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Research on second language learning by children with DLD has mainly focused on naturalistic L2 acquisition with plenty of exposure. Very little is known about how children with DLD learn foreign languages in classroom settings with limited input. This study addresses this gap and targets English as a foreign language (EFL) learning by Russian-speaking children with DLD. We ask whether learners with DLD benefit from a later onset of EFL instruction because older children are more cognitively mature and have more developed L1 skills. The second aim of this study is to determine whether EFL learners with DLD benefit from positive L1 transfer in vocabulary learning. We administered a receptive vocabulary test to younger (Grade 6, n = 18) and older (Grade 10, n = 15) children with DLD matched on the amount of prior EFL instruction. The younger group started EFL instruction in Grade 2 and the older group in Grade 6. The performance of the two groups was compared after four and a half years of English lessons. Half of the words in the test were English-Russian cognates and half were noncognates. Contra to our hypothesis, the results showed no difference between younger and older children. Both groups equally benefitted from cognate vocabulary suggesting that positive cross-language transfer is available to children with DLD, irrespective of their age and onset of EFL instruction.

This article presents a review of recent research on the acquisition of adjectives across languages and different learner groups. It has often been noticed in the literature that adjectives are problematic for different groups of learners (L1, L2, SLI, etc.) and that they are acquired later than nouns and verbs. This review aims to provide explanation of the adjective challenge based on empirical data from a number of recent studies. It is proposed that adjectives are difficult because they are relatively infrequent in the input, often have abstract meanings, depend on the nouns and because their learning involves enhanced attention control and theory of mind.

Nous commencerons par revenir sur le point soulevé par Steven GILLIS dans sa conférence, à savoir que dans la recherche sur l'acquisition du langage par l'enfant, on examine fréquemment le langage spontané, c'est-à-dire des corpus.Mirjam ERNESTUS (voir page 65) a montré la nécessité d'indices convergents. Si l’étude de corpus nous apprend quelque chose, elle doit nécessairement être complétée par des recherches sur la compréhension, par exemple, et par une approche expérimentale.Dans cette contribution nous présenterons deux études de cas portant sur un matériel linguistique précis, russe en l'occurrence, qui montrent ce qui peut se passer quand on utilise uniquement des données de corpus – c'est-à-dire à l'instar de 99% des études qui s'intéressent aux différences entre populations bilingues et populations atteintes de dysphasie. Nous montrerons ce qui arrive lorsqu'on n'utilise que ce type de données et à quelles conclusions erronées on risque de parvenir.

Prior research shows that morphological richness facilitates acquisition and that paradigm size is more important than uniqueness of form-function pairings (uniformity). The present paper takes a novel approach to uniformity, not restricted to inflectional morphology, and aims to establish whether morphological richness is more important than uniformity when competing forms from different linguistic levels are taken into account. To this end, the paper compares the acquisition of adjectival degree markers in Dutch and Russian. Dutch has scarce adjectival (degree) morphology, but more one-to-one form-function mappings, whereas the Russian system involves rich morphology, but little uniformity. A longitudinal study of spontaneous child speech and a cross-sectional elicitation experiment provide converging evidence that Russian children have more difficulty acquiring degree markers: their acquisition rate is lower and error rate higher. It is concluded that uniformity is more important than morphological richness, when cross-categorical cue competition (beyond inflectional morphology) is taken into account.

This study aims to establish whether connectives can create referential expectations in discourse, and, if so, what these expectations are based on: connective semantics or frequency distributions in language use. This was tested by comparing the processing of the connectives “and” and “but” in Dutch and Russian by means of an eye-tracking experiment using the visual world paradigm. A corpus study showed that in terms of frequency distributions, the Russian connectives are very similar to the Dutch connectives (“and” more often introduces reference maintenance and “but” more often introduces reference shift). In terms of semantics, the two languages are different, because only the Russian connectives are specified for maintenance/shift. The experimental results indicate that only Russian connectives are informative about referential development of discourse. Irrespective of frequency distributions, connectives are only used as processing instructions for referential development if reference maintenance or...

Research on the acquisition of relevance implicatures usually shows that it is not until age six that children learn to draw relevance inferences. However, Schulze et al. (in press) demonstrated that the ability of children to comprehend implicatures might have been underestimated due to the relatively complex and metalinguistic nature of the tasks. When implicature generation is naturally embedded in an ongoing interaction and supported by joint attention, even three-year-olds appear to succeed. The present paper develops this research path and tests comprehension of relevance implicatures based on adjectives in two experiments in which implicature reading was a necessary step in a shopping game. Experiment 1 demonstrated that five-year-olds are adult-like in drawing relevance inferences from evaluative adjectives used in argumentative contexts. Three-year-olds, although having more difficulty with negative items, still performed above chance across all conditions. Experiment 2 extended this finding to even younger children (2;6–3;6) and revealed that the presence of joint attention helps toddlers to comprehend negative utterances. Children not supported by joint attention performed at chance with indirect negative utterances, whereas children in the joint-attention condition coped equally well with positive and negative trials.

