Pub Date : 2022-04-25DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2022.2049600
Bassil Mashaqba, Aya Daoud, Wael Zuraiq, A. Huneety
ABSTRACT This article investigates the production of the emphatic consonants /ṭ, ḍ, ṣ/ by typically developing Jordanian children. Sixty typically developing monolingual Ammani Arabic-speaking children (30 boys and 30 girls) with ages ranging from 2 to 7;11 years were recruited in a production experiment. In the experiment, they were asked to produce 18 minimal pair words with emphatic consonants and their corresponding plain coronals in all word positions. Contrary to Amayreh & Dyson (1998) and Hamdan & Amayreh (2007), >50% of Ammani Arabic-speaking children produced emphatic consonants by the age of 3, >75% produced them by the age of 4, and >90% produced them by the age of 5. Acoustically, they produce them in an adult-like manner at the age of 6 word-initially and medially and at the age of 7 word-finally. The acoustic measurements confirm that children’s productions become increasingly adult-like with age. Compared with nonemphatic consonants, the appearance of emphatics tends to be delayed in Ammani Arabic. This delay in the production of emphatics, which are among the least frequently occurring consonants in Arabic, is likely due to their articulatory complexity, which involves a secondary co-articulation (the so-called pharyngealization). The current findings help clarify the developmental trajectory of children’s acquisition of emphatic consonants and should be informative for both researchers and clinicians.
{"title":"Acquisition of emphatic consonants by Ammani Arabic-speaking children","authors":"Bassil Mashaqba, Aya Daoud, Wael Zuraiq, A. Huneety","doi":"10.1080/10489223.2022.2049600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2022.2049600","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates the production of the emphatic consonants /ṭ, ḍ, ṣ/ by typically developing Jordanian children. Sixty typically developing monolingual Ammani Arabic-speaking children (30 boys and 30 girls) with ages ranging from 2 to 7;11 years were recruited in a production experiment. In the experiment, they were asked to produce 18 minimal pair words with emphatic consonants and their corresponding plain coronals in all word positions. Contrary to Amayreh & Dyson (1998) and Hamdan & Amayreh (2007), >50% of Ammani Arabic-speaking children produced emphatic consonants by the age of 3, >75% produced them by the age of 4, and >90% produced them by the age of 5. Acoustically, they produce them in an adult-like manner at the age of 6 word-initially and medially and at the age of 7 word-finally. The acoustic measurements confirm that children’s productions become increasingly adult-like with age. Compared with nonemphatic consonants, the appearance of emphatics tends to be delayed in Ammani Arabic. This delay in the production of emphatics, which are among the least frequently occurring consonants in Arabic, is likely due to their articulatory complexity, which involves a secondary co-articulation (the so-called pharyngealization). The current findings help clarify the developmental trajectory of children’s acquisition of emphatic consonants and should be informative for both researchers and clinicians.","PeriodicalId":46920,"journal":{"name":"Language Acquisition","volume":"29 1","pages":"441 - 456"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49658562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-22DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2022.2043328
Cecile McKee, Dana Mcdaniel, M. Garrett
ABSTRACT Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and three-clause structures in active and passive voice. The complex structures included complements and relative clauses. The experiment yielded 1,884 utterances that were coded for lexical, grammatical, and fluency factors. Articulation rate was calculated for the 790 fully fluent utterances. Age, utterance length, and structure affected rate. Increases in rate as speakers age are generally taken to reflect gains in proficiency as the complex skills of language production are practiced. The length effect is tentatively explained in terms of a strategy that adjusts the time to articulate different structures. Central analyses found passives articulated faster than actives, and subject (passive) relative clauses articulated faster than object (active) relative clauses. These structural effects—the rate increase in passives and rate decrease in object relatives—support a planning-based account that hinges on filler-gap dependencies.
