past decade: the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, which can be used to assess lexical and syntactic knowledge in children as young as thirteen months. They describe a theory of language learning that emphasizes the role of multiple cues and forces in development. They further show how infants shift their reliance on different aspects of the linguistic input, moving from a bias to attend to prosodic information to a reliance on semantic information, and finally to a reliance on the syntax itself.

Author Biography

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is Associate Professor of Psychology at Temple University. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff is H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Educational Studies, Psychology, and Linguistics at the University of Delaware.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(10)
Theories of Language Acquisition	11	(42)
The Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm	53	(20)
Infants' Perception of Constituent Structure	73	(26)
Single-Word Speakers' Comprehension of Word Order	99	(24)
Young Children's Use of Syntactic Frames to Derive Meaning	123	(36)
Letitia Naigles
A Coalition Model of Language Comprehension	159	(44)
Notes	203	(2)
References	205	(18)
Index	223