Project Vari
Managing linguistic variation in monolingual preschool children
This project investigates how preschool children cope with linguistic variation. The focus is on the acquisition of adjectives such as big, clean or yellow. The project thus contributes to the question of how children acquire the grammatical rules of their first language and the meaning of utterances when the linguistic input is ambiguous.
The Vari project analyses the language acquisition of monolingual German children of preschool age. We are particularly interested in the acquisition of linguistic phenomena that allow for variation in word order in sentences and in the meaning of words and sentences. The aim of the project is to find out how children deal with this variation in linguistic input.
The project focuses on the acquisition of adjectives such as big, clean or yellow. Adjectives are among the first words that children use. However, compared to nouns and verbs, they make up a smaller proportion of children’s vocabulary and the acquisition of the different meanings and uses of adjectives can continue until they start school. For this reason, the Vari project is investigating the production and understanding of adjectives in 3- to 5-year-old children. One study looks at variation in the use of different adjectives (e.g. the big yellow ball or the big yellow ball). On the one hand, comprehension is tested using adjectives whose meaning varies more or less depending on the context (e.g. big mouse vs. big elephant; yellow plate vs. yellow jumper). On the other hand, we analyse how the presence of adjectives such as clean influences the interpretation of sentences (The man wipes the table clean vs. The man wipes the table).
Selected publications
Li, D., Grohe, L., Schulz, P. & Yang, C. (2021). The distributional learning of recursive structures. In D. Dionne & L.-A. Vidal Covas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 471-485). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Weicker, M. & Schulz, P. (2020). Not Everything Needs to Be Big or Small: Evidence from Children’s Interpretation of Vague Adjectives. In M. M. Brown & A. Kohut (eds.), Proceedings of the 44th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 724-737). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Weicker, M. & Schulz, P. (2019). Red train, big train, broken train – semantic and syntactic aspects of adjectives in child language. In M. Rispoli & T. Ionin (eds.), Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research (pp. 203-221). Language Acquisition and Linguistic Disorders Series. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.