Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

, Volume 14, Issue 4, pp 351–363 | Cite as

Are early verbal communicative intentions universal? A preliminary investigation

  • Froma P. Roth
  • Nancy S. Davidge
Article
Accepted:

Abstract

This longitudinal study was conducted to provide preliminary information about the universality of early verbal communicative intentions. Three children whose native languages differ were videotaped in spontaneous mother-child interactions at 2-week intervals between MLU 1.0 and 2.0. The languages studied were American English, Danish, and Serbo-Croatian. Each child utterance was coded for the communicative intention expressed using a modified version of Dale's (1980) taxonomy. Findings indicate that all subjects used the full range of intentions. Overall, the intentions used most frequently were Naming and Attributes. Crosslinguistic similarities were also noted in patterns of intention usage as a function of increasing MLU. Results support the view that early verbal intentions are language-learning universals. However, no support was found for the universal-sequence hypothesis.

Keywords

Longitudinal Study Cognitive Psychology Native Language Full Range Preliminary Investigation 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Plenum Publishing Corporatin 1985

Authors and Affiliations

  • Froma P. Roth
    • 1
  • Nancy S. Davidge
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Hearing and Speech SciencesUniversity of MarylandCollege Park

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