Opportunities and challenges in the analysis of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children’s narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax, discourse-pragmatics, as well as various aspects of narrative structure, communicative competence, and language use (such as code-switching). It is particularly well suited to the study of discourse cohesion, referential adequacy and informativeness, and of course to the study of narrative structure and richness, and the acquisition of a more formal or literary register. In this commentary article, I reflect on the five empirical papers included in the special issue. I focus on methodological challenges for the analysis of narratives and identify outstanding questions.

Acquisition of cumulative conditioning effects on words: Spanish-speaking children’s [subject pronoun + verb] usage

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular discourse context that conditions usage accumulates in memory over time and shapes the lexical representation of that form. This study contributes to the body of research on frequency effects in child language acquisition by testing whether such cumulative conditioning effects are also found among children, and, if so, at what age such effects appear. Specifically, the study investigates the influence of a distributional frequency measure (each verb form’s likelihood of use in a switch vs same-reference discourse context) on variable subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression ( N = 2227) in Spanish (e.g. yo voy ~ voy, both meaning ‘I go’) in the speech of 65 monolingual children in two age cohorts. Results reveal sensitivity to the contextual conditioning of discourse continuity (switch reference) among both the younger (6- and 7-year-olds) and older (8- and 9-year-olds) children in support of previous research. In addition, each verb’s likelihood of use in a switch-reference context significantly predicted the SPP use among the older children, but not the younger ones, suggesting that the cumulative effect of a probabilistic pattern takes time to emerge during childhood. The lexically specific accumulation in memory of contextual conditioning effects supports exemplar models of child language acquisition: each instance of use in discourse contributes to the lexical representation of that form and, over time, plays a role in the creation of morphosyntactic patterns during language development.

A new perspective on referentiality in elicited narratives: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue investigates the use of referential expressions in elicited picture-based narratives by children with and without developmental language disorders, across a range of languages and language combinations. All contributions use the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2012, 2019). The studies featured in this issue cover monolingual and bilingual children aged 4–11 years, but focus mainly on age 4–7, a period in a child’s life where great strides are made in the development of narrative skills. This collection of papers offers a new perspective on referentiality for several reasons: all studies use the same stimuli and by and large the same procedure for the elicitation of narratives. The stimuli, four picture-based stories, are controlled for comparability of protagonists, plot and story structure. They were designed as a ‘visual’ representation of a multidimensional model of story grammar. This methodological and theoretical base allows for a comparative investigation of referentiality (including reference introduction, maintenance and reintroduction) in narratives, across languages and populations. This introduction addresses theoretical aspects of referentiality in decontextualised discourse and reviews the literature regarding the impact of language-specific referential systems and the age and path of acquisition in typically developing children and children with developmental language disorders. We also discuss methodological aspects of eliciting referentiality in narratives in detail. This introduction thus seeks explanations for the diverse and sometimes contradictory empirical results regarding children’s mastery of referentiality. Finally, an overview of the contributions in the special issue is given.

Postverbal subjects in child Italian: Argument structure, discourse and the definiteness effect

While previous work on postverbal subjects in Italian has shown that young children are sensitive to the effects of argument structure and definiteness, little is known about the acquisition of postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery. In response, the present study investigated such subjects under new-information focus by monolingual Italian children (6;1 – 7;4). For this, we employed an elicitation task and a forced-choice task. The results indicated that the children use postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery felicitously, although they do not perform at ceiling. Unexpectedly, the results also suggested possible remnant difficulty with the definiteness effect. However, after comparison with adult data we argue that this is not a developmental issue and instead may suggest that our children were aware that the definiteness effect is not about definiteness per se.

The acquisition of argument structures of intransitive and transitive verbs in Japanese: The role of parental input

The present study investigated the role of morphosyntactic information in the acquisition of transitive and intransitive verb argument structures (VAS) in the Japanese language, which allows massive omissions of arguments and case markers. In particular, we investigated how the ‘variation sets’ proposed by Küntay and Slobin work in Japanese. Longitudinal interaction data from three Japanese-speaking mother–child pairs were collected at five different times between the ages of 0;10 and 3;01. Children’s acquisition of VAS and mothers’ use of verbs were examined, including morphologically related verbs in a variety of sentence frames with null and overt arguments. The results indicate that all three mothers showed an increase in overt arguments in different syntactic roles as well as lexical given arguments around the time that children started uttering words. However, the use of a variety of sentence frames with null and overt arguments was not uniform among the mothers, and such individual differences were related to the acquisition of VAS among children. These findings support the role of ‘variation sets’ in the acquisition of VAS in Japanese and suggest that the availability of morphosyntactic information in the input helps children to reconstruct VAS.

