Search

This squib investigates the nature of the phenomenon of isomorphism, which expresses the observation that young children, unlike adults, display a strong preference for the interpretation of sentences containing negation and quantified noun phrase (NPs) that corresponds to the surface syntactic position of these scope-taking operators. The authors focus on sentences containing negation and indefinite objects. Based on the intuition that indefinites can give rise to what has been called either a presuppositional/quantificational or a cardinal interpretation, they propose that isomorphism, as it pertains to indefinite objects, arises when children fail to select the so-called presuppositional interpretation of the NP and its associated logical representation. This account predicts that when plain NPs like some Ns and two Ns are replaced by inherently presuppositional ones, such as partitives, children should be more likely to access the nonisomorphic, wide-scope interpretation of the indefinite objects with respect to negation. This prediction is tested and verified in two experiments designed to assess young children's interpretation of sentences containing negation and partitive NPs in object position.

Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to all) in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical entries with some. Such is the case with some in English and unos and algunos in Spanish. Indeed, Heritage Spanish-English bilinguals have been documented as diverging from monolingual children and adults in their interpretation of algunos, which is said to lexically encode this upper-bounded meaning, although early Heritage bilinguals do not demonstrate this knowledge robustly. In this article, we ask how pervasive this challenge is by (a) investigating whether the same pattern holds in English, where there are not two words for some, and (b) comparing the pragmatic process for some to other linguistic items that either invoke another pragmatic process (particularized conversational implicature) or a semantic upper bound. Our results strongly suggest that the extended process of fine-tuning of quantificational lexical entries within and across languages precedes a pragmatic comparison of alternatives, but at the same time, Heritage bilinguals demonstrate pragmatic awareness beyond generalized conversational implicatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that the pattern and timing of ordinal acquisition differs substantially from that of cardinals and is influenced by different language-specific factors, such as (ir)regular ordinal morphology, superlative morphology, and the singular-plural distinction. We discuss data from a Give X task (Wynn 1992) administered to 77 Dutch monolinguals (2;11-6;04) that support a so-called knower-level acquisition pattern (e.g., Le Corre & Carey 2007) for Dutch cardinals but show a more complex picture for ordinals, which are acquired around the time a child masters the necessary counting principles and becomes a CP (cardinal principle) knower. Not only is the tiered pattern absent in regular low ordinals, we also see that it takes time for children to link drie ‘three’ to irregular derde ‘third.’ We take this as evidence that ordinals are acquired via rules, rather than being stored lexically one by one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Syrett (2013), three experiments explored children’s ability to distinguishattributives(e.g., “three-pound strawberries,” where MPs as adjectives signal reference to attributes) versuspseudopartitives(e.g., “three pounds of strawberries,” where MPs combine withofto signal part-whole relations). Given the systematic nature of the syntax-semantics mapping, we asked whether children are able to use syntax to interpret how entities are quantified. In Experiment 1, four- and five-year-olds were asked to choose between two characters for the one who was selling appropriate items matching an attributive or pseudopartitive expression. In Experiment 2, children of the same age heard items described with a phrase using either an attributive, a pseudopartitive, “each” (“each weighs three pounds”), or “all together” (“all together they weigh three pounds”). At test, with some items removed, children were asked whether the same phrase applied to the remaining items (e.g., “Does Dora still havethree-pound strawberries?”). Children did not distinguish between attributives and pseudopartitives but did so for “each” and “all together.” Experiment 3 extends the age range with a third experimental design. Children heard “each” or “all together” descriptions (e.g., “each strawberry weighs three pounds”) and judged, at test, which of two characters “said it better” (i.e., “Mickey says ‘these aretwo pounds of strawberries,’ but Donald says ‘these aretwo-pound strawberries.’”). Children under 6 were at chance. Together, the three experiments suggest that despite its systematicity, children do not automatically appreciate the mapping between syntax and semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This cross-linguistic study evaluates children’s understanding of passives in 11 typologically different languages: Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish. The study intends to determine whether the reported gaps between the comprehension of active and passive and between short and full passive hold cross-linguistically. The present study offers two major findings. The first is the relative ease in which 5-year-old children across 11 different languages are able to comprehend short passive constructions (compared to the full passive). The second and perhaps the more intriguing finding is the variation seen across the different languages in children’s comprehension of full passive constructions. We argued, based on the present findings, that given the relevant linguistic input (e.g., flexibility in word order and experience with argument reduction), children at the age of 5 are capable of acquiring both the short passive and the full passive. Variation, however, stems from the specific characteristics of each language, and