{"title":"Fast passives, slow relatives","authors":"Cecile McKee, Dana Mcdaniel, M. Garrett","doi":"10.1080/10489223.2022.2043328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2022.2043328","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and three-clause structures in active and passive voice. The complex structures included complements and relative clauses. The experiment yielded 1,884 utterances that were coded for lexical, grammatical, and fluency factors. Articulation rate was calculated for the 790 fully fluent utterances. Age, utterance length, and structure affected rate. Increases in rate as speakers age are generally taken to reflect gains in proficiency as the complex skills of language production are practiced. The length effect is tentatively explained in terms of a strategy that adjusts the time to articulate different structures. Central analyses found passives articulated faster than actives, and subject (passive) relative clauses articulated faster than object (active) relative clauses. These structural effects—the rate increase in passives and rate decrease in object relatives—support a planning-based account that hinges on filler-gap dependencies.","PeriodicalId":46920,"journal":{"name":"Language Acquisition","volume":"29 1","pages":"384 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45975591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-13DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2021.2017439
Akari Ohba, K. Deen
ABSTRACT This article investigates the acquisition of empathy verbs in child Japanese, focusing on verbs of giving/receiving: age-ru ‘give,’ kure-ru ‘give,’ and mora(w)-u ‘receive.’ These verbs are distinguished by which argument the speaker empathizes with when describing an event. For age-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the giver); for kure-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with a non-subject (the recipient), and for mora(w)-u ‘receive,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the recipient). Using two diagnostics for empathy (alignment of first person with empathy loci; empathy loci being preferred antecedents in reflexive binding), 4- to 6-year-old children were tested. Our experiments show the following two findings: (i) children found kure-ru as most challenging, partially contradicting previous research; (ii) some children as young as age 4 have fully acquired the empathy-encoding properties of these verbs despite the speaker’s empathy being unobservable in the input. We discuss the challenges that kure-ru poses for children in light of the potential learnability problem that these empathy verbs pose.
{"title":"Acquisition of empathy in child Japanese","authors":"Akari Ohba, K. Deen","doi":"10.1080/10489223.2021.2017439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.2017439","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates the acquisition of empathy verbs in child Japanese, focusing on verbs of giving/receiving: age-ru ‘give,’ kure-ru ‘give,’ and mora(w)-u ‘receive.’ These verbs are distinguished by which argument the speaker empathizes with when describing an event. For age-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the giver); for kure-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with a non-subject (the recipient), and for mora(w)-u ‘receive,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the recipient). Using two diagnostics for empathy (alignment of first person with empathy loci; empathy loci being preferred antecedents in reflexive binding), 4- to 6-year-old children were tested. Our experiments show the following two findings: (i) children found kure-ru as most challenging, partially contradicting previous research; (ii) some children as young as age 4 have fully acquired the empathy-encoding properties of these verbs despite the speaker’s empathy being unobservable in the input. We discuss the challenges that kure-ru poses for children in light of the potential learnability problem that these empathy verbs pose.","PeriodicalId":46920,"journal":{"name":"Language Acquisition","volume":"29 1","pages":"260 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41864309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2021.2009835
Shuyan Wang, Yasuhito Kido, William B. Snyder
ABSTRACT Two distinctive types of complex predicates found in English are separable verb-particle combinations (“particles”) and adjectival resultatives (“ARs”). Snyder ties both to the positive setting of the Compounding Parameter (“TCP”). This predicts that during the acquisition of a [+TCP] language, any child who has acquired ARs or particles will also permit “creative” bare-stem, endocentric compounding. Existing support comes from children acquiring Japanese and English. Yet the same evidence introduces two new puzzles: (i) why is compounding acquired roughly a year earlier in English than in Japanese?; and (ii) in English, why is compounding always acquired at the same time as (and never substantially prior to) particles? Here, we argue that both puzzles can be explained if we allow the trigger for a single parameter-setting (e.g., [+TCP]) to be completely different for children acquiring different languages. Specifically, the trigger for [+TCP] (and hence, ARs) in English is proposed to be particles, which are unavailable in Japanese. Two novel predictions are tested and supported: (i) the frequency will be higher for particles than for any (other) potential trigger in child-directed English or Japanese; and (ii) children acquiring English (unlike Japanese) will have reliably adult-like comprehension of ARs by the age of 3 years.
