Presenter: Amanda Hammons
Mentor: Rose Maier, Dare Baldwin
Poster: 17
Major: Psychology & German
Marcus (1993) argues that recasts (feedback on children’s speech errors provided via a corrected version of the utterance) are of little value for language acquisition: although parents recast children’s errors, they also recast well- formed utterances. Perhaps, however, parents provide pedagogical cues that distinguish recasts with corrective versus non-corrective intent. If so, children might be especially receptive to recasts accompanied by corrective intent, and update their linguistic constructions accordingly. To test this, 5- and 6-year-old children are introduced to two novel verbs in present tense forms. Both verbs take irregular past tense forms, modeled after real irregular verbs in English (e.g. ling/lang modeled after ring/rang), so children’s initial attempts to use the past tense are typically overgeneralizations (e.g. linged). The experimenter recasts these errors in two conditions: In the informative condition, pedagogical cues signaling corrective intent accompany recasts. In the uninformative condition, recasts are linguistically identical but lack pedagogical cues to corrective intent. If these cues help children disambiguate corrective versus non-corrective recasts, children in the informative condition should show greater preference for the correct (irregular) past tense form over the incorrect (overgeneralized) form. This work contributes to the growing body of research on children’s use of social cues to disambiguate linguistic input in the service of language acquisition.