Article published In:
Language, Interaction and AcquisitionVol. 5:2 (2014) ► pp.185–226
Development of adjective frequencies across semantic classes
A growth curve analysis of child speech and child-directed speech
This paper is a longitudinal investigation of adjective use by children aged 1;8−2;8, speaking Dutch, German, French, Hebrew, and Turkish, and by their caregivers. Each adjective token in transcripts of spontaneous speech was coded for semantic class. The development of adjective use in each semantic class was analysed by means of a multilevel logistic regression. The results show that toddlers and their parents use adjectives more often as the child grows older. However, this holds only for semantic classes denoting concrete concepts, such as physical properties, colour, and size. Adjectives denoting more abstract properties are barely used by children and parents throughout the first year of adjective acquisition. The correlations between adjective frequencies in child speech and child-directed speech are very strong at the beginning, but decrease with time as the child develops independent adjective use. The composition of early adjective lexicons is very similar in the five languages under study.
References (91)
Aksu-Koç, A. (2011). An exploration of the emergence of adjectives in Turkish. In E.E. Taylan & B. Rona (eds.), Puzzles of language: Essays in honour of Karl Zimmer (103–120). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
Aksu-Koc, A., Terziyan, T. & Taylan, E.E. (2012). Input offers and child uptakes: Acquiring modal morphology in Turkish. Paper presented at the Early Language Acquisition Conference, Lyon, December 5–7.
Andrick, G.R. & Tager-Flusberg, H. (1986). The acquisition of color terms. Journal of Child Language 131, 119–134. 
Baltes, T.B. & Nesselrode, J.R. (1979). History and rationale of longitudinal research. In J.R. Nesselrode & T.B. Baltes (eds.), Longitudinal research in the study of behaviour and development (1–39). New York: Academic.
Barner, D. & Snedeker, J. (2008). Compositionality and statistics in adjective acquisition: 4-year-olds interpret tall and short based on the size distributions of novel noun referents. Child Development 791, 594–608.
Barrett, M. (1995). Early lexical development. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (eds.), The handbook of child language (362–392). Oxford: Blackwell.
Barsalou, L.W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 221, 577–609.
Bartlett, E.J. (1976). Sizing things up: The acquisition of the meaning of dimensional adjectives. Journal of Child Language 31, 205–219.
Bassano, D. (1998). Sémantique et syntaxe dans l’acquisition des classes de mots: l’exemple des noms et des verbes en français. Langue française 1181, 26–48.
. (2000). Early development of nouns and verbs in French: Exploring the interface between lexicon and grammar. Journal of Child Language 271, 521–559.
Behrens, H. (2006). The input-output relationship in first language acquisition. Language and Cognitive Processes 211, 2–24.
Berman, R.A. (1988). Word-class distinctions in developing grammars. In Y. Levy, I.M. Schlesinger & M.D.S. Braine (eds.), Categories and processes in language acquisition (45–72). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bhat, D.S.N. (1994). The adjectival category: Criteria for differentiation and identification. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bittner, D., Dressler, W.U. & Kilani-Schoch, M. (eds.) (2003). Development of verb inflection in first language acquisition: A cross-linguistic perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Blackwell, A.A. (2005). Acquiring the English adjective lexicon: Relationships with input properties and adjectival semantic typology. Journal of Child Language 321, 535–562.
Bolinger, D. (1967). Adjectives in English: attribution and predication. Lingua 181, 1–34.
Booth, A.E. & Waxman, S.R. (2009). A horse of a different color: Specifying with precision infants’ mappings of novel nouns and adjectives. Child Development 801, 15–22.
Bornstein, M.H. (1985). On the development of color naming in young children: Data and theory. Brain and Language 261, 72–93.
Brewer, W. & Stone, J.B. (1975). Acquisition of spatial antonym pairs. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 191, 299–307.
Caselli, M.C., Bates, E., Casadio, P. & Fenson, J. (1995). A cross-linguistic study of early lexical development. Cognitive Development 101, 159–199.
Clark, E.V. (1973). What’s in a word? On the child’s acquisition of semantics in his first language. In T.E. Moore (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language (65–110). New York & London: Academic Press.
Clark, H.H. & Murphy, G.L. (1982). Audience design in meaning and reference. In J.F. LeNy & W. Kintsch (eds.), Language and comprehension (287–299). Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company.
Creissels, D. (2005). La notion d’adjectif dans une perspective typologique. In J. François (ed.), L’adjectif en français et à travers les langues (73–88). Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen.
Cruse, D.A. (1977). A note on the learning of colour names. Journal of Child Language 41, 305–311.
Dixon, R.M.W. (1982). Where have all the adjectives gone? And other essays in semantics and syntax. Berlin: Mouton.