{"title":"Acquisition of English adjectival resultatives: Support for the Compounding Parameter","authors":"Shuyan Wang, Yasuhito Kido, William B. Snyder","doi":"10.1080/10489223.2021.2009835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.2009835","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Two distinctive types of complex predicates found in English are separable verb-particle combinations (“particles”) and adjectival resultatives (“ARs”). Snyder ties both to the positive setting of the Compounding Parameter (“TCP”). This predicts that during the acquisition of a [+TCP] language, any child who has acquired ARs or particles will also permit “creative” bare-stem, endocentric compounding. Existing support comes from children acquiring Japanese and English. Yet the same evidence introduces two new puzzles: (i) why is compounding acquired roughly a year earlier in English than in Japanese?; and (ii) in English, why is compounding always acquired at the same time as (and never substantially prior to) particles? Here, we argue that both puzzles can be explained if we allow the trigger for a single parameter-setting (e.g., [+TCP]) to be completely different for children acquiring different languages. Specifically, the trigger for [+TCP] (and hence, ARs) in English is proposed to be particles, which are unavailable in Japanese. Two novel predictions are tested and supported: (i) the frequency will be higher for particles than for any (other) potential trigger in child-directed English or Japanese; and (ii) children acquiring English (unlike Japanese) will have reliably adult-like comprehension of ARs by the age of 3 years.","PeriodicalId":46920,"journal":{"name":"Language Acquisition","volume":"29 1","pages":"229 - 259"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45683525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-31DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2021.2023814
Onur Keleş, Furkan Atmaca, Kadir Gökgöz
ABSTRACT Using a free-recall paradigm, we explored the effects of age of acquisition and category size on verbal fluency in Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili [TİD]). We studied the semantic and phonological fluency task performances of deaf native and deaf late adult signers. We measured the number of correct responses and performed a time course analysis to observe how signers engage in lexical retrieval. Each task parameter had three difficulty settings corresponding to the size of the selected phonological and semantic categories. The results show that native TİD signers produced more correct responses. However, the results reveal no relation between the age of acquisition and the retrieval rate since participants maintained close subsequent response times. This indicates that participants had similar lexical access. Furthermore, the number of signs that the participants produced decreased as the level of difficulty (as a function of category size) increased. Therefore, phonological and semantic category size was found to be a suitable measure for categorical difficulty in TİD. We conclude that both groups of signers update information in the working memory and engage in lexical access similarly, but delayed acquisition of TİD results in a smaller search set in the mental lexicon.
{"title":"Effects of age of acquisition and category size on signed verbal fluency","authors":"Onur Keleş, Furkan Atmaca, Kadir Gökgöz","doi":"10.1080/10489223.2021.2023814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.2023814","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Using a free-recall paradigm, we explored the effects of age of acquisition and category size on verbal fluency in Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili [TİD]). We studied the semantic and phonological fluency task performances of deaf native and deaf late adult signers. We measured the number of correct responses and performed a time course analysis to observe how signers engage in lexical retrieval. Each task parameter had three difficulty settings corresponding to the size of the selected phonological and semantic categories. The results show that native TİD signers produced more correct responses. However, the results reveal no relation between the age of acquisition and the retrieval rate since participants maintained close subsequent response times. This indicates that participants had similar lexical access. Furthermore, the number of signs that the participants produced decreased as the level of difficulty (as a function of category size) increased. Therefore, phonological and semantic category size was found to be a suitable measure for categorical difficulty in TİD. We conclude that both groups of signers update information in the working memory and engage in lexical access similarly, but delayed acquisition of TİD results in a smaller search set in the mental lexicon.","PeriodicalId":46920,"journal":{"name":"Language Acquisition","volume":"29 1","pages":"361 - 383"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42549738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-16DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2022.2078211
Mireille Babineau, N. Havron, Alex de Carvalho, Isabelle Dautriche, A. Christophe
ABSTRACT Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis, children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking the distribution of familiar words. We propose that these learning mechanisms relate to a larger cognitive model: the predictive processing framework. According to this model, we perceive and make sense of the world by constantly predicting what will happen next in a probabilistic fashion. We outline evidence that prediction operates within language acquisition and show how this framework helps us understand the way lexical knowledge refines syntactic predictions and how syntactic knowledge refines predictions about novel words’ meanings. The predictive processing framework entails that learners can adapt to recent information and update their linguistic model. Here we review some of the recent experimental work showing that the type of prediction preschool children make from a syntactic context can change when they are presented with contrary evidence from recent input. We end by discussing some challenges of applying the predictive processing framework to syntactic bootstrapping and propose new avenues to investigate in future work.
