Dr Danielle Matthews' Publications\ Journal Articles Journal Articles MATTHEWS, D., & Bannard, C. (2010). Children's production of unfamiliar word sequences is predicted by positional variability and latent classes in a large sample of child directed speech. Cognitive Science. We explore whether children's willingness to produce unfamiliar sequences of words reflects their experience with similar lexical patterns. We asked children to repeat unfamiliar sequences that were identical to familiar phrases (e.g., A piece of toast) but for one word (e.g., a novel instantiation of A piece of X, like A piece of brick). We explore two predictions—motivated by findings in the statistical learning literature—that children are likely to have detected an opportunity to substitute alternative words into the final position of a four-word sequence if (a) it is difficult to predict the fourth word given the first three words and (b) the words observed in the final position are distributionally similar. Twenty-eight 2-year-olds and thirty-one 3-year-olds were significantly more likely to correctly repeat unfamiliar variants of patterns for which these properties held. The results illustrate how children's developing language is shaped by linguistic experience. Further details MATTHEWS, D., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2010). What’s in a manner of speaking? Children’s sensitivity to partner-specific referential precedents. Developmental Psychology. This study investigated whether young children form ‘referential pacts’ (Brennan & Clark, 1996; Metzing & Brennan, 2003) such that they expect people to refer to objects with the same terms over time unless there is a good reason to switch to using a new expression. 128 children aged 3 and 5 years participated in a study where they co-operated with an experimenter (E1) to move toys around to new locations on a shelf. E1 established referential terms for all the toys in a warm up game. Then, either E1 (original partner condition) or a new experimenter, E2 (new partner condition), played a second game with the same toys. In the second game, two critical toys were referred to with their original terms and two with new terms. Children were significantly slower to pick up a toy if it was referred to with a new term than with an old term. Crucially, this difference in reaction times was significantly greater in the original partner condition. This suggests that children found it harder to process a new term when it was produced by someone who had previously referred to the same toy with a different expression. That is, children as young a 3 years of age show adult-like sensitivity to referential pacts. Further details Pyykkönen, P., MATTHEWS, D., & Järvikivi, J. (2010). Verb semantics affects children’s pronoun comprehension: Evidence from eye-movements. Language and Cognitive Processes. Online studies of pronoun comprehension have revealed that children tend to treat pronouns as co-referential with the subject (and first- mentioned referent) in the prior linguistic context (Song & Fisher, 2006). The current study aimed to add to our understanding of the factors that affect children’s processing of temporarily ambiguous pronouns. It investigated whether, in addition to syntactic information, verb semantics might also affect children’s pronoun comprehension. One type of semantic information that very young children might be sensitive to is that of verb transitivity (Dowty, 1991). Highly transitive verbs (e.g. hit) have prototypical agents and patients, whereas low transitivity verbs (e.g. see) have less active, causal agents and less affected patients. Such differences in verb semantics might affect children’s pronoun comprehension. We selected 30 transitive verbs from the CHILDES corpus and had them rated for transitivity by 20 undergradute psychology students (Kako, 2006). We took as stimuli the 10 verbs with the highest ratings (high-transitivity verbs: fed, pinched, phoned, cuddled, squashed, kissed, squeezed, kicked, banged, hit) and 10 with the lowest ratings (low-transitivity verbs: bumped, teased, found, loved, hated, ignored, liked, heard, lost, saw). Fifteen three-year-olds participated in a visual-world study in which they looked at a screen, presenting two characters and a location (figure 1), while listening to corresponding four-sentence stories of the following form: 1. The X [verb]ed the Y near the [location]. 2. Do you know what happened next? 3. He did something very silly. 