Dixon, R.M.W. & Aikhenvald, A.Y. (eds.) (2004). Adjective classes: A cross-linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dromi, E. (1987). Early lexical development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ebeling, K.S. & Gelman, S.A. (1994). Children’s use of context in interpreting “big” and “little”. Child Development 651, 1178–1192.
Ferris, D.C. (1993). The meaning of syntax: A study in the adjectives of English. London & New York: Longman Publishing Group.
Frawley, W. (1992). Linguistic semantics. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In S.A. Kuczaj (ed.), Language development, vol. 2. Language, thought and culture (pp. 301–334). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
. (2006). Why verbs are hard to learn. In K. Hirsch-Pasek & R. Golinkoff (eds.), Action meets word: How children learn verbs (544–564). New York: Oxford University Press.
Gentner, D. & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relativity and early word learning. In M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (215–256). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldstein, H. (1979). The design and analysis of longitudinal studies: Their role in the measurement of change. London: Academic Press.
. (1987). Multilevel models in educational and social research. London: Griffin.
Graham, S.A., Cameron, C.L. & Welder, A.N. (2005). Preschoolers’ extension of familiar adjectives. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 911, 205–226.
Harris, P.L., Morris, J.E. & Terwogt, M.M. (1986). The early acquisition of spatial adjectives: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language 131, 335–352.
Healy, M.J.R. (1989). Growth curves and growth standards. The state of the art. In J.M. Tanner (ed.), Auxiology ‘88: perspectives in the science of growth and development (1–29). London: Smith Gordon.
Hirsh Pasek, K & Michnik Golinkoff, R.M. (2006). Actions meet words: How children learn verbs. New York: Oxford University Press.
Istomina, Z.M. (1963). Perception and naming of color in early childhood. Soviet Psychology and Psychiatry 11, 37–45.
Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Kilani-Schoch, M. & Xanthos, A. (2013). The adjective petit ‘small, little’ in French acquisition data: an example of the relationship between pragmatics and morphosyntactic development. Journal of Pragmatics 561, 113–132.
Klibanoff, R.S. & Waxman, S.R. (2000). Basic level object categories support the acquisition of novel adjectives: Evidence from preschool-aged children. Child Development 711, 649–659.
Korecky-Kröll, K. (2011). Early adjectives in input and output: Syntactic and morphological analyses and results. Paper presented at the 12th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Montreal, July 23.
Kowalski, K. & Zimiles, H. (2006). The relation between children’s conceptual functioning with color and color term acquisition. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 941, 301–321.
Lewis, D. (1976). General semantics. In B. Partee (ed.), Montague grammar (1–50). New York: Academic Press.
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maouene, J., Laakso, A. & Smith, L.B. (2011). Object associations of early-learned light and heavy English verbs. First Language 311, 109–132.
Maratsos, M.P. (1973). Decrease in the understanding of the word “Big” in pre-school children. Child Development 441, 747–752.
Marvin, C., Beukelman, D. & Vanderhoof-Bilyeu, D. (1994). Vocabulary use patterns by preschool children: Effects of context and time sampling. Augmentative and Alternative Communication 101, 224–236.
Mintz, T.H. (2005). Linguistic and conceptual influences on adjective acquisition in 24- and 36-month-olds. Developmental Psychology 411, 17–29.
Mintz, T.H. & Gleitman, L. (2002). Adjectives really do modify nouns: The incremental and restricted nature of early adjective acquisition. Cognition 841, 267–293.
Nelson, K. (1976). Some attributes of adjectives used by young children. Cognition 41, 1–31.
Ninio, A. (1988). On formal grammatical categories in early child language. In Y. Levy, I.M. Schlesinger & M.D.S. Braine (eds.), Categories and processes in language acquisition (11–30). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
O’Hanlon, C.G. & Roberson, D. (2006). Learning in context: Linguistic and attentional constraints on children’s color term learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 941, 275–300.
Panagiotidis, P. (2011). A generative theory of categorical features. Ms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pitchford, N.J. & Mullen, K.T. (2001). Conceptualization of perceptual attributes: A special case for color? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 801, 289–314.
Quené, H. & Van den Bergh, H. (2008). Examples of mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects and with binomial data. Journal of Memory and Language 591, 416–425.
Ravid, D. & Nir, M. (2000). On the development of the category of adjective in Hebrew. In M. Beers, B. van den Bogaerde, G. Bol, J. de Jong & C. Rooijmans (eds.), From sound to sentence: Studies on first language acquisition (113–124). Groningen: Center for Language and Cognition.