good mastery of passives by the age of 5 is not a universal, cross-linguistically valid milestone in typical language acquisition. Therefore, difficulties with passives (short or full) can be used for identifying SLI at the age of 5 only in those languages in which it has already been mastered by typically developing children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain cross-linguistic differences discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this brief article is to investigate four-year-olds' interpretation of attributive measure phrases (MPs), such as3-pound, and the role of cardinality in mediating children's responses. In two experiments, I demonstrate that children at this age are starting to recognize that such MPs refer to a property of an individual, such as weight per unit (rather than the weight of an entire collection). Accordingly, they distinguish between attributive and pseudopartitive MPs. However, when the opportunity presents itself to treat the number word as referring to the cardinality of a set, some children succumb to this pressure, deviating from adult-like responses. I argue that the fundamental aspect of number word meaning that children take the first few years of life to master—that number words denote exact cardinality of a set of discrete objects—is precisely the aspect they must overcome when interpreting these MPs. However, the evidence shows that four-year-olds are well on their way to doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the acquisition of object shift in Norwegian child language. We show that object shift is complex derivationally, distributionally, and referentially, and propose a new analysis in terms of IP-internal topicalization. The results of an elicited production study with 27 monolingual Norwegian-speaking children (ages 4;05–7;00) reveal a prolonged delay in the acquisition of object shift with topical individuated pronominal objects. At the same time, we observe target-like placement and prosodic marking of contrastive, possessive, and indefinite pronouns, which do not shift. In our account of the observed delay we refer to the complexity models proposed by Yang (2002, 2004, 2005, 2010) and Hudson Kam & Newport (2005, 2009). In light of Yang's productivity model we argue that not shifting object pronouns is the rule, and OS is the exception. In light of Hudson Kam & Newport's approach to complexity, we argue that the children perceive OS as an inconsistent operation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children, it is very low in Spanish-speaking children. We argue that this difference can be attributed to a property of their respective grammars (the presence or otherwise of past participle agreement when objects cliticize) under the Unique Checking Constraint of Wexler (1998). In a second experiment, we confirm the robustness of early sensitivity to past participle agreement; through a grammaticality judgment task we find a statistically significant difference between the two languages. We show that the parametric approach postulated can be extended, for mandatory, overt objects, beyond Catalan and Spanish, broadening the empirical scope of the Unique Checking Constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a study of a between-subjects design experiment on the comprehension of telicity in simple telic predicates (e.g., John filled the bucket) and locatum predicates (e.g., the water filled the bucket) in L1 Spanish. Weist, Wysocka, and Lyytinen (1991) for English and Finnish, and Van Hout (1997, 1998b) for English and Dutch have shown that children up to age 6;06 allow simple telic predicates to have both telic and atelic interpretations. The main objective of this article is to show that children aged 3;09 allow locatum structures to be interpreted as telic, like adults, but allow simple telic predicates to have telic and atelic interpretations. The central claim is that in simple telic predicates, telicity is checked by covert movement, while in locatum predicates, telicity is checked by overt movement. Children misinterpret simple telic predicates because covert movement is an operation that takes place after the branching off to the PF component, but perform like adults when overt movement is involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the acquisition of the discourse/pragmatic notion of topic, based on an experimental task eliciting topic vs. focus subjects. In spoken French, these are obligatorily realized as dislocated vs. nondislocated noun phrases. The results provide overwhelming evidence for the early mastery of topic, even by the youngest children (2;6). The only difficulty was in the evaluation of fine-grained salience distinctions, leading to the underuse of full noun phrases in ambiguous contexts. A theory of mind test revealed that the ability to assess their listener's knowledge state is not sufficient to explain this underuse. Instead, children's overreliance on the situational context as a source of complementary information to disambiguate their utterances is argued to have a major impact on how explicit they are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines noun-drop constructions in French-speaking children. French being intermediate between English (which rarely allows noun-drop) and Spanish (which freely allows it) with respect to the richness of their respective morphological systems, it provides a fertile testing ground for various agreement-based analyses of noun-drop. We conclude, along with Snyder, Senghas, & Inman (2001) that agreement is not a factor in the licensing of these constructions. Moreover, limitations on the occurrence of this phenomenon (i.e., not all adjective types allow it) in French lead us to propose that semantic, rather than syntactic, factors are responsible for noun-drop in French, i.e., partitivity and atomization (in the sense of Bouchard 2002). This in turn assigns the determiner a more important role than had previously been assumed in the licensing of noun-drop. Ultimately, our analysis illustrates how child language can be used to discriminate