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Limits on negative information in language input.

J L Morgan, L L Travis

Journal of Child Language

|October 1, 1989

Summary

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Parental responses like repetitions and questions may signal grammatical errors to children. However, this study found such corrective feedback is infrequent and diminishes as children

Area of Science:

Child language acquisition
Developmental linguistics
Psycholinguistics

Background:

Previous research suggested parental repetitions and clarification questions offer subtle cues to children's grammatical errors.
This study investigates the role of negative input in language learning, specifically focusing on overgeneralization errors.

Observation:

Parental responses to grammatical errors were analyzed in transcripts of children Adam, Eve, and Sarah.
Expansions and clarification questions, potential corrective feedback, occurred more frequently after ill-formed utterances in Adam's and Eve's input, but not Sarah's.

Findings:

Corrective parental responses constituted a small fraction of all adult responses to grammatical errors.
These corrective responses decreased in frequency even as children continued to make overgeneralization errors.

Related Experiment Videos

Implications:

The study questions the general availability and effectiveness of negative input for language acquisition.
Findings suggest that explicit negative feedback is not a consistently incorporated feature of child-directed speech.