4. He [verb]ed. The verb in the first sentence was either high or low transitive. Children’s eye movements for each 40-millisecond frame following the onset of the pronoun ‘he’ in sentence 3 were coded as looking to the subject (of sentence 1), the object or the location. The number of looks to each area was counted for six consecutive 520 milliseconds time-bands. Children were significantly more likely to look to both the subject and the object of the first sentence if the verb had been highly transitive. This effect was significant from 520 to 2600ms after pronoun onset. There was also a significant preference for looking at the subject of the verb, although this effect occurred later (between 2080 and 3120ms after pronoun onset). There were no reliable interactions between transitivity and grammatical role, indicating that the subject preference was not modified by verb transitivity. We conclude that children had stronger expectations about both referents in the high-transitivity condition. This finding accords with accounts that explain pronoun comprehension in terms of assumptions about the causes and consequences of events and the expectations these generate about how a discourse will unfold (Crinean & Garnham, 2006). Higher transitivity verbs depict events that have more powerful causes and consequences and, thus, create greater expectations, which stimulate increased looking behaviour. The fact that the effect of verb semantics arose quickly suggests that, like adults, children rapidly generate expectations about the upcoming discourse (Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006). MATTHEWS, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Pronoun co-referencing errors: challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts. Cognitive Linguistics, 20(3), 599-626. This study tests accounts of co-reference errors whereby children allow ‘‘Mama Bear’’ and ‘‘her’’ to co-refer in sentences like ‘‘Mama Bear is washing her’’ (Chien and Wexler 1990). 63 children aged 4;6, 5;6 and 6;6 participated in a truth-value judgment task augmented with a sentence pro- duction component. There were three major finding: 1) contrary to predic- tions of most generativist accounts, children accepted co-reference even in cases of bound anaphora e.g., ‘‘Every girl is washing her’’ 2) contrary to Thornton and Wexler (1999), errors did not appear to occur because chil- dren understood referring expressions to be denoting the same person in dif- ferent guises 3) contrary to usage-based accounts, errors were less likely in sentences that contained lower as opposed to higher frequency verbs. Error rates also di¤ered significantly according to pronoun type (‘‘him’’, ‘‘her’’, ‘‘them’’). These challenging results are discussed in terms of possible pro- cessing explanations. Further details Bannard, C., & MATTHEWS, D. (2008). Stored Word Sequences in Language Learning: The effect of familiarity on children’s repetition of four-word combinations. Psychological Science, 19, 241-248. Recent accounts of the development of grammar propose that children remember utterances they hear and draw generalizations over these stored exemplars. This study tested these accounts' assumption that children store utterances as wholes by testing memory for familiar sequences of words. Using a newly available, dense corpus of child-directed speech, we identified frequently occurring chunks in the input (e.g., sit in your chair) and matched them to infrequent sequences (e.g., sit in your truck). We tested young children's ability to produce these sequences in a sentence-repetition test. Three-year-olds (n= 21) and 2-year-olds (n= 17) were significantly more likely to repeat frequent sequences correctly than to repeat infrequent sequences correctly. Moreover, the 3-year-olds were significantly faster to repeat the first three words of an item if they formed part of a chunk (e.g., they were quicker to say sit in your when the following word was chair than when it was truck). We discuss the implications of these results for theories of language development and processing. Further details MATTHEWS, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2007). French children’s use and correction of weird word orders: A constructivist account. Journal of Child Language, 34, 381-409. Using the weird word order methodology (Akhtar, 1999), we investigated children's understanding of SVO word order in French, a language with less consistent argument ordering patterns than English. One hundred and twelve French children (ages 2;10 and 3;9) heard either high or low frequency verbs modelled in either SOV or VSO order (both ungrammatical). Results showed that: (1) children were more likely to adopt a weird word order if they heard lower frequency verbs, suggesting gradual learning; (2) children in the high frequency conditions tended to correct the ungrammatical model they heard to the closest grammatical alternative, suggesting different models activated different grammatical schemas; and (3) children were less likely to express the object of a transitive verb than were English children in an equivalent study, suggesting object expression is more difficult to master in French, perhaps because of its inconsistency in the input. These findings are discussed in the context of a usage-based model of language acquisition. Further details MATTHEWS, D., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2007). How toddlers and preschoolers learn to uniquely