ERIC Number: EJ1391190
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023-Oct
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0142-7237
EISSN: EISSN-1740-2344
Thought and Language: Association of Groupmindedness with Young English-Speaking Children's Production of Pronouns
Vasil, Jared; Moore, Charlotte; Tomasello, Michael
First Language, v43 n5 p516-538 Oct 2023
Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking children's first-person plural, first-person singular, second-person, third-person plural, and third-person singular pronouns. As a proportion of pronouns, children used more first-person plural pronouns, only, after 3;0 compared to before. Additionally, children used more 1pp. pronouns when their mothers used more 1pp. pronouns. As a proportion of total utterances, all pronoun classes were used more often as children aged. These findings suggest that a shift in children's social conceptualizations at age 3 is reflected in their use of 1pp. pronouns.
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Preschool Children, Language Acquisition, Language Usage, Bayesian Statistics, Comparative Analysis, Mothers, Parent Child Relationship, Age Differences, Cognitive Development, Child Development, English, Social Cognition, Developmental Stages, Psycholinguistics, Databases
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
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