Research on specific language impairment (SLI) has primarily focused on the acquisition of nouns and verbs. Less attention has been given to other content-word classes, such as adjectives and adverbs. This article investigates adjective production by 7- to 10-year-old Russian-speaking children with SLI and their typically developing (TD) peers and focuses on the production of antonymous adjectives and degree markers in an elicitation experiment. The results show that degree morphology is more impaired in SLI than antonymy. In antonym production, children with SLI were able to catch up with their TD peers by age 8. In the domain of degree, however, the SLI group lagged behind the TD controls across all ages studied. Error analysis indicates that language-impaired children have particular difficulty with agreement inflection and affixal negations. They also substitute adjectives with specific meanings by more general terms. The implications of this study for the morphological-richness hypothesis are discussed.

Recent semantic studies show that adjectives differ in terms of the scalar structures associated with them, which has implications for patterns of degree modification. For example, relative adjectives in Dutch are associated with unbounded (open) scales and are, therefore, incompatible with maximizing adverbs (e.g. #helemaal groot ‘completely big’, #helemaal klein ‘completely small’). This paper tests the hypothesis that children acquire the relevant distinctions in the domain of boundedness in a piecemeal fashion by storing ready-made modifier-adjective pairings from the input and later generalizing over them. The results of the longitudinal corpus study of four degree adverbs in the spontaneous speech of nine children acquiring Netherlandic Dutch are consistent with the idea that language learners start by reproducing target-like modifier-adjective combinations stored as prefabs from the input. Once a critical mass of such adverb-adjective pairings has been stored, children make generalizations over the stored instances and proceed to productive use. This phase is marked by over-generalization errors that are attested, on average, six months after the emergence of a degree adverb. Most of the over-generalization errors involved combining a degree adverb with an adjective of an incompatible scalar structure. It is concluded that the acquisition of boundedness has a more protracted time course than has been hitherto assumed on the basis of comprehension experiments.

Maximizers - adverbs denoting a maximum degree of a property (e.g. completely) - are often re-conceptualized as boosters denoting a high degree (cf. very). As a result, these degree adverbs come to modify unbounded adjectives which are not compatible with the idea of a maximum value. Although this kind of meaning change proved cross-linguistically robust, the exact mechanisms of this process have never been investigated. The present paper aims to shed more light onto semantic and contextual factors facilitating combinations of open-scale (unbounded) adjectives with closed-scale (bounded) adverbs by analyzing the distribution of the Dutch maximizer helemaal in the Corpus of Spoken Dutch. Following the boundedness hypothesis, we hypothesized that configurational harmony destroyed by combinations of the maximizer helemaal with unbounded adjectives can be restored by either imposing scale boundaries onto, by default, unbounded adjectival scales, or by re-conceptualizing the degree adverb as an unbounded modifier. Both predictions were confirmed by the data in this study. The findings suggest that there is no one-to-one relationship between semantic classes of adjectives and scalar structures associated with them. Rather, scalar meanings are a matter of dynamic construal constrained by semantic properties of adjectives and degree modifiers, as well as by context and world knowledge. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.

This paper addresses one of the central assumptions in the analysis of scalar adjectives that their positive form is obligatorily interpreted vis-à-vis an average value. By this view, tall and taller than average are equivalent expressions. Counter to this well-established view, I argue that the two constructions are not equivalent; there are important semantic and functional differences between them. First, not all uses of the positive form are interpreted vis-à-vis an average value. Second, even in contexts where the average is relevant, it is not sufficient by itself: several standards of comparison are involved in the interpretation of scalar adjectives. Third, bare scalars and the Aer-than-average construction select different scale parts as their profile and are in this sense different construals of the gradual scale.

Принято считать, что прилагательные размера ориентированы на точку референции в центре градационной шкалы. В настоящей статье исследуется роль ЭГО (размеров человеческого тела) как дополнительной точки референции для интерпретации прилагательных размера. Критическому анализу подвергается гипотеза Е. В. Рахилиной (2000) о том, что ЭГО определяет дистрибуцию прилагательных невысокий и низкий в русском языке. Хотя результаты корпусного исследования и анкетирования не подтверждают гипотезу в абсолютном смысле, они явно указывают на тенденцию использовать невысокий для описания референтов выше человеческого роста, а низкий—для характеристики объектов ниже человеческого роста. Результаты также говорят об отсутствии комплементарных семантических отношений между данными прилагательными. Наблюдается значительное совпадение их семантических сфер при сохранении различных фокусных точек. Невысокий заимствует у прилагательного высокий ориентацию на антропоморфную вертикаль, в то время как его квазисиноним низкий ориентирован на вертикаль в самом широком смысле этого слова. Результаты настоящего исследования свидетельствуют о неадекватности общепринятого подхода, согласно которому прилагательные размера имеют только одну точку референции, поскольку этот подход не может объяснить особенности дистрибуции квазисинонимов и семантические различия между ними.