Ravid, D., Dressler, W.U., Nir-Sagiv B., Korecky-Kröll, K., Souman, A., Rehfeldt, K., Laaha, S., Bertl, J., Basbøll, H. & Gillis, S. (2008). Core morphology in child directed speech: Crosslinguistic corpus analyses of noun plurals. In H. Behrens (ed.), Corpora in language acquisition research (25–60). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Roget, P.M. (1965). The St. Martin’s Roget’s thesaurus of English words and phrases. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Rusiecki, J. (1985). Adjectives and comparison in English. London & New York: Longman.
Salerni, N., Assanelli, A., D’Odorico, L. & Rossi, G. (2007). Qualitative aspects of productive vocabulary at the 200- and 500-word stages: A comparison between spontaneous speech and parental report data. First Language 27(1), 75–87.
Sapir, E. (1944). Grading: A study in semantics. Philosophy of Science 111, 93–116.
Savickiene, I. & Dressler, W.U. (2007). The acquisition of diminutives: A cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Saylor, M.M. (2000). Time-stability and adjective use by child and adult English speakers. First Language 201, 91–120.
Siegel, M.E.A. (1980). Capturing the adjective. New York & London: Garland Publishing.
Smith, L.B. (1989). From global similarities to kinds of similarities. The construction of dimensions in development. In S. Vosniadu & A. Ortony (eds.), Similarity and analogy (146–178). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, L.B., Cooney, N.J. & McCord, C. (1986). What is “high”? The development of reference points for “high” and “low”. Child Development 571, 583–602.
Smith, L.B., Jones, S.S. & Landau, B. (1996). Naming in young children: A dumb attentional mechanism? Cognition 601, 143–171.
Soja, N.N. (1994). Young children’s concept of color and its relation to the acquisition of color words. Child Development 651, 918–937.
Stephany, U. & Voeikova, M.D. (eds.) (2009). Development of nominal inflection in first language acquisition: A cross-linguistic perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Stevens, E., Blake, J., Vitale, G. & Macdonald, S. (1998). Mother-infant object involvement at 9 and 15 months: Relation to infant cognition and early vocabulary. First Language 181, 203–222.
Stolt, S., Haataja, L., Lapinleimu, H. & Lehtonen, L. (2008). Early lexical development of Finnish children: A longitudinal study. First Language 281, 259–279.
Taylor, J.R. (1992). Old problems: Adjectives in Cognitive Grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 31, 1–35.
Tribushinina E. (2013a). Adjective semantics, world knowledge and visual context: Comprehension of size terms by two- to seven-year-old Dutch-speaking children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 42(3), 205–225.
Tribushinina, E. (2013b). Spatial adjectives in Dutch child language: Towards a usage-based model of adjective acquisition. In C. Paradis, J. Hudson & U. Magnusson (eds.), Conceptual spaces and the construal of spatial meaning: Empirical evidence from human communication (263–286). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tribushinina, E. & Gillis, S. (2012). The acquisition of scalar structures: Production of adjectives and degree markers by Dutch-speaking children and their caregivers. Linguistics 501, 241–268.
Tribushinina, E., Gillis, S. & De Maeyer, S. (2013). Infrequent word classes in the speech of two- to seven-year-old children with cochlear implants and their normally hearing peers: A longitudinal study of adjective use. Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology 771, 356–361.
Tribushinina, E. & Levie R. (2011). Semantic categories in early adjective lexicons. Paper presented at the 12th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Montreal, July 23.
Van den Bergh, H., Rijlaarsdam, G., Janssen, T., Braaksma, M., Van Weijen, D. & Tillema, M. (2009). Process execution of writing and reading: Considering text quality, learner and task characteristics. In M. Shelly, B. Hand & L. Yore (eds.), Quality research in literacy and science education: International perspectives and gold standards (399–426). Berlin: Springer.
Van de Weijer, J. (1999). Language input for word discovery. Doctoral dissertation, Katholieke Universisiteit (MPI Series in Psycholinguistics 9), Nijmegen.
Van Veen, R. (2011). The acquisition of causal connectives: The role of parental input and cognitive complexity. Utrecht: LOT.
Van Veen, R., Evers-Vermeul, J., Sanders, T. & Van den Bergh, H. (2009). Parental input and connective acquisition in German: A growth curve analysis. First Language 291, 267–289.
Vendler, Z. (1968). Adjectives and nominalizations. The Hague & Paris: Mouton.
Voeikova, M.D. (2011). Rannie ėtapy usvoenija det’mi imennoj morfologii (Early stages in the acquisition of nominal morphology). Moscow: Znak.
Voeikova, M.D. & Dressler, W.U. (eds.) (2002). Pre- and protomorphology: Early phases of morphological development in nouns and verbs. München: Lincom.
