early plural comprehension?

[Marita Böhning]

dear info-childes, dear tom roeper, dear brian macwhinney!
please excuse the wrong forwarding/answering!
was distracted by the interesting discussion and did not check recipients 
again. ;-)

marita

*********************************************
Marita Boehning
Department of Linguistics
(Erasmus/Sokrates co-ordinator)
P.O. Box 601553
D - 14415 Potsdam
Germany
Phone: +49 331 977 2929
Fax:   +49 331 977 2095
email: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de
*********************************************
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marita Böhning" <boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de>
To: "Tom Roeper" <roeper at linguist.umass.edu>; "Brian MacWhinney" 
<macw at cmu.edu>; "info-childes" <info-childes at mail.talkbank.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:54 PM
Subject: Re: early plural comprehension?


> Liebe Barbara,
> wenn man die Diskussion zw. Tom Roeper, Tomasello und MacWhinney so liest, 
> scheint es eine wirklich gute Idee, unser Pluralexperiment bald zu 
> starten. Christina hat auch Daten zu Plural und würde sich konzeptionell 
> nach ihrem Urlaub beteiligen.
>
> LG
> Marita
>
>
>
> *********************************************
> Marita Boehning
> Department of Linguistics
> (Erasmus/Sokrates co-ordinator)
> P.O. Box 601553
> D - 14415 Potsdam
> Germany
> Phone: +49 331 977 2929
> Fax:   +49 331 977 2095
> email: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de
> *********************************************
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Tom Roeper" <roeper at linguist.umass.edu>
> To: "Brian MacWhinney" <macw at cmu.edu>; "info-childes" 
> <info-childes at mail.talkbank.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:40 PM
> Subject: Re: early plural comprehension?
>
>
>> Dear Brian---
>>
>>    Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult
>> things that a child must master.  It is not clear when its properties
>> are fully grasped at all.  To consider what the child faces, parents
>> easily say to a child, holding up a single banana,
>>    "do you like bananas?"
>> with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that?
>>    An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland,
>> Anderson, and Yatsushiro.   Following work by Anne  Vainnikka,
>> they asked children questions  like:
>>             Does a dog have tails?
>> Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes".
>>
>> Tom Roeper
>>
>> PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT)
>> I devote a long chapter to the topic.
>> Brian MacWhinney wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Info-CHILDES,
>>>    During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked
>>> whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which
>>> a child can comprehend the plural marker.  We were discussing the
>>> findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with
>>> reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12
>>> months.  If this paradigm can be used to see if children can
>>> distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see
>>> if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?"
>>>    We were particularly interested in information on the plural
>>> marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically
>>> transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially.  However,
>>> evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would
>>> also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed
>>> further light on the comprehension-production lag during this
>>> period.  Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference?  Many
>>> thanks.
>>>
>>> --Brian MacWhinney, CMU
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>