between competing analyses of a given syntactic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Article omission is known to be a feature of early grammar, although it does not affect all child languages to the same extent. In this article we analyze the production of articles by 12 children, 4 speakers of Catalan, 4 speakers of Italian, and 4 speakers of Dutch. We consider the results in the light of (i) the adult input the children are exposed to, (ii) the prosodic properties of articles in the three languages, and (iii) the properties of the syntax-semantics mapping of nouns in the languages under consideration. We show that the proportion of bare nouns (grammatical or ungrammatical) in the adult input does not bear any systematic relation to child production/omission of articles and that the full developmental pattern observed can be explained by appealing to the role of the nominal mapping parameter (NMP) in guiding acquisition, in conjunction with prosodic properties of articles and with discourse conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much developmental work has been devoted to scalar implicatures. These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how Some pragmatically implies Not all) that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded meaning of these terms (wherein Some is compatible with All). In three experiments, we gauge children's performance with scalars while investigating four factors that can have an effect on implicature production: (i) the role of (the presence or absence of) distractor items; (ii) the nature of the task (verbal judgments versus action-based judgments); (iii) the choice of scalar expression (the French quantifier quelques versus certains); and (iv) the type of scale that contextualizes the weak utterance (the affirmative All versus the negative None). Experiment 1 replicated earlier findings showing that 9-year-olds are more likely than adults to consider as true statements such as Some turtles are in the boxes (uttered when all turtles are in the boxes) while employing the quantifier certains in a truth evaluation task containing multiple distractor items. The task in Experiment 2 increased implicature production across all ages (4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds as well as adults) but maintained the developmental effect while using quelques in an action-based task containing no distractor items. Experiment 3 showed that 9-year-olds are more likely to produce implicatures with quelques than they are with certains in the action task while adults are not affected by the choice of term. Overall, these results identify seemingly harmless task features that can prevent even older children (9-year-olds) from carrying out implicatures (e.g., through the inclusion of distractors) while also showing how implicature production among even young children (4- to 5-year-olds) can be facilitated by task features (e.g., the use of an action task) and without the introduction of special training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on language acquisition has recently focused on the interaction between quantifiers and negation. One generalization presented in the literature is the so-called Observation of Isomorphism, the observation that children's semantic scope coincides with syntactic scope (see Musolino (1998)). The most recent contribution to the debate on scope resolution is due to Gennari and MacDonald(2005/2006) (G&M henceforth). Their proposal attempts to derive the Observation of Isomorphism from the distributional properties of the input to which children are exposed. The article presented here evaluates the proposal by G&M. First, we review the existing findings on children's interpretation of negative quantified sentences. The findings show that the generalization presented by Musolino (1998) is incorrect, thereby calling into question any attempt to derive that generalization. Second, we highlight children's ability to go beyond the input, an issue that must be addressed by G&M if they want to derive any generalization about child language from the properties of the input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by adult models of language production and comprehension, we investigate whether children's nonadult interpretation of ambiguous negative quantified sentences reflects their sensitivity to distributional patterns of language use. Studies 1 and 2 show that ambiguous negative quantified sentences of the sort typically used in acquisition studies are strongly avoided in adult production and are judged as poor alternatives by adults. Corpus Studies 3 and 4 show that children and adults overwhelmingly use quantifiers and negation in ways that promote one interpretation of these ambiguous quantified sentences over others. We argue that these patterns guide children's ambiguity resolution processes and explain children's interpretations of ambiguous quantified sentences. The origin of distributional patterns in adult production processes is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the correspondence conditions that hold between certain semantic relations—including part-whole relations, possession, location, and the semantic features [± animate] or [± count]—and certain syntactic structures including genitives and relative clauses. The objective is to determine the extent to which these correspondence conditions derive from Universal Grammar or are "learned" by children in response to input from caretakers and others. Interface conditions imposed by Universal Grammar (UG) are expected to appear early in the course of language development despite the vagaries of the primary linguistic data. In this article, we show that children as young as 3 years old adhere to specific semantic distinctions and to specific constraints on the mapping of these distinctions onto syntactic structures. Moreover, the children show more stringent adherence to interface conditions than adult speakers of the same languages do, indicating that children's mapping relations between syntax and semantics are not based on their experience