Missing Agreement: Where is it Dialect and Where Deficit?

2016

Linguistic theory, if conceived as providing a framework for grammars that are mental representations of linguistic competence, should constitute an important part of a theory of language development, i.e., a theory of how cltildren acquire language. Despite this obvious point and the recent proliferation of developmental psycholinguistic literature, there exists a gap between studies of linguistic theory and of language development in children. This dissertation 1s one attempt to fill this gap between the two fields. The aim of this dissertation 1s to test experimentally whether some alleged linguistic universals in recent theories of generative grammar play a role in language development in children. We have taken up the Subjacency Condition and Binding Theory, both discussed in recent literature in generative grammar. Our experiments point

On the basis of the Leonard corpus in the Child Language Data Exchange System, the present paper tries to evaluate Wexler, Schütze & Rice's (1998) two-factor account of specific language impairment (SLI), the Agreement and Tense Omission Model (ATOM), and to figure out the nature of syntactic errors made by SLI children. The result shows that the SLI children in the Leonard corpus did experience difficulties in the use of the third-person, singular, present tense -s and the preterite verb forms as predicted by ATOM. However, it is found that these SLI children mark tense better than agreement. ATOM cannot explain such a discrepancy. In addition, it is shown that case marking is unimpaired in these children's grammars. Therefore, an alternative account which claims that nominative case is assigned by an interpretable mood feature on T is adopted in order to account for the findings here. Moreover, it is found that these SLI children do not have any problem with A-movement. ...

Interlanguage studies bulletin (Utrecht), 1990

This paper continues the debate concerning the availability of Universal Grammar (UG) to adult L2 acquirers. Specifically, an analysis of native (prodrop) Romance speakers' acquisition of negative placement in L2 German is provided. Contrary to Clahsen (1987; 1988a) and Clahsen and Muysken (1988), we argue that a UG-based analysis for the three stages of NEGplacement is not only possible but in fact provides independent support for UG-based analyses of the developmental sequence found in L1 Romance, L2 German Verb placement (duPlessis et al, 1987; Schwartz and Tomaselli, 1988). In particular, by combining (1) aspects of the L 1 grammar with (2) the independently needed changes in parameter values (characterizing principal differences between the L1 and L2 grammars), we arrive at a non- ad hoc account. We also show how the resolution of additional problems concerning the data of this same set of L2 acquirers naturally follows from the analysis argued for. Finally, some discussion...

… in child language. De Gruyter, Berlin, 2010

One central property of human language is that, in general, adult speakers can understand whatever they produce and adult listeners can produce whatever they understand. This observed symmetry between production and comprehension might not, however, be an inherent property of grammar. It is well-known that children sometimes understand meanings that they do not yet correctly produce. Recent studies have also provided evidence that children sometimes correctly produce forms that they do not yet understand. Such delays in comprehension have been found in areas as diverse as object pronouns, indefinite noun phrases, prosody and contrastive stress, word order and structural attachment (see Hendriks and Koster 2010, for discussion). Many of these delays occur relatively late in acquisition, after age 5 or even later, resulting in a gap between correct production and correct comprehension that can span several years. Such asymmetries in language acquisition present a real challenge to rule-based systems of grammar. If children know a rule of grammar, they should be able to use this rule in production and comprehension alike. So, how can asymmetries between comprehension and production in child language be explained? Taking object pronouns as an example, previous accounts of children's acquisition have attempted to explain comprehension errors as resulting from a lack of pragmatic knowledge necessary to distinguish exceptional cases from the standard pattern (Thornton and Wexler 1999), from insufficient working memory capacity for the parser to compare alternative forms and meanings (Reinhart 2006), or as an experimental artifact due to an unbalanced context (Conroy et al. 2009). One common denominator in all these accounts is that they fail to provide a detailed explanation of children's successful production of object pronouns. The general solution of arguing that asymmetries arise as a result of difficulties at the interface with other linguistic modules and do not reflect core properties of the grammar also makes it difficult to explain why certain delays occur only in particular syntactic environments or only in par

