Anat Ninio

Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor in Psychology
Department of Psychology
The Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Last date updated  November 20, 2009

Telephone at work: 972-2-5883045                          
FAX: 972-2-5881159
E-mail: msninio@mscc.huji.ac.il

 

Research interests:
Syntactic development and complexity theory; Communicative functions of speech and the interactive context of language acquisition; The interface of pragmatic and syntactic  development; Parental cognition and environmental effects on development.

 

Publications on language acquisition in the perspective of Complexity Theory

Selected publications on syntactic development
Selected publications on language acquisition in an interactive context
Selected publications on theoretical issues
Selected publications on parental cognition 

 

New Book:

 

Ninio, A. (in press). Syntactic development: Its input and output. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Ninio, A. (2006). Language and the learning curve: A new theory of syntactic development.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Reviews:

 

Journal of Child Language

The Times Higher Education Supplement

IASCL - Child Language Bulletin

International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders

Computational Linguistics

Studies in Second Language Acquisition

Natural Genesis: A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative  Organic Universe  

Infant and Child Development

SRCD Newsletter

First Language

Warning: Incorrect statements in the review in First Language

Language (in press)

 

Teaching:

University of Warsaw, Institute of English Studies

University of Edinburgh, Linguistics and English Language

Universidad de Navarra, Spain, Psychology of Language

 

 

Ninio, A. and Snow, E. C.  (1996).  Pragmatic development.   Boulder, CO:  Westview Press.

 

Reviews:

 

Language

First Language

 

Papers online:

 

Ninio, A. (in press). Review of Routes to language: Studies in honor of Melissa Bowerman, Edited by Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole. Psychology Press, 2008. First Language.

Ninio, A. (2009, April).  Input-output relations in syntactic development reflected in large corpora.  Poster presented at the 2009 Biennial Meeting of SRCD, Denver, Colorado, April 2-4, 2009. [PPT]

Ninio, A. (2008, September). Self-Organized Criticality and the properties of English. Paper presented at the 5th European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS 2008), Jerusalem, September 14-19, 2008.

 

Spharim, G. and Ninio, A. (2008, July). Aspect is not first: Children do not mistakenly map inherent lexical aspect to tense morphology. Poster presented at the 11th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Edinburgh, 2008.  [PPT]

 

Ninio, A. (2008, March). The past was just a moment ago: Past morphology in the speech of young children and their mothers.  Poster presented at the XVIth Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies, Vancouver, Canada, March 27-29. [PPT]

 

Ninio, A. (2007, March). Complex Systems' approach to the development of a morphological formclass. Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston, MA, March 29 - April 1. [PPT]

 

Ninio, A. (2006). Kernel vocabulary and Zipf's Law in maternal input to syntactic development.  In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia & C. Zaller (eds.), BUCLD  30: Proceedings of the 30th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. (pp. 423-431).  Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

 [PDF ].

 

Ninio, A. (2005).  Syntactic development: Lessons from complexity theory.

Paper presented at the Eight Annual Gregynog/Nant Gwrtheyrn Conference on Child Language, 6-8 April, 2006. (Based on Chapter 5 of Ninio, A. (2006). Language and the Learning Curve: The acquisition of syntax.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.)

 

Ninio, A. (2005). Adult-type grammatical relations in children's early language.  In B. Bokus (Ed.),  (2005). Studies in the psychology of child language (pp. 71-83). Warsaw: Matrix.

 

Ninio, A. (2005, November). Kernel vocabulary and Zipf's Law in maternal input to syntactic development. Paper presented at the 30th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, November 2005. 

 

Ninio, A. (2005). Accelerated learning without semantic similarity: indirect objectsCognitive Linguistics, 16, 531-556. 

Prefinal version; also [PDF ]. 


Ninio, A. (2005).  Testing the role of semantic similarity in syntactic development.  Journal of Child Language, 32, 35-61.


Ninio, A. (2004). Young children's difficulty with adjectives modifying nouns.  Journal of Child Language, 31, 255-285
.

 

Hershberg, U. and Ninio, A. (2004). Optimal exemplar learning in cognitive systems. Invited article for a special issue of Cognitive Systems (ESSCS) on Multidisciplinary Aspects of Learning, edited by G. Dalenoort & M. Pichat, 6, 181-188.  [PDF ].

 

Ninio, A. (2003). No verb is an island: Negative evidence on the Verb Island hypothesis. Psychology of Language and Communication, 7, 3-21. [PDF ].
 
Ninio, A. (2003). Analogy and transfer of learning in syntactic development.
Invited article for a special issue of Revue d'Intelligence Artificielle (RIA): Regards Croisés sur l'Analogie
, edited by Karine Duvignau, Olivier Gasquet & Bruno Gaume.  17 813-821.
 
Ninio, A. (2001). Pragmatic keywords and the first combining verbs in children's speech. Invited article for a special issue on Pragmatic Development, edited by Haydee Marcos. First Language, 21, 433-460.  [text]

 


Ninio, A. (1999). Learning from examples in syntactic development. Keynote address at the 11th Australasian Human Development Conference, Sydney University, Sydney, Australia, July 9, 1999.  [text]  

 

Ninio, A. (1999). Model learning in syntactic development: Intransitive verbs.
Invited article for a special issue on Cross-linguistic Studies of Early Grammar, edited by M.M. Vihman.  International Journal of Bilingualism , 3, 111-131.

