Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-21T21:56:46.627Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cue validity in Hebrew sentence comprehension*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Jeffrey L. Sokolov
Jeffrey L. Sokolov*
Affiliation:
Carnegie-Mellon University
*
Department of Psychology, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study investigated the degree to which cue validity, as estimated from textual analyses, predicts the actual strength of grammatical cues as they are used by speakers of Hebrew. An experiment was conducted to determine the differential strengths of the linguistic cues employed by Hebrew speakers when assigning the role of patient in sentences. Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects 4, 5, 7, and 9 years old, as well as adults, were tested using a sentence-picture verification task. Six cues were included in the study: word order, the accusative object marker, the reflexive noun phrase and three verbal derivations. By presenting subjects with sentences which set these cues in competition with one another, a measure of the strength of each cue was obtained. The results of a regression analysis revealed strong positive correlations between estimated cue validities and actual cue strengths for all but the youngest age groups. These results were interpreted as suggesting that cue validity is highly predictive of actual cue strengths. In addition, the strengths of the six cues varied as a function of the subject's age. Two additional factors were hypothesized to account for the performance of the older subjects: increased sensitivity to the reliability of cues and discourse-based constraints.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , February 1988 , pp. 129 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Ruth Berman, Brian MacWhinney, Janet McDonald and James McClelland for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank Lea Kalush for testing the children who participated in the study. This research was supported by NICHHD grant #HD 17790 to Brian MacWhinney.

References

REFERENCES

Ammon, M. S. & Slobin, D. I. (1979). A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentences. Cognition 7. 3–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, E., McNew, S., MacWhinney, B., Devescovi, A. & Smith, S. (1982). Functional constraints on sentence processing: A crosslinguistic study. Cognition 11. 245–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1987). Competition, variation and language learning. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Beilin, H. (1975). Studies in the cognitive basis of language development. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1978). Modern Hebrew structure. Tel Aviv, Israel: University Publishing Projects.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1981). Verb-pattern alternation: the interface of morphology, syntax, and semantics in Hebrew child language. Journal of Child Language 9. 169–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1986). Acquisition of Hebrew. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. & Dromi, E. (1983). On marking time without aspect in child language. Papers and Reports in Child Language Development 23.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. & Sagai, Y. (1981). [In Hebrew] Word formation and innovation in young children. Hebrew Computational Linguistics 18. 32–62.Google Scholar
Bolozky, S. & Saad, G. (1983). On active and non-active causativization verbs in Arabic and Hebrew. Journal of Arabic Linguistics 10. 71–80.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1979). The acquisition of complex sentences. In Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. (eds), Language acquisition: studies in first language development. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Chandler, J. P. (1969). Subroutine STEPIT–Finds local minima of a smooth function of several parameters. Behavioral Science 14. 81–2.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Clark, H. H. (1979). When nouns surface as verbs. Language 55. 767–811.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1973). The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: a critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12. 335–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dromi, E. & Berman, R. A. (1986). Language-specific and language-general in developing syntax. Journal of Child Language 13. 371–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fodor, J. A., Bever, T. G. & Garrett, M. F. (1974). The psychology of language: Introduction to psycholinguistics and generative grammar. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Frankel, D. & Arbel, T. (1981). Developmental changes in assigning agent relations in Hebrew: the interaction between word order and structural cues. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 32. 102–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hakuta, K. (1982). Interaction between particles and word order in the comprehension of simple sentences in Japanese children. Developmental Psychology 18. 62–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopper, P. J. & Thompson, S. A. (1980). Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56. 251–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kail, M. (in press). Cue validity, cue cost, and processing types in French sentence comprehension. In MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (eds) Cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1982). Language as a formal problem space. In Deutsch, W. (ed.), Child language: Beyond description. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Kilborn, K. & Ito, T. (in press). Sentence processing strategies in adult bilinguals. In MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (eds) Cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (1978). The acquisition of morphophonology. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (1987). The competition model. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Snow, C. (1985). The Child Language Database Exchange System. Journal of Child Language 12. 271–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B., Pleh, C. & Bates, E. (1985). The development of sentence interpretation in Hungarian. Cognitive Psychology 17. 178–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Massaro, D. W. (in press). A fuzzy logical model for speech perception. In Lea, W. A. (ed.), Towards robustness in speech recognition. Apple Valley MN: Speech Science Publications.Google Scholar
McDonald, J. (1984). The mapping of semantic and syntactic processing cues by first and second language learners of English, Dutch and German. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Carnegie-Mellon University.Google Scholar
Rom, A. & Dgani, R. (1985). Acquiring case-marked pronouns in Hebrew. Journal of Child Language 12. 61–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sheldon, A. (1974). On the role of parallel function in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13. 272–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, H. & Bronckardt, J. (1972). SVO–a linguistic universal? A study in developmental psycholinguistics. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 14. 329–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobinx, D. I. (1973). Cognitive prerequisites for the acquisition of grammar. In Ferguson, C. A. & Slobin, D. I. (eds), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. & Bever, T. G. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: A cross-linguistic study of word and inflections. Cognition 112. 229–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walden, Z. (1983). Children's construal of the root system in Hebrew. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation. Harvard University.Google Scholar
Yehoshua, A. (1979). [In Hebrew] hama'ahev ‘The lover’. Tenth editionTel Aviv, Israel: Schocken Publishing House.Google Scholar