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The "Given-before-New" principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organized in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977; Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organize information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the "Dative Alternation" in Norwegian. In an experimental study, we investigate to what extent Norwegian children's and adults' sentence production is governed by givenness when the speaker chooses one word order over another. Our results suggest that givenness influences the word-order choices of both children and adults. However, children more often than adults tend to omit given recipients and have a tendency to produce prepositional datives even when the recipient represents given information. The results are discussed in light of previous acquisition findings and syntactic accounts of the phenomenon. We argue that children's behavior is not a result of a pragmatic deficit or an immature syntactic component per se but rather a failure to consistently integrate the two.

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture description task was used to set appropriate semantic contexts to prompt the production of scrambled structures. The results demonstrate that the children scrambled at higher rates in definite/partitive contexts than in indefinite/non-specific contexts. This suggests that children are susceptible to the same semantic features that are associated with NP scrambling in adult production. However, they differ from adults in pronominal scrambling and approximate adult scrambling behaviour only around four to five years. These findings underline the complex nature of syntax/semantics/phonology correlation in scrambling, and contribute to our understanding of the issue of optionality in child and adult grammar.

Aims and Objectives: The main goal of the present study is to investigate effects of crosslinguistic influence in third language acquisition by simultaneous bilinguals. We address the following research questions: Do both languages contribute to crosslinguistic influence in third language acquisition, or is one of them chosen as the sole source of influence? Is crosslinguistic influence always from the typologically more similar language? Is crosslinguistic influence always facilitative, or can it also be non-facilitative? Methodology: The paper reports on a grammaticality judgment task with two word order conditions, both related to verb movement (verb-second in Norwegian and subject-auxiliary inversion in English). Data and Analysis: An experiment was carried out with three groups of 11-14-year-old participants, Norwegian-Russian bilinguals (n=22), Norwegian-speaking monolinguals (n=46), and Russian-speaking monolinguals (n=31). The data were analyzed using a generalized linear mixed effects logistic regression allowing us to estimate the effects of condition (Adv-V, Aux-S), language (Norwegian, Norwegian-Russian, Russian) and their interaction on the correctness of judgments. Findings: The analysis reveals that while L1 Norwegian children over-accept ungrammatical sentences in English with a word order that reflects verb movement (V2), bilingual Norwegian-Russian children notice these errors significantly more often, just like L1 Russians. At the same time, the bilinguals score lower than L1 Russian children on grammatical trials, suggesting the presence of non-facilitative influence from Norwegian. Originality: This study argues for the Linguistic Proximity Model, which proposes incremental property-by-property learning and allows for both facilitative and non-facilitative influence from one or both of the previously acquired languages. Significance: The Linguistic Proximity Model and supporting experimental data contribute to existing models in third language acquisition by indicating that not just typological proximity but also structural similarity at an abstract level should be considered an important factor in third language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and research questions: This paper presents a new study addressing the issue of cross-linguistic influence in acquisition of referring expressions. The main research question is how to predict directionality of this influence in a dual language development. Methodology: The method is an elicited production task. We consider the phenomenon of direct object referring choices, i.e. noun, pronoun and null element, in a ‘null-object’–‘overt-object’ language pair (Ukrainian and English). Data and Analysis: Participants of the experiment are 4–6-year-old Ukrainian–English bilinguals (N20) and Ukrainian monolinguals (N21). The data are analyzed in the statistical program R, utilizing the R-library function lme4. The results are presented as odds ratios (ORs) of each direct object type. Findings: Our data reveal that while there is no significant difference in Ukrainian object types in most of the age groups, there is a considerable amount of null object usage in English at the ages of four to five. Originality: The innovative nature of this study lies in: (i) the consideration of a licit object omission at a later stage of language development (from 4 to 6 years of age); (ii) the examination of an under-investigated language combination (i.e. English and Ukrainian); and (iii) the innovative approach to linguistic data analysis (e.g. comparing OR values). Implications: Our findings suggest that the directionality of influence in dual language acquisition depends on the developmental stage, language-specific means of syntax–pragmatics interaction, and extra-linguistic input-related factors. At the early stages of development, the null-object language is likely to influence the overt-object language, especially under conditions of limited exposure to the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polish and Ukrainian pattern together syntactically in allowing various omissions in the same discourse settings, for example, when the referring element has been mentioned in a previous context. However, Ukrainian employs full object pronouns morphologically, whereas Polish uses clitics in the same environments. We exploit this contrast to compare the acquisition of clitics versus full pronouns, enriching previous accounts of omissions in child speech. The results of an elicited production experiment reveal that, in the two languages considered, 3- to 6-year-old children make no errors in direct object realization, but prefer to use null arguments up to the age of 5. It is crucial that there is no obvious difference between the acquisition patterns for clitics versus pronouns, which suggests that the morphophonological properties of direct objects are not primary predictors of object realization in languages that allow discourse-related omissions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]