Waxman, S.R. & Booth, A.E. (2001). Seeing pink elephants: Fourteen-month-olds’ interpretations of novel nouns and adjectives. Cognitive Psychology 431, 217–242.
Waxman, S.R. & Klibanoff, R.S. (2000). The role of comparison in the extension of novel adjectives. Developmental Psychology 361, 571–581.
Wood, D., Bruner, J.S. & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Child Psychiatry 171, 89–100.
Xanthos, A., Laaha, S., Gillis, S., Stephany, U., Aksu-Koç, A., Christofidou, A., Gagarina, N., Hrzica, G., Ketrez, F.N., Kilani-Schoch, M., Korecky-Kröll, K., Kovačević, M., Laalo, K., Palmović, M., Pfeiler, B., Voeikova, M.D. & Dressler, W.U. (2011). On the role of morphological richness in the early development of noun and verb inflection. First Language 311, 461–479.
Cited by (18)
Cited by 18 other publications
Durston, Laura, Michael T. Clarke & Gloria Soto
2024. What relationships exist between nouns and verbs and the use of prepositions, adverbs, and adjectives in children and adolescents who use speech generating devices?. Augmentative and Alternative Communication ► pp. 1 ff. 
Ivanova-Sullivan, Tanya, Natalia Meir & Irina A. Sekerina
2024. Fine-grained differences in gender-cue strength affect predictive processing in children: Cross-linguistic evidence from Russian and Bulgarian. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 242 ► pp. 105868 ff.
Surakka, Maija & Minna Kirjavainen
2024. 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. Journal of Child Language ► pp. 1 ff.
RICHES, Nick
2023. Exploring early syntactic generalisation: evidence from a growth curve analysis of Spanish “se” constructions. Journal of Child Language ► pp. 1 ff.
Fuchs, Zuzanna
2022. Eyetracking evidence for heritage speakers’ access to abstract syntactic agreement features in real-time processing. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Grinberg, Dana, Bonnie Levin-Asher & Osnat Segal
2022. The Myth of Women's Advantage in Using Child-Directed Speech: Evidence of Women Versus Men in Single-Sex–Parent Families. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 65:11 ► pp. 4205 ff.
Korecky-Kröll, Katharina, Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Veronika Mattes & Wolfgang U. Dressler
2022. Morphological Verb Families in German-Speaking Children and Parents of Two SES Backgrounds According to a Groundbreaking Model by Dorit Ravid and Colleagues. In Developing Language and Literacy [Literacy Studies, 23], ► pp. 495 ff.
Rodrigue-Schwarzwald, Ora
2022. Tracking a Morphological Pattern: miCCaC in Hebrew. In Developing Language and Literacy [Literacy Studies, 23], ► pp. 685 ff.
Tribushinina, Elena, Marinka Willemsen, Esmee Kramer & Pim Mak
2022. Incremental Processing of Prenominal Modifiers by Three-Year-Olds: Effects of Prototypicality and Contrast. In Developing Language and Literacy [Literacy Studies, 23], ► pp. 81 ff.
Davies, Catherine, Jamie Lingwood, Bissera Ivanova & Sudha Arunachalam
2021. Three-year-olds' comprehension of contrastive and descriptive adjectives: Evidence for contrastive inference. Cognition 212 ► pp. 104707 ff.
Lustigman, Lyle
2021. The emergence and development of complex predicates in early child Hebrew. First Language 41:4 ► pp. 430 ff.
Pettibone, Erin, Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux & Gabrielle Klassen
2021. Old Grammars New (?) Scope: Adjective Placement in Native and Non-Native Spanish. Languages 6:1 ► pp. 22 ff.
DAVIES, Catherine, Jamie LINGWOOD & Sudha ARUNACHALAM
2020. Adjective forms and functions in British English child-directed speech. Journal of Child Language 47:1 ► pp. 159 ff.
Weicker, Merle & Petra Schulz
2019. Red train, big train, broken train. In Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 63], ► pp. 203 ff.
Nir, Bracha
2016. Development of intra- and inter-clausal dependency in Hebrew. In Acquisition and Development of Hebrew [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 19], ► pp. 259 ff.
Ravid, Dorit, Amalia Bar-On, Ronit Levie & Odelia Douani
Ravid, Dorit, Amalia Bar-On, Ronit Levie & Odelia Douani
2021. Chapter 5. Hebrew adjective lexicons in developmental perspective. In Polylogues on The Mental Lexicon, ► pp. 109 ff.
Tribushinina, Elena
2015. Acquisition of adjectival degree markers by Dutch- and Russian-speaking children. Linguistics in the Netherlands 32 ► pp. 155 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.