but rather are projected from UG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Number acquisition is a field of research with a wealth of studies mainly by psychologists. In this article, I try to add some linguistic insights. To acquire all number words with their meanings as a basis for further mathematical thinking-at least other numerals than those for small numerosities like [two] or [three] (and maybe [four])-a child has to learn a number sequence as a list of speech forms meaningless at first. It is claimed that general principles of rhythm and coordination explain the child's ability to learn by rote a sequence of such speech forms and their word class. I show that these principles also apply in the acquisition of sequences of the names of the days of the week and the names of the months. As far as the development of the counting abilities for numbers up to [a hundred] is concerned, I argue that the particular rhythmical structure of the sequence provides the child with the raw material to develop a concept "decade word." The child will have to learn by rote a second sequence, that is, the sequence of the decade numbers [10, 20, 30, etc.]. This is an important step in the detection of the algorithm that ultimately makes the generation of all natural numbers possible. I argue that the theory of reduction from Lerdahl and Jackendoff's (1996) generative theory of music may explain this step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I present a new syntactic analysis of the negative marker no in child English. The main claim of the article is that the majority of no constructions in early child English are determiner phrases (DPs) in which no appears as a determiner. This claim is supported on the basis of distributional and morphosyntactic tests, a discourse analysis of children's elliptical negatives, and a comparison of no constructions in child and adult English. These results suggest that the Sentence Operator analysis, the standard analysis of child English no for more than 30 years, is untenable as a general analysis of child English no. The results also suggest that although children make many mistakes using no, they represent no as a determiner in abstract syntax and control the Phonetic Form principles that regulate the use of discourse ellipsis with no DPs at a very early age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the use of tense, agreement, and non-tense morphemes and associated distributional contingencies in the language production of Quebec French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing language and age-matched controls. We sought to determine whether the Optional Infinitive/Extended Optional Infinitive (OI/EOI; e.g., Rice & Wexler (1996)) pattern of normal and impaired developmental language in English occurs in French as well. In so doing, we also sought to explore the possibility that certain kinds of finite verb forms can pattern as root infinitives in some languages including French. Our results indicate that SLI in French has the majority of the EOI characteristics displayed in English SLI, such as variable use of tense-marking morphemes combined with accuracy of form choice, obedience to distributional contingencies associated with finiteness, and relatively nonvariable use of non-tense grammatical morphemes. Our results also provide support for French SLI being an extension of an earlier stage in normal development. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that the finite verb stem in French appears to act as a root infinitive along side the nonfinite verb forms. Accordingly, we suggest that the (Extended) Optional Infinitive account could be renamed the (Extended) Optional Default account in order to include certain finite forms as well as nonfinite forms as root infinitives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we report results of an interpretive task showing that both native speakers of French and English-speaking classroom learners of French exhibit knowledge of the event sensitivity associated with quantification at a distance (QAD). We argue that such knowledge seems reliably acquirable only if both first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) acquisition are subject to domain-specific constraints. We consider two sources for such domain-specific knowledge: the native grammar and Universal Grammar. We also consider the acquisition of the interpretive properties of QAD under domain-general learning in which syntax is a categorial extension of interpretive operations to linguistic categories. Without syntax-specific computational principles restricting the application of such operations, it appears that, given the nature of the input, domain-general assumptions do not guarantee that the QAD word order maps to the interpretation it actually receives. We argue that in both L1 and L2 acquisition of French, the interpretation of QAD is constrained by (on the most parsimonious account, the same) domain-specific principles because in both cases the input the language acquirer receives grossly under-determines the grammatical knowledge attained. This suggests that syntax-specific computational principles must restrict the hypothesis space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I distress the syntactic properties of child Dutch root infinitives (RIs) in light of recent findings concerning the structure of adult Dutch. The data examined offer support for those analyses that treat RIs in terms of truncated structures and speak against proposals that interpret RIs as root CPs. In the discussion I focus on one analysis representative of the truncation approach, namely, that developed by Rizzi (1993; 1993/1994), and on one analysis representative of the CP approach, that developed by Boser, Lust, Santelmann, and 'Whitman (1992), which is specifically adapted to the Germanic verb-second (V2) languages. This research is based on a corpus of production data for the child, Hein, from ages 2;4 to 3;1, obtained from CHILDES (MacWhinney and Snow (1985), coders: Wijnen and Boers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]