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1996

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as well as Typically Developing (TD) children, are sensitive to the same hierarchical and locality factors that characterise agreement in adult grammars. This sensitivity holds even though DLD children show accrued difficulties in more complex agreement configurations. In the first experiment, a forced-choice task was used to establish whether children are more affected in the computation of S-V agreement when an element intervenes hierarchically or linearly in the agreement relation: DLD children are more subject to attraction errors when the attractor intervenes hierarchically, indicating that DLD children discriminate between hierarchical and linear configurations. The second experiment, also conducted through a forced-choice task, shows that the computation of agreement in DLD children is more ‘fragile’ than in TD children (and also in children with a primary impairment in the phonological domain), in that it is more sensitive to the factors of complexity identified in Moscati and Rizzi's (2014) typology of agreement configurations. To capture the agreement pattern found in DLD children, we put forth a novel hypothesis: the F ragile C omputation of A greement H ypothesis . Its main tenet is that DLD children make use of the same grammatical operations employed by their peers, as demonstrated in Experiment 1, but difficulties increase as a function of the complexity of the agreement configuration.

Language, 2014

In many different domains of language acquisition, there exists an apparent learnability problem to which innate knowledge of some aspect of universal grammar (UG) has been proposed as a solution. The present article reviews these proposals in the core domains of (i) identifying syntactic categories, (ii) acquiring basic morphosyntax, (iii) structure dependence, (iv) subjacency, and (v) the binding principles. We conclude that, in each of these domains, the innate UGspecified knowledge posited does not, in fact, simplify the task facing the learner.

Journal of Neurolinguistics, 2004

We report a study on the spoken production of subject -verb agreement in number by four age groups of normally developing children (between 5 and 8;5) and a group of 8 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; between 5;4 and 9;4), all French speaking. The production of verb agreement was experimentally elicited by asking children to complete sentence preambles containing a head noun and a potentially attracting 'local noun'. In contrast to previous studies that focused on attraction with local nouns within the subject constituent (postmodifiers), we also studied attraction with local nouns in structures that are not part of the subject constituent (interpolated adjuncts). In normally developing children, we report that (1) attraction effects appear from early on;

Language Contacts Meet English Dialects: Studies in Honor of Markku Filppula, 2009

A very traditional way of looking at non-standard varieties of English around the world consists in listing the grammatical properties (phonological, morpho-syntactic) that distinguish them from the standard varieties (e.g. double negation, special agreement patterns, absence of dental fricatives, etc.). This general approach is well established and has resulted in important and valuable handbook descriptions of English varieties (e.g. Burchfield 1994;. More recent handbook descriptions (e.g. follow this traditional format-even though they discuss phonology and morpho-syntax in different volumes-but also provide systematic summaries that chart the non-standard grammatical features that have been observed across varieties of English against those varieties in which they actually occur. In its basic outline these summaries follow the format laid out by the World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005) as well as its more recent sibling project The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures (Michaelis et al. forthc.). The overall aim common to all these projects is to chart the grammatical features found in varieties and/or languages and thus to enable the analyst to perform systematic comparisons across languages and their varieties. The ultimate objectives are to gain a better understanding of what the patterns and limits of variation are, to identify constraints between and across grammatical features and to help uncover the workings of our linguistic capacity.

Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2011

In a previous study of language production, a group of Hungarian-speaking children with language impairment (LI) committed a larger number of errors than typically developing peers on verb inflections that mark person, number, tense, and definiteness (Lukács et al. 2009b). However, the error forms produced often differed from the correct form by only a single dimension (e.g., person, number, tense, or definiteness) with no single dimension proving consistently problematic. In the present study, we sought to determine whether a similar pattern applied to the children's understanding of verb inflections, as reflected in a grammaticality judgment task. We compared the performance of 17 Hungarian-speaking children with language impairment (LI) between ages 8;0 and 11;9 with typically developing children between 6;10 and 11;1 years individually matched on receptive vocabulary raw scores (VC) and also to a control group of children matched on chronological age (AC; between 8;1-12;1). We obtained grammaticality judgments for 68 sentences, including 56 ill-formed sentences that contained a single error of person, number, tense, definiteness, or morphophonology. As the AC group performed at ceiling, the analysis focused on comparisons between the LI and VC groups. Besides comparing accuracy scores in the two groups, we tested how well performance could be predicted by a test of grammatical comprehension (TROG) and a measure of

This paper reviews evidence for strong interaction between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in the area of language acquisition, language processing, and language disorders. It is argued that this type of frequency-­based bias must be taken into consideration not only in research on temporality but also in any areas of language sciences.

2008