Volume 18 (2014): Issue 2 (August 2014)
Children's Language and Communicative Knowledge, Part One. In Memory of Professor Grace Wales Shugar, Issue Editor: Barbara Bokus

This paper is an outline of Grace Wales Shugar’s research approach and some of her main theses in the field of language acquisition and children’s discourse. Her idea of dual agentivity of adult-child interaction shows how to best support children’s communicative skills: It is only when children can show what they know in their own way, and when that child knowledge is received and used in a discourse process, that we can expect a child’s inner motivation to acquire knowledge from others to be maintained and to become a driving force of the child’s further development (Shugar, 1995, p. 233).

Analyses of interactions between an adult and a one-year-old child are often connected with studying early communicative competences, e.g. the child’s participation in turn-taking sequences, in joint attention, and use of pointing gestures. Infants’ communicative behaviors were studied using a structured observational measure - the Early Social Communication Scales (Mundy et al., 2003) in a study of 358 12-month-old children. An exploratory factor analysis revealed: (i) a distinction between the categories of initiation and response among the behaviors displayed, (ii) simple and complex behavior categories occurring; (iii) the presence within one factor of behaviors fulfilling various functions (e.g. requesting and sharing interest). An analysis of the results showed that communicative competences can be classified according to their level and ignoring their function, and made it possible to suggest modifications to the way in which behaviors are coded on the ESCS and to complement the procedure of studying early communicative competences.

A model of syntactic development proposes that children’s very first word-combinations are already generated via productive rules that express in syntactic form the relation between a predicate word and its semantic argument. An alternative hypothesis is that they learn frozen chunks. In Study 1 we analyzed a large sample of young children’s early two-word sentences comprising of verbs with direct objects. A majority of objects were generated by pronouns but a third of children’s sentences used bare common nouns as objects. We checked parents’ twoword long sentences of verbs with objects and found almost no bare common nouns. Children cannot have copied sentences with bare noun objects from parents’ two-word long sentences as frozen chunks. In Study 2 we raised the possibility that children’s early sentences with bare nouns are rote-learned ‘telegraphic speech’, acquired as unanalyzed frozen chunks from longer input sentences due to perceptual problem to hear the unstressed determiners. To test this explanation, we tested the children’s speech corpus for evidence that they avoid determiners in their word-combinations. The results showed that they do not; in fact they generate very many determiner-common noun combinations as two-word utterances. The findings suggest that children produce their early word-combinations of the core-grammar type by a productive rule that maps the predicate-argument relations of verbs and their semantic arguments to headdependent syntax, and not as frozen word-combinations. Children mostly learn to use indexical expressions such as pronouns to express the variable semantic arguments of verbs as context dependent; they also employ bare common nouns to express specific values of the arguments. The earliest word-combinations demonstrate that children understand that syntax is built on the predicate-argument relations of words and use this insight to produce their early sentences.

This paper reviews a body of research that reveals how children acquire the capacity to express the temporal location of episodes that they remember and those they anticipate for the future. The paper shows how the child’s knowledge of language structure provides a window on the conceptual development of memory processes and the capacity for conceptual time travel away from the conversational context of the speech act.

In this short article, we discuss what is specific language impairment (SLI) and why it is a hidden disability that few people have heard about. We describe the impact on research, policy and practice of SLI being a neglected condition. We end by providing the background and rationale of a new internet campaign, RALLI (www.youtube.com/rallicampaign), aimed at changing this state of affairs and raising awareness of SLI.

This paper discusses the communicative competence of deaf children. It illustrates the process in which such children build narrative texts in interaction with a deaf teacher, and presents the diversity of this process due to the shared vs. non-shared perception of a picture - the source of the topic. Detailed analyses focus on the formal and semantic aspect of the stories, including the length of the text in sign language, the content selected, information categories, and types of answers to the teacher’s questions. This text is our contribution in memory of Professor Grace Wales Shugar, whose idea of dual agentivity of child-adult interaction inspired the research presented here.

Universal Grammar serves as a basis for acquiring language competence, but it is not sufficient to acquire communicative competence. To be a competent sender or receiver of an utterance, one needs to be able to infer another person’s intentions or beliefs. In other words, one needs to have a theory of mind. Are then neural substrates of linguistic and communicative abilities distinct, too? The paper characterizes language as a specific human feature and briefly describes both language competence and communicative competence. Finally, it presents the results of an fMRI study according to which communicative and linguistic abilities rely on cerebrally (and computationally) distinct mechanisms.