Children's use of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge in the interpretation of novel adjectives
Date
2006-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Wiley : Society for Research In Child Development
Abstract
In Study 1, English-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabelled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "a very DAXY dog") than as predicates (e.g., "a dog that is very DAXY"). Study 2 revealed that this response occurred only when both adjectives were prenominal. Study 3 replicated Study 1 with Hebrew-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds, even though in Hebrew both types of adjectives appear postnominally. Preschoolers understand that prenominal adjectives imply a restriction of the reference of nouns, and this knowledge motivates a contrastive pragmatic inference regarding the referents of different prenominal adjectives.
Description
Keywords
Citation
Diesendruck, G., Hall, D. G., & Graham, S. A. (2006). Children's use of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge in the interpretation of novel adjectives. "Child Development", January/February 2006, volume 77, number 1, pages 16-30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00853.x