{"title":"Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper","authors":"Mireille Babineau, N. Havron, Alex de Carvalho, Isabelle Dautriche, A. Christophe","doi":"10.1080/10489223.2022.2078211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2022.2078211","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis, children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking the distribution of familiar words. We propose that these learning mechanisms relate to a larger cognitive model: the predictive processing framework. According to this model, we perceive and make sense of the world by constantly predicting what will happen next in a probabilistic fashion. We outline evidence that prediction operates within language acquisition and show how this framework helps us understand the way lexical knowledge refines syntactic predictions and how syntactic knowledge refines predictions about novel words’ meanings. The predictive processing framework entails that learners can adapt to recent information and update their linguistic model. Here we review some of the recent experimental work showing that the type of prediction preschool children make from a syntactic context can change when they are presented with contrary evidence from recent input. We end by discussing some challenges of applying the predictive processing framework to syntactic bootstrapping and propose new avenues to investigate in future work.","PeriodicalId":46920,"journal":{"name":"Language Acquisition","volume":"30 1","pages":"337 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45747299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-01Epub Date: 2021-07-30DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2021.1932905
Tracy Reuter, Mia Sullivan, Casey Lew-Williams
Prediction-based theories posit that interlocutors use prediction to process language efficiently and to coordinate dialogue. The present study evaluated whether listeners can use spatial deixis (i.e., this, that, these, and those) to predict the plurality and proximity of a speaker's upcoming referent. In two eye-tracking experiments with varying referential complexity (N = 168), native English-speaking adults, native English-learning 5-year-olds, and non-native English-learning adults viewed images while listening to sentences with or without informative deictic determiners, e.g., Look at the/this/that/these/those wonderful cookie(s). Results showed that all groups successfully exploited plurality information. However, they varied in using deixis to anticipate the proximity of the referent; specifically, L1 adults showed more robust prediction than L2 adults, and L1 children did not show evidence of prediction. By evaluating listeners with varied language experiences, this investigation helps refine proposed mechanisms of prediction, and suggests that linguistic experience is key to the development of such mechanisms.
{"title":"Look at that: Spatial deixis reveals experience-related differences in prediction.","authors":"Tracy Reuter, Mia Sullivan, Casey Lew-Williams","doi":"10.1080/10489223.2021.1932905","DOIUrl":"10.1080/10489223.2021.1932905","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Prediction-based theories posit that interlocutors use prediction to process language efficiently and to coordinate dialogue. The present study evaluated whether listeners can use spatial deixis (i.e., <i>this, that, these,</i> and <i>those</i>) to predict the plurality and proximity of a speaker's upcoming referent. In two eye-tracking experiments with varying referential complexity (<i>N</i> = 168), native English-speaking adults, native English-learning 5-year-olds, and non-native English-learning adults viewed images while listening to sentences with or without informative deictic determiners, e.g., <i>Look at the/this/that/these/those wonderful cookie(s)</i>. Results showed that all groups successfully exploited plurality information. However, they varied in using deixis to anticipate the proximity of the referent; specifically, L1 adults showed more robust prediction than L2 adults, and L1 children did not show evidence of prediction. By evaluating listeners with varied language experiences, this investigation helps refine proposed mechanisms of prediction, and suggests that linguistic experience is key to the development of such mechanisms.</p>","PeriodicalId":46920,"journal":{"name":"Language Acquisition","volume":"29 1","pages":"1-26"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8916748/pdf/nihms-1714235.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10463880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-10DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2021.1971231
J. Gerard
ABSTRACT Previous research on 4–6-year-olds’ interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like John called Mary before running to the store. Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children’s errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by comparing children’s behavior on two truth value judgment tasks: a high-demand task, with a true/false judgment based on event ordering, and a low-demand task, with a true/false judgment based on the color of an item. Children’s behavior is more adultlike on the low-demand task, suggesting that children’s interpretations may be influenced by extragrammatical factors. Implications are discussed for children’s behavior in previous studies and for the role of the linguistic input.
