The results of longitudinal study, based on the corpus data of an oral personal discourse of 4-6 - year - old children are presented in the paper. The data were collected by means of the innovative methodological approach The Methodology for Simulation a Peer Conversation (MeSPeC) . During the analysis, a distribution of passages of different discourse genres and their developmental changes along the four wawes were estimated. In the paper, the fundamental patterns of the oral discourse acquisition are discussed with the main focus on the genre variability changes along the children’s age.

Among the multiple examples of visual semiosis in culture, particular attention is paid to painted (or drawn) objects such as pictures, book illustrations, separate items and some compositions in design and ads. There is a lot of evidence to recognize painting as the means of communication in the cultural space and as a visual language. Still, it should be noted that, from a semiotic perspective, painting has been discussed less than writing in literature. The question “What should be recognized as a sign in a painted object?” is still open. The issues of the main semiotic features of the visual sign, its structure and semantic components, as well as its pragmatic meaning are still debatable. In the current study, visual semiosis development is the main topic of discussion. The theoretical background of this study includes the culture-historical theory of Lev Vygotsky, the culture semiosphere concept of Yuri Lotman, and some conceptual arguments about the visual semiosis stated by Charles Sanders Peirce, Roland Barthes, and Winfried Nöth. In children’s subculture, painting is a highly attractive and frequent activity. There is a plenty of evidence that children’s painting activity is usually communicatively oriented, and this is an essential point of the pragmatics of visual semiosis. Following Lotman, the authors divide children’s visual communication into the Self-Other and I-I types. Visual communication is highly represented in both of them. In fact, the given communication types are relevant to personal and cross-cultural communication. The latter one means a dialogue between the child and the adult culture. The current study is based on multiple research publications about the development of children’s pictorial language and on the authors’ own data. The study addresses the genesis of structural, semantic, and pragmatic features of the visual sign. [...]

The article is devoted to the comprehension of written and oral artistic narrative texts by students in grades 3-4 of one public school. The results of the study confirmed our assumption that children who have a poor understanding of written text also have difficulty understanding spoken text.

A number of studies in language acquisition have dealt with parts of speech (PoS). Mainly, a growth of noun and verb diversity, as well as a variety of inflections have been evaluated separately from other PoSs. However, the PoSs play a unique functional role of building blocks interacted to each other in utterance, text, and discourse. The more a speech development progresses, the more skillfully and flexibly children manipulate with different PoSs to produce structurally well-organized and semantically transparent discourse. Our paper aims at analyzing a distribution of all PoSs in different discourse genres in preschool children. The cross-linguistic study was based on a corpus data of Russian (N = 12) and Lithuanian (N = 24) monolingual typically-developing 6-year-olds. Subcorpus No. 1 consisted of fictional narratives elicited according picture sequences. Following the RAIN methodology, Russian children were asked to tell a story according one picture sequence and then to retell a story according to another picture sequence; the sessions were separate by a few minutes of a conversation between a child and an experimenter. Lithuanian children were asked to tell a story according one picture sequence. To sum up, subcorpus No. 1 consistend of 24 narratives (2451 word tokens) (re-)told by Russian subjects and 24 narratives (2467 word tokens) told by Lithuanians. Subcorpus No.2 consisted of semi-structured dialogues between a child and an experimenter. Russian data (6710 word tokens) consisted of conversations based on standard comprehension questions about the (re-)told narratives; while Lithuanian data (5207 word tokens) consisted of semi-structured interwiev about a child’s favourite school subjects and activities. [...]

The paper focuses on a pragmatic and structural analysis of interrogative repetitions that are typically frequent in child-directed speech (CDS). The cross-linguistic analysis is based on longitudinal corpus data of Russian and Lithuanian, two highly inflected Indo-European languages with rich morphology. Despite the numerous studies oflanguage acquisition in both languages, their CDS have so far escaped comprehensive analysis. A special focus of this study was on redundancy, a typical characteristic of CDS. In line with our previous studies, we proceeded from the ideathat it is the caregivers’ frequent repetition of children’s utterances that may generally be a cause for the so-called CDSredundancy. Our results highlighted numerous communicative similarities between the Russian and Lithuanian CDS, the pragmatics and structural diversity of repetitions among them. The majority of repetitions occur in conversation. It appears that both Russian and Lithuanian caregivers of various age, social groups or kinship status intuitively use conversational repetitions for elaborating a conversation and thus stimulating children’s communicative development. Among all structural types of repetitions, expansions and reformulations seem to be the most frequent, i. e., both Russian- and Lithuanian-speaking caregivers prefer modification of the children’s previous utterances to pure or focus-repetitions. Also, they seem to be similarly sensitive to children’s grammatically correct vs. erroneous utterances. Specifically, they tend to expand children’s grammatically correct utterances and to reformulate the erroneous ones (however, metadiscursive direct corrections were similarly rare in both corpora). The results of the study confirm a prediction about the frequency of repetitions in CDS. However, we still assume that this kind of redundancy should be recognized as a natural and even necessary element of CDS, especially at early language acquisitionstages. [...]