To what extent do children's expressions of time actually refer to time? An investigation into the temporal and discursive usages of temporal adverbs in family interaction

We report two corpus-based studies that investigated temporal adverbs in Finnish child-parent interaction between the children's ages of 1;7 and 4;11. Study 1 shows that the two corpus children used temporal adverbs to construe both temporal and discursive meanings from their early adverb production and that the children's usage syntactically broadly reflected the input received. Study 2 shows that the discursive uses of adverbs appeared to be learned from contextually anchored caregiver constructions that convey discourse functions like urging and reassuring, and that the usage is related to the children's and caregivers' interactional roles. Our study adds to the literature on the acquisition of temporal adverbs by demonstrating that these items are learned also with additional discursive meanings in family interaction.PMID:38646693 | DOI:10.1017/S0305000924000114
Source: Journal of Child Language - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: research