title: Children's acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian: contrasting the roles of frequency and positional salience in maternal language.
abstract: Because of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on children's acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this issue in a sample of twenty-six mother-child dyads whose spontaneous conversations were recorded, transcribed, and coded at 1;4 and 1;8. The percentages of nouns occurring in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4 predicted children's production of noun types at 1;8. For verbs, children's growth rates were positively predicted by the percentages of input verbs occurring in utterance-initial position, but negatively predicted by the percentages of verbs located in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4. These findings clearly illustrate that the effects of positional salience vary across lexical categories.
authors: Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology,University Sapienza of Rome,Italy.
authors: Emiddia
authors: E
authors: Longobardi
authors: Department of Psychology,University Sapienza of Rome,Italy.
authors: Clelia
authors: C
authors: Rossi-Arnaud
authors: Department of Psychology,University Sapienza of Rome,Italy.
authors: Pietro
authors: P
authors: Spataro
authors: Child and Family Research,Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland,USA.
authors: Diane L
authors: DL
authors: Putnick
authors: Child and Family Research,Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland,USA.
authors: Marc H
authors: MH
authors: Bornstein
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007558:Italy; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009035:Mothers; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary