early plural comprehension?

[Marita Böhning]

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
>>
>>
>
>
>