Summary: verbs ASK and TELL

[Darinka Andjelkovic]

Dear collegues,
Here is a summary of replies that I recieved from you to my following question.

  A small experiment that we have done recently with Serbian preschool children has given some reasons to believe that acquisition of verbs PITAJ and RECI (meaning ASK and TELL) in Serbian is pretty easier and taking place several years before then in English, having in mind what was shown in the classic Caroll Chomsky's: The Acquistion of Syntax in Children's Language from 5 to 10.
  Could anyone kindly direct me to new studies of acquistion of these verbs? Any language, any methodology and corpora retrieval data would be appreciated very much.

Lise Menn wrote that there are a lot of pragmatic artifacts in the pioneering Chomsky studies. 
Actually our colegues and I had the same thought and that's why we conducted the experiment I mentioned above. 
L. Menn also recommended the following references:
Tanz, C. (1980). Studies in the acquisition of deictic terms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
or her article
Tanz, C. (1983). Asking children to ask: an experimental investigation of the pragmatics of relayed questions. Journal of Child Language, 10, 187-194.


Kristen Syrett suggests that opting for acting-out and production methodology has a significant effect, which was shown in a recent work (Syrett and Lidz 2004). K.S.: "We ran 4-year olds in a Truth Value Judgment Task looking at a special type of ellipsis construction.  We used subject and object control structures with the verbs want, need, ask, and invite.  Children did just fine with these in this comprehension/judgment methodology." 

Barbara Lust suggested: 
Cohen Sherman, Janet and Lust, B. 1993. Children are in control. Cognition. 46, pp 1-51. 

I thank you all for taking time to reply. I appreciate your kind efforts.

Darinka Andjelkovic
dandjelk at f.bg.ac.yu
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Belgrade
Serbia and Montengro
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