identify referents for others: A training study. Child Development, 76(6), 1744-1759. This training study investigates how children learn to refer to things unambiguously. Two hundred twenty-four children aged 2.6, 3.6, and 4.6 years were pre- and posttested for their ability to request stickers from a dense array. Between test sessions, children were assigned to a training condition in which they (a) asked for stickers from an adult, (b) responded to an adult's requests for stickers, (c) observed 1 adult ask another for stickers, or (d) heard model descriptions of stickers. All conditions yielded improvements in referring strategies, with condition (a) being most effective. Four-year-olds additionally demonstrated learning effects in a transfer task. These results suggest that young children's communication skills develop best in response to feedback about their own attempts at reference. Further details MATTHEWS, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2006). The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children’s use of referring expressions. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 403-422. Choosing appropriate referring expressions requires assessing whether a referent is “available” to the addressee either perceptually or through discourse. In Study 1, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, chose different referring expressions (noun vs. pronoun) depending on whether their addressee could see the intended referent or not. In Study 2, in more neutral discourse contexts than previous studies, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds clearly differed in their use of referring expressions according to whether their addressee had already mentioned a referent. Moreover, 2-year-olds responded with more naming constructions when the referent had not been mentioned previously. This suggests that, despite early social–cognitive developments, (a) it takes time to master the given/new contrast linguistically, and (b) children understand the contrast earlier based on discourse, rather than perceptual context. Further details MATTHEWS, D., & Theakston, A. (2006). Errors of omission in English-speaking children’s production of plurals and the past tense: The effects of frequency, phonology and competition. Cognitive Science, 30, 1027-1052. How do English-speaking children inflect nouns for plurality and verbs for the past tense? We assess theoretical answers to this question by considering errors of omission, which occur when children produce a stem in place of its inflected counterpart (e.g., saying “dress” to refer to 5 dresses). A total of 307 children (aged 3;11-9;9) participated in 3 inflection studies. In Study 1, we show that errors of omission occur until the age of 7 and are more likely with both sibilant regular nouns (e.g., dress) and irregular nouns (e.g., man) than regular nouns (e.g., dog). Sibilant nouns are more likely to be inflected if they are high frequency. In Studies 2 and 3, we show that similar effects apply to the inflection of verbs and that there is an advantage for “regular-like” irregulars whose inflected form, but not stem form, ends in d/t. The results imply that (a) stems and inflected forms compete for production and (b) children generalize both product-oriented and source-oriented schemas when learning about inflectional morphology. Further details MATTHEWS, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2005). The role of frequency in the acquisition of English word order. Cognitive Development, 20(1), 121-136. Akhtar [Akhtar, N. (1999). Acquiring basic word order: Evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure. Journal of Child Language, 26, 339–356] taught children novel verbs in ungrammatical word orders. Her results suggested that the acquisition of canonical word order is a gradual, data-driven process. The current study adapted this methodology, using English verbs of different frequencies, to test whether children's use of word order as a grammatical marker depends upon the frequency of the lexical items being ordered. Ninety-six children in two age groups (2;9 and 3;9) heard either high frequency, medium frequency or low frequency verbs that were modeled in SOV order. Children aged 2;9 who heard low frequency verbs were significantly more likely to adopt the weird word order than those who heard higher frequency verbs. Children aged 3;9 preferred to use SVO order regardless of verb frequency. Furthermore, the younger children reverted to English word order using more arguments as verb frequency increased and used more pronouns than their older counterparts. This suggests that the ability to use English word order develops from lexically specific schemas formed around frequent, distributionally regular items (e.g. verbs, pronouns) into more abstract, productive schemas as experience of the language is accrued. Further details Last update: 10 Nov 2011

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