The use of pronouns as a developmental factor in early Russian language acquisition
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Maria Voeikova
Abstract
This chapter considers the earliest stages in children’s acquisition of the Russian pronominal system. General tendencies in the acquisition of pronouns based on previous studies are compared to four detailed longitudinal corpora of children’s spontaneous speech production to sketch common and individual features in their early use of pronouns and deictic adverbs. In all children, pronouns only occurred at a certain level of syntactic and lexical development based on the calculation of their mean length of utterance (henceforth - MLU) and vocabulary diversity (henceforth - VOCD). Children also exhibit different strategies in the acquisition of pronouns: two male children demonstrated a balanced pronoun usage, whereas one male and one female showed a clear preference for the early demonstratives followed by personal pronouns only several months later. Possible explanations and further research questions are proposed.
Abstract
This chapter considers the earliest stages in children’s acquisition of the Russian pronominal system. General tendencies in the acquisition of pronouns based on previous studies are compared to four detailed longitudinal corpora of children’s spontaneous speech production to sketch common and individual features in their early use of pronouns and deictic adverbs. In all children, pronouns only occurred at a certain level of syntactic and lexical development based on the calculation of their mean length of utterance (henceforth - MLU) and vocabulary diversity (henceforth - VOCD). Children also exhibit different strategies in the acquisition of pronouns: two male children demonstrated a balanced pronoun usage, whereas one male and one female showed a clear preference for the early demonstratives followed by personal pronouns only several months later. Possible explanations and further research questions are proposed.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
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Part 1: Relational coherence
- The comprehension of coherence relations in expository texts at the age of 10 and 12 11
- Short sentences, easy to read? Effects of connectives and layout on text comprehension by beginning readers 41
- Explicit coherence relations in children’s and adults’ spoken narratives: the importance of und for the acquisition of German connectives 57
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Part 2: Referential coherence
- Text organization in typically developing bilinguals and bilinguals at risk of DLD: what is different and how language independent is it? 85
- Referential coherence: Children’s understanding of pronoun anaphora. Insights from mono- and bilingual language acquisition 105
- Reference in French and German: A developmental perspective 139
- The use of pronouns as a developmental factor in early Russian language acquisition 171
- Index 207
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
-
Part 1: Relational coherence
- The comprehension of coherence relations in expository texts at the age of 10 and 12 11
- Short sentences, easy to read? Effects of connectives and layout on text comprehension by beginning readers 41
- Explicit coherence relations in children’s and adults’ spoken narratives: the importance of und for the acquisition of German connectives 57
-
Part 2: Referential coherence
- Text organization in typically developing bilinguals and bilinguals at risk of DLD: what is different and how language independent is it? 85
- Referential coherence: Children’s understanding of pronoun anaphora. Insights from mono- and bilingual language acquisition 105
- Reference in French and German: A developmental perspective 139
- The use of pronouns as a developmental factor in early Russian language acquisition 171
- Index 207
