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Limits on negative information in language input*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

James L. Morgan and
Lisa L. Travis
James L. Morgan*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
Lisa L. Travis
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
*
Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, 51 East River Road, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
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Abstract

Hirsh-Pasek, Treiman & Schneiderman (1984).and Demetras, Post & Snow (1986).have recently suggested that certain types of parental repetitions and clarification questions may provide children with subtle cues to their grammatical errors. We further investigated this possibility by examining parental responses to inflectional over-regularizations and wh-question auxiliary-verb omission errors in the sets of transcripts from Adam, Eve and Sarah (Brown 1973). These errors were chosen because they are exemplars of overgeneralization, the type of mistake for which negative information is, in theory, most critically needed. Expansions and Clarification Questions occurred more often following ill-formed utterances in Adam's and Eve's input, but not in Sarah's. However, these corrective responses formed only a small proportion of all adult responses following Adam's and Eve's grammatical errors. Moreover, corrective responses appear to drop out of children's input while they continue to make overgeneralization errors. Whereas negative feedback may occasionally be available, in the light of these findings the contention that language input generally incorporates negative information appears to be unfounded.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , October 1989, pp. 531 - 552
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported in part by NICHD grant T32-HD07151 to the Center for Research in Learning, Perception and Cognition, University of Minnesota. We thank Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Elissa Newport, Tom Trabasso, and an anonymous reviewer for thoughtful comments on drafts of this paper, and Elizabeth Greene for her diligent assistance.

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