Functional categories and maturation: The prefunctional stage of language acquisition

The aim of this thesis is to provide a theory of language acquisition within the Principles and Parameters framework of Generative Grammar. In Chapter 1, I outline the syntactic theory I adopt which assumes that functional categories determine crosslinguistic variation in terms of parameterisation. In the model of the grammar presented, the set of functional categories is argued to constitute an independent module in the Language Faculty, the Functional Module. This is also referred to as the UG lexicon on the ground that it consists of categories that belong to the grammar proper. Substantive categories are assumed to be included in the Mental lexicon which is part of an independent module of the mind/brain. One of the underlying criteria which determine the difference between functional and substantive categories is the relation of each of these sets with conceptual entries in the mental lexicon. Both substantive and functional categories are argued to be morphologically realised at an interface level where processes of morphological affixation take place. The theoretical approach to language acquisition defended in this thesis is summarised as follows: Principles of UG (Universal Grammar) are always available throughout the process of language acquisition; the Functional Module is subject to maturation, hence not available at the Prefunctional stage (18-24 months). On the basis of these background assumptions, the predictions of the theory are that Prefunctional grammars are 'possible' grammars in the sense defined by UG and that parameterisation is absent. Accordingly, the theory is tested against acquisition data from a number of languages: English, French, Greek, German, Spanish and Irish. In Chapter 2 I present an account of inflectional affixation in Prefunctional grammars, the basic claim being that Aspect rather than Tense is encoded in early verbal forms. The presence of Aspect at this stage is argued to be motivated by two reasons. The first is that the process of Aspectual affixation involves a morphological rather than a syntactic derivation. On the assumption that lexical processes take place at the interface level, the presence of Aspectual features is expected. The second reason is that Aspect is an argument of the verb, thus necessarily present in early grammars, by virtue of thematic constraints on representations imposed by UG. In Chapter 3 I discuss Agreement morphology in early verbal forms. The absence of an Agreement projection in the structural representation is argued to give rise to a number of predictions as far as the status of null arguments in Prefunctional grammars is concerned. In particular, the claim put forward is that null subjects and objects are structurally realised as PRO, the underlying motivation being that the availability of this category does not depend on the presence of a functional head in the clause structure. The traditional idea that child grammars are context-bound is formulated in terms of the distinction between discourse- and sentence-oriented languages. Early grammars are thus argued to belong to the former set in that the referential status of null arguments is not syntactically but pragmatically identified. In Chapter 4 the issue of word-order in Prefunctional grammars is addressed. In the absence of functional heads in the clause structure, the order of the subject and the object is argued to be unfixed with respect to the verbal head. Moreover, according to the clause structure suggested previously, it is predicted that certain word-order patterns are not available at this stage. Thus, the VSO order is shown to be missing even in acquisition data from languages where it is available in adult speech, e.g. Irish, Greek and Spanish. The account of word-order in early grammars is thus subsumed under the general claim concerning the absence of functional categories, and, consequently, parameterisation. In Chapter 5, I discuss the interaction of negation and modality at the Prefunctional stage. These two categories are argued to exhibit certain distributional properties in early grammars which are attributed to their underlying semantic compatibility. Thus, distinctions between different categories of modality as well as between modal and non-modal sentences are argued to be expressed in the use of different negative elements in early grammars. The transition from this to the subsequent stage of development is argued to be the result of modal elements and negation emerging as syntactic categories. This account is consistent with the theoretical approach to language acquisition presented in this thesis, whereby transitional stages of development are taken to instantiate the emerging functional structure

Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children

This study investigates the production and on-line processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty nine 6-9-year-old L2 children and 28 typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person –s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 1996) and participated in an on-line word-monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person –s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive –ing, possessive ‘s) morphemes. The L2 children’s performance on the on-line task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery & Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997)

Linguistic illusions and misconceptions: The role of language variation in language development across three varieties of American English

Prior research on the linguistic abilities of Southern English- (SE) and African-American English-speaking children (SAAE) revealed unexpectedly high rates of risk for a language disorder (Christodoulou & Tsimpli 2021; Moland & Oetting 2021). This study examines the performance of 139 SE-, 46 SAAE-, and 35 Mainstream American English-speaking children (MAE), aged 2-13, and analyzes their performance, through twelve sections, in four key linguistic domains: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology, using a standardized assessment test. Results revