Overview

This book is about how toddlers learn their first adjectives, such as, for example, red, big and tasty. Adjectives denote properties and enter child vocabularies later than words for objects (such as apple and tree) and actions (such as eat and run), probably due to lower frequencies in parental speech and greater conceptual complexity. Adjective acquisition has received relatively little attention in child language research. Furthermore, cross-linguistic studies of adjective learning are virtually non-existent. This book represents the first systematic analysis of how children learning typologically different languages acquire adjective form, function and meaning. The cross-linguistic comparisons undertaken in the book provide valuable insights into universal and language-specific aspects of language acquisition. For each of the languages studied in this volume, the development of adjective semantics is studied in tandem with the development of morphology by testing two hypotheses: (a) the acquisition trajectory in the domain of adjectival morphology is determined by the typological properties of the target language; (b) irrespective of the languages being acquired, adjective learning is facilitated by universal conceptual mechanisms such as comparison and contrast.

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9781443877305

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Reviews

This book is very useful for all those who are engaged in the study of children's speech in different countries around the world [...] On the one hand, this book provides answers to many questions that formerly remained unanswered in ontolinguistics, and on the other hand it poses new questions, pointing the direction for further research. Galina R. DobrovaHerzen State Pedagogical University, St PetersburgVoprosy Jazykoznanija, 3 (2017)

Author Information

Elena Tribushinina is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research interests include semantics, child language acquisition, bilingualism and language disorders.Maria Voeikova is Head of the Department of Grammar Theory at Institute for Linguistic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Professor of Russian Language at St. Petersburg State University, Russia. Her current research focus is on child language, functional grammar and corpus linguistics.Sabrina Noccetti is Assistant Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Pisa, Italy. She is interested in first and second language development with particular reference to morphological acquisition in children and adult learners.

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