Pragmatic Leads and Null Subjects: When Children Consult Leads and When They Do Not

This study was a preliminary investigation into children’s attention to pragmatic leads when assigning reference to null subjects in three different sub-types of control. The sentences included were object control (Ron persuaded Hermione ec to kick the ball), controlled verbal gerund subjects (ec Pouring the water quickly made Harry wet) and temporal adjunct control (Harry tapped Luna while ec feeding the owl). 76 British children, aged 6;9 to 11;8, divided into five year groups, undertook three picture-selection tasks. Constructions were presented with no pragmatic lead, with a weak pragmatic lead cueing a particular referent and with a strong pragmatic lead cueing a particular referent. Children across all year groups ignored both leads when assigning reference to the null subject in object control, consulted both strengths of lead when doing so for verbal gerund subjects and utilised the strong lead when making an interpretative choice in temporal adjunct control. Thus they demonstrated a selective use of the discourse when interpreting these three different sub-types of control. The results for temporal adjunct control are surprising and the implications they have for its classification are discussed. The data on verbal gerund subjects provide a first step towards an understanding of older children’s development of this far less studied example of control. In addition, the way in which children attended to the discourse for this construction brings data to bear on the unresolved theoretical debate over the correct characterisation of the ec in non-obligatory control

Who did what to whom?

A project sponsored by the British Academy at the University of Kent demonstrates key areas of language at which individuals with autism spectrum disorder excel. Dr Vikki Janke explains aspects of grammatical and contextual skills that are right on target and why this is good news

The False-Friend Effect in Three Profoundly Deaf Learners of French: Disentangling Morphology, Phonology and Orthography

Three profoundly deaf individuals undertook a low-frequency backward lexical translation task (French/English), where morphological structure was manipulated and orthographic distance between test items was measured. Conditions included monomorphemic items (simplex), polymorphemic items (complex), items whose French morphological structure exceeded their English counterpart (mismatch), and a control. Order of translation success was uniform: control > mismatch > simplex > complex, as was order for false-cognate errors: complex > simplex > mismatch, patterning precisely with hearing participants (Janke and Kolokonte, 2014). We discuss how these results highlight a route for future studies to disentangle phonology and orthography further from morphology in first-language interference

Issues in the Acquisition of Binding and Control in High-Functioning Children with Autism

In this study, we test 12 high-functioning children with autism (HFA), aged 12-16, on a picture-selection task assessing comprehension of binding and compare their performance on this construction with that on an already conducted, similarly designed task, testing comprehension of obligatory control (Janke & Perovic, submitted). We compare the children’s performance on these two tasks to that of a younger gender- and verbal MA-matched typically developing (TD) group. No difference between the groups’ performance was found, with both performing at ceiling on the two tasks. By comparing comprehension of two constructions which share a number of syntactic properties, these results provide further corroboration for the claim in Janke and Perovic (submitted) and Perovic, Modyanova and Wexler (2013a) that certain syntactic dependencies in high-functioning individuals with autism are intact. This contribution is of clinical import, as it provides practitioners with a more precise profile of advanced grammatical abilities. The paper’s theoretical significance lies with its division between binding and control on the one hand and raising on the other. While binding and obligatory control pattern together in our sample, research using the same paradigm on a different sample of children, also high-functioning and with an age range of 10-16, show an impaired comprehension of raised structures relative to unraised structures and fillers (Perovic, Modyanova & Wexler, 2007). We hypothesise that the source of this difference lies with the extra degree of complexity in raising that is absent from binding and control: raising involves argument displacement

False cognates: The effect of mismatch in morphological complexity on a backward lexical translation task

In this article we focus on ‘false cognates’, lexical items that have overlapping orthographic/phonological properties but little or no semantic overlap. False-cognate pairs were created from French (second language or L2) and English (first language or L1) items by manipulating the levels of morphological correspondence between them. Our aim was to test whether mismatches in morphological structure affected success on a low-frequency backward lexical translation task. Fifty-eight participants, divided into four groups (A-level; degree level; adult learners; bilinguals) were tested on monomorphemic items (simplex), polymorphemic items (complex), items whose morphological structure in French exceeded that of their English counterpart (mismatch), and control items. Translation success rate followed a uniform pattern: control > mismatch > simplex > complex. With respect to the false-friend effect, participant responses were also uniform: complex > simplex > mismatch. It is argued that an independent level of morphology explains these results

Effects of Discourse on Control

This study examined discourse effects on obligatory and non-obligatory control interpretations. 70 participants undertook three online forced-choice surveys, which monitored preferred interpretations in complement control, verbal-gerund-subject control, long-distance control and final temporal adjunct control. Survey 1 ascertained their baseline interpretations of the empty category in these constructions. Survey 2 cued the critical sentences used in survey 1 with a weakly established topic of discourse and survey 3 cued them with a strongly established one. Reference assignment in complement control remained consistent across all three conditions, illustrating that pragmatics does not infiltrate this structurally regulated and syntactically unambiguous construction. Changes in interpretation were found in the remaining three constructions. An accessibility-motivated scale of influence, combining three independent discourse factors (topic, linear distance and competition) is created to model reference determination in verbal-gerund-subject control and long-distance control. The results for temporal adjunct control are novel. They revealed a much stronger susceptibility to pragmatic interference than that reported in the literature yet the construction behaved differently from non-obligatory control under discourse pressure. We propose a structural account for final temporal adjunct control, which permits the evident interpretation shift, whilst still excluding arbitrary and sentence-external interpretations

A Syntactic Representation of Control without a Subject

The aim of this paper is to develop a representation of control that does not require a PRO-subject. I first analyse obligatory control using a de-compositional analysis of theta-roles, according to which theta-roles are divided into two selectional requirements. The resulting theory makes the same predictions as one based on PRO, yet avoids dependence on this ill-defined empty category. I then concentrate on Icelandic, tackling agreement phenomena in infinitival clauses. Again no PRO is necessary to answer for the data, which receive a uniform account using the mechanism outlined in the first half of the paper

Appendix to Janke and Marshall, Using the Hands to Represent Objects in Space, 2017

Supplementary Material for Janke and Marshall 2017. Handshapes used by sign-naive gesturers