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16–36 months) acquiring eight different languages. Adjectives in child speech and child-directed speech were coded as either unrelated or related to a contrastive term in the preceding context. Results show large differences between children in the growth of adjective production. These differences are strongly related to contrast use. High contrast users not only increase adjective use earlier, but also reach a stable level of adjective production in the investigated period. Average or low contrast users increase their adjective production more slowly and do not reach a plateau in the period covered by this study. Initially there is a strong relation between contrast use in child speech and child-directed speech, but this relation diminishes with age.

This study seeks to establish whether and at what age children's language production reflects relevant semantic differences between nongradable adjectives, on the one hand, and various classes of gradable adjectives, on the other hand. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of adjectives in spontaneous speech samples from Dutch-speaking children aged 2 to 7 and their caregivers show that children reveal some sensitivity to scalar structures already at age 2. From the outset of adjective production, toddlers use degree markers (comparatives, superlatives, degree adverbs) to modify only gradable, but not nongradable adjectives. By age 4, the proportions of degree markers within the class of gradable adjectives are clearly contingent on the type of scalar structure associated with an adjective. The patterns in child speech reflect frequencies in child-directed speech. However, the frequency of context-dependent adjectives in child speech across all age groups is lower than predicted by the input. Although very few errors were attested in the domain of degree modification, the errors seem to persist until age 6. At this age, the proportion of degree adverbs in child speech reaches the adult level. The results are consonant with the idea that children construe scales through exposure to linguistic input, rather than on the basis of pre-linguistic conceptual distinctions.

A central assumption about relative adjectives (e.g., big, old) is that their positive form is interpreted vis-à-vis a class-specific reference point located in the midzone of a series (norm). More recently, functional-cognitive studies argued that other reference points (e.g., argumentative zero, endpoints) are more relevant in actual language use than a norm. This paper argues that the two positions are not necessarily irreconcilable and experimentally tests a hypothesis that a norm is a default reference point used for the interpretation of relative adjectives in zero contexts. Experiment 1 addressed the location of a norm in the midzone of a series and its category dependence. As predicted by the traditional semantic studies, the cutoff point between big and small is located around the midpoint of a scale. Furthermore, its location is category-dependentand sensitive to prototypicality effects. The results further indicate that adults easily compute a contextually relevant norm by integrating their world knowledge with the visually provided information. Experiment 2 investigated the relevance of a norm in the online processing of relative adjectives. The results suggest that language users indeed exploit norms for the interpretation of relative adjectives in real time.

The central claim of this paper is that Vantage Theory is able to provide a much-needed explanatory account of the seemingly unrelated differences between lexical and morphological antonyms of dimensional adjectives in Slavic languages. In a case study, I compare two antonyms of the Russian adjective vysokij ‘high’, a morphologically unrelated term nizkij ‘low’ and a morphologically related adjective nevysokij ‘not.high’. I argue that the two terms co-exist because they provide different ways of looking at the lower subscale of vertical size. The distribution exhibited by the adjectives under study is symptomatic of the dominant-recessive pattern of coextension identified by MacLaury in the domain of colour. Two sets of data – a corpus and an elicitation test – provide converging evidence that nizkij ‘low’ names the dominant vantage on the lower subscale: it is more frequent and evenly distributed over referent categories. Nevysokij ‘not.high’ is a recessive term: it is characterised by lower frequency, a rather narrow range of application, and a distribution skewed towards human referents. The findings from this study are compared to the results of earlier research on colour terminology, which raises several methodological questions concerning the application of Vantage Theory to lexical domains other than colour.

Insights from cognitive psychology indicate that the zero value on a scale is an important reference-point phenomenon in the processing of relative adjectives. However, linguistic evidence for the reference-point status of the zero value has not been provided hitherto. In this paper, I search for such evidence by analyzing the use of dimensional adjectives denoting vertical size in two languages - English and Russian. Three types of linguistic implications of the zero are discussed. First, the zero point is crucial to the account of markedness asymmetry between antonymous adjectives. Second, the reference-point status of the zero value motivates differences in the compatibility of relative adjectives with maximality adverbs in languages such as Russian. Third, the location of the zero point and the position of the entity vis-a-vis the zero point have implications for adjective-noun combinability.

The interpretation of size terms involves constructing contextually-relevant reference points by combining visual cues with knowledge of typical object sizes. This study aims to establish at what age children learn to integrate these two sources of information in the interpretation process and tests comprehension of the Dutch adjectives groot ‘big’ and klein ‘small’ by 2- to 7-year-old children. The results demonstrate that there is a gradual increase in the ability to inhibit visual cues and to use world knowledge for interpreting size terms. 2- and 3-year-old children only used the extremes of the perceptual range as reference points. From age four onwards children, like adults, used a cut-off point in the mid-zone of a series. From age five on, children were able to integrate world knowledge and perceptual context. Although 7-year-olds could make subtle distinctions between sizes of various object classes, their performance on incongruent items was not yet adult-like.