{"title":"The extragrammaticality of the acquisition of adjunct control","authors":"J. Gerard","doi":"10.1080/10489223.2021.1971231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.1971231","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Previous research on 4–6-year-olds’ interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like John called Mary before running to the store. Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children’s errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by comparing children’s behavior on two truth value judgment tasks: a high-demand task, with a true/false judgment based on event ordering, and a low-demand task, with a true/false judgment based on the color of an item. Children’s behavior is more adultlike on the low-demand task, suggesting that children’s interpretations may be influenced by extragrammatical factors. Implications are discussed for children’s behavior in previous studies and for the role of the linguistic input.","PeriodicalId":46920,"journal":{"name":"Language Acquisition","volume":"29 1","pages":"107 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41855449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-02DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2021.1992409
Aldona Sopata, Kamil Długosz
ABSTRACT This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input—including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input—affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who had acquired German from birth and German monolinguals, comparing on the one hand simultaneous bilingual children speaking German as a majority language with simultaneous bilinguals who speak German as a heritage language and, on the other hand, comparing heritage speakers of German who are simultaneous bilinguals with those who are sequential bilinguals. We studied their word order patterns in German, specifically the position of verb and negation, by dint of several tasks including acceptability judgment, forced choice, sentence repetition, and narrative tasks. The results revealed the effect of all three factors on word order patterns used by bilinguals between the ages of 7 and 13. The performance of simultaneous bilingual heritage speakers varies across the tasks. We conclude that they have problems inhibiting their stronger language in tasks that place higher demands on processor, leading to a non-target-like performance in their weaker language in producing narratives.
{"title":"The effects of language input on word order in German as a heritage and majority language","authors":"Aldona Sopata, Kamil Długosz","doi":"10.1080/10489223.2021.1992409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.1992409","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input—including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input—affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who had acquired German from birth and German monolinguals, comparing on the one hand simultaneous bilingual children speaking German as a majority language with simultaneous bilinguals who speak German as a heritage language and, on the other hand, comparing heritage speakers of German who are simultaneous bilinguals with those who are sequential bilinguals. We studied their word order patterns in German, specifically the position of verb and negation, by dint of several tasks including acceptability judgment, forced choice, sentence repetition, and narrative tasks. The results revealed the effect of all three factors on word order patterns used by bilinguals between the ages of 7 and 13. The performance of simultaneous bilingual heritage speakers varies across the tasks. We conclude that they have problems inhibiting their stronger language in tasks that place higher demands on processor, leading to a non-target-like performance in their weaker language in producing narratives.","PeriodicalId":46920,"journal":{"name":"Language Acquisition","volume":"29 1","pages":"198 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48645673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-22DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2021.1990930
Glenn Starr, Jacee Cho
ABSTRACT This study aims to investigate adult L2 speakers’ use of different types of information in the comprehension of pragmatic inferences by examining L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers’ sensitivity to cues all and any in scalar implicature (SI) computation for some. This article and our experimental setup does not seek to understand how the question under discussion (QUD) affects implicature derivation. Rather, we examine whether comprehension of scalar sentences is modulated by QUD. We used an acceptability judgment task in which the felicitousness of the target response containing some in a given picture is manipulated by the QUD containing all or any. The interpretation of some depends on the QUD. For instance, in the question “Are all/any of the squares red?,” all primes an implicature “Some but not all squares are red” reading, whereas any does not. Linear mixed-effects regression analysis conducted on z-score transformed Likert-scale ratings with QUD type (all/any) and Group (native vs. L2 speakers) showed that native speakers differentiated between any and all in their ratings for target sentences with some, but L2 speakers did not. That is, native speakers rated target infelicitous sentences with some in the QUD-any condition significantly higher than in the QUD-all condition. Though we stress that these results must be considered exploratory in nature, our findings are in line with the proposal that native and L2 speakers differ in the type of information they attend to during language comprehension.
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