[PDF] [postscipt] or [compressed postscript]

Ninio, A. (1999). Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity. Journal of Child Language, 26, 619- 653.  Also [PDF] [postscipt] [compressed postscript] or [HTML]

Ninio, A. and Snow, C. (1999).  The development of pragmatics: Learning to use language appropriately.  Invited chapter, in T. K. Bhatia & W. C. Ritchie (Eds.), Handbook of language acquisition (pp. 347-383).  New York: Academic Press. Prefinal version.

 

Ninio, A. (1998).  Acquiring a dependency grammar: The first three stages in the acquisition of multiword combinations in Hebrew-speaking children. In G. Makiello-Jarza, J. Kaiser & M. Smolczynska (Eds.), Language acquisition and developmental  psychology.  Cracow: Universitas.

 

Ninio, A. (1996).  A proposal for the adoption of dependency grammar as the framework for the study of language acquisition.  In G. Ben Shakhar & A. Lieblich (Eds.), Volume in Honor of Shlomo Kugelmass (pp. 85-103). Jerusalem: Magnes.

 

Ninio, A. (1996, July).  Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development.  Paper presented at the Seventh International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Istanbul, Turkey.

 

Ninio, A. (1994). Predicting the order of acquisition of three-word constructions by the complexity of their dependency structureFirst Language, 14, 119-152.

 

Ninio, A. (1994, January). Words with holes:  The acquisition of the predicateness of predicates.  Paper presented at the Emory Conference on Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Grammatical Development, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

 

Ninio, A. (1993). On the fringes of the system: Children's acquisition of syntactically isolated forms at the onset of speech. First Language, 13, 291-313.

 
Ninio, A. (1993). Is early speech situational? An examination of some current theories about the relation of early utterances to the context. In D. Messer & G. Turner (Eds.), Critical influences on language acquisition and development (pp. 23-39). London: Macmillan.

 

Ninio, A. and Goren, H. (1993). PICA-100: Parental Interview on 100 Communicative Acts. Coding manual distributed by the Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.


Ninio, A. (1992). The social bases of Cognitive/Functional Grammar: Commentary on Tomasello, M. (1992), The social bases of language acquisition. Social Development, 1, 155-158.
  

Ninio, A. (1992). The relation of children's single word utterances to single word utterances in the input. Journal of Child Language, 19, 87-110.

 

Ninio, A. (1991, April).  Introduction to the Ninio and Wheeler taxonomy of verbal communicative acts and to the INCA abridged version.   Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, Washington, April, 1991.

 

Ninio, A. (1990).  The genome might as well store the entire language in the environment. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 746-747.


Ninio, A. (1988).  On formal grammatical categories in early child language.  In Y. Levy, I. Schlesinger, & M. D. S. Braine (Eds.), Categor­ies and processes in language acquisition (pp. 99-119).  Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.  

Also [PDF]

Ninio, A. and Snow, C. (1988).  Language acquisition through language use: The functional sources of children's early utterances.  In Y. Levy, I. Schlesinger, and M. D. S. Braine (Eds.), Categories and processes in language acquisition (pp. 11-30).  Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

 

Ninio, A. (1988). The roots of narrative: Discussing recent events with very young children. Invited article for a special issue on Child Language Acquisition, edited by B. G. Blount. Language Sciences, 10, 35-52. [PDF]


Ninio, A. and Rinott, N. (1988). Fathers' involvement in the care of their infants and their attributions of cognitive competence to infants. Child Development, 59, 652-664.  [PDF]

 

Ninio, A. and Wheeler, P. (1987).  A manual for classifying verbal communicative acts in mother-infant interaction – Revised.  Working Papers in Developmental Psychology, No. 1. Jerusalem: The Martin and Vivian Levin Center, Hebrew University.
 

Ninio, A. (1986).  The direct mapping of function to form in children's early language. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 15, 559 (Abstract).

 

Ninio, A. (1985). The meaning of children's first words: Evidence from the input. Invited article for a special issue on Pragmatic Aspects of Lexical Acquisition and Development, edited by J. Streeck. Journal of Pragmatics, 9, 527-546. [PDF]

 

Ninio, A. and Wheeler, P. (1984).  Functions of speech in mother-infant interaction.  In L. Feagans, G.J. Garvey, & R. Golinkoff (Eds.), The origins and growth of communication (pp. 196-207).  Norwood, NJ: Ablex. [PDF]


Ninio, A. (1983). Joint bookreading as a multiple vocabulary acquisition device. Developmental Psychology, 19, 445-451. [PDF]

 

Ninio, A. (1980). Picture-book reading in mother-infant dyads belonging to two subgroups in Israel. Child Development, 51, 587-590.  [PDF]

 

Ninio, A. (1979).  The naive theory of the infant and other maternal attitudes in two subgroups in Israel. Child Development, 50, 976-980. [PDF]

 

Ninio, A. and Bruner, J. (1978). The achievement and antecedents of labelling. Journal of Child Language, 5, 1-15. [PDF]

 

Ninio, A. and Lieblich, A. (1976).  "The grammar of action": "Phrase-structure" in children's copying.  Child Development, 47, 846-849.  [PDF]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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