Finiteness marking in Russian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment

Much crosslinguistic acquisition research explores finiteness marking in typical development and Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Research into Russian, however, has focused on typical acquisition, not SLI. This article presents a first attempt to investigate finiteness marking in monolingual Russian-speaking children with SLI. We test two competing hypotheses: the Extended Optional Infinitive (EOI) hypothesis and the morphological richness account. The former predicts a large proportion of non-finite forms in the speech of children with SLI crosslinguistically. Due to the rich morphological verbal system of Russian, the latter hypothesis predicts that finiteness marking in Russian SLI will be relatively unimpeded, except for ‘near-miss’ errors. To test these predictions, we analyzed picture-story narrative samples collected from 67 monolingual Russian-acquiring children aged 4;1 to 4;11. All samples are part of the BiSLI corpus created by Tribushinina and colleagues and publicly available through the CHILDES project. We found that, similar to both aged-matched typically developing (TD) controls (N = 24) and younger TD children (N = 23), children with SLI (N = 20) are essentially adultlike in terms of finiteness marking of verbal forms in the matrix clause. The handful of errors observed in the SLI sample involved substitutions in only one inflectional category. These findings provide support for the morphological richness hypothesis over the EOI model of Russian SLI.

The development and psychometric properties of a shared book reading observational tool: The Emergent Literacy and Language Early Childhood Checklist for Teachers (ELLECCT)

Shared book reading in preschool settings plays an influential role in supporting children’s oral language and emergent literacy skills. Early childhood teachers can provide high-quality shared book reading experiences using extratextual utterances (reading beyond the story text) to maximise these learning outcomes. We report on the development and psychometric properties of the ‘Emergent Literacy and Language Early Childhood Checklist for Teachers’ (ELLECCT) tool, a comprehensive observational checklist designed to document early childhood teachers’ extratextual oral language and emergent literacy strategies during shared book reading. The ELLECCT measures teachers’ dialogic reading prompts, vocabulary promotion strategies, responsive statements, print knowledge and phonological awareness. The ELLECCT also contains a rating scale examining paralinguistic and nonverbal strategies used by early childhood teachers to support engagement during shared book reading interactions. The psychometric properties of the ELLECCT were measured in a four-phase process. Content validity was tested using the Content Validity Index and a three-round Delphi process was used to measure face validity. Both intra-rater and inter-rater reliability were evaluated from a sample of 32 shared book reading observations. The study findings provide preliminary evidence for the psychometric properties of the ELLECCT, such that it is judged as suitable for evaluation of early childhood teachers’ use of extratextual and paralinguistic strategies while engaged in shared book reading. We describe the ELLECCT’s potential application in both classroom coaching and training, and as a research tool, to support early childhood teachers’ skill-development during shared book reading.

Feature generalization in Dutch–German bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the ‘voiced’ dorsal plosive /ɡ/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch–German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6–6;0 years generalized voicing to /ɡ/ in Dutch; and (2) whether there was evidence for featural cross-linguistic influence from Dutch to German in bilingual children, testing monolingual German-speaking children as controls. Bilingual and monolingual children’s production of /ɡ/ provided partial evidence for feature generalization: in Dutch, both bilingual and monolingual children either recombined Dutch voicing and place features to produce /ɡ/, suggesting feature generalization, or resorted to producing familiar /k/, suggesting segment-level adaptation within their Dutch phonological system. In German, bilingual children’s production of /ɡ/ was influenced by Dutch although the Dutch phoneme inventory lacks /ɡ/. This suggests that not only segments but also voicing features can exert cross-linguistic influence. Taken together, phonological features appear to play a crucial role in aspects of bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production.

Linguistic cues facilitate children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences

It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb factivity in particular, can facilitate children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Two experiments were implemented, one testing children’s knowledge of verb factivity using a gold medal task, and one investigating children’s interpretation of belief-reporting sentences using a truth-value-judgment task. Both experiments took advantage of the contrast between neutral non-factive mental verbs and strong negatively biased mental verbs. What sets the two apart is that the complement clause following a strong negatively biased mental verb is definitely false, whereas the one following a neutral non-factive mental verb remains indeterminate in the absence of additional information. The findings were that, first, 4-year-old children were able to tell the difference between the two types of mental verbs in factivity, and second, children’s performance was significantly improved when a strong negatively biased mental verb than when a neutral non-factive mental verb was used as the main verb of the belief-reporting sentences. The findings suggest that the use of strong negatively biased mental verbs facilitates children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the underlying mechanisms connecting verb factivity and false-belief understanding.

Maternal responsiveness and directiveness in speech to 2-year-olds: Relationships with children’s concurrent and later vocabulary

This study investigated responsive and directive speech from 60 Finnish mothers to their 2-year-old children, as well as correlations with concurrent and later vocabulary. Possible gender differences with regard to both maternal speech and children’s vocabulary skills were considered. There were no gender differences in maternal utterance frequencies or in maternal utterance types. Girls scored statistically significantly higher in receptive and expressive vocabulary tests at 24, 30 and 36 months. The effect sizes were large. Maternal Other Utterances (fillers like yes, oh, umm) were correlated with children’s concurrent receptive vocabulary. However, there was no relationship between Other Utterances and children’s later vocabulary after controlling for vocabulary size at 24 months. This association may reflect an attempt by mothers to elicit speech from more linguistically advanced children. Furthermore, mothers’ Intrusive Directives towards 2-year-olds correlated negatively with receptive vocabulary at 30 months, particularly for boys. Surprisingly, Intrusive Attentional Directives correlated positively with expressive vocabulary in the group of 30-month-old girls. The results of this study demonstrate relationships between maternal verbal interactional style and both concurrent and future child vocabulary.