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.
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Roth, F.P., Davidge, N.S. Are early verbal communicative intentions universal? A preliminary investigation. J Psycholinguist Res 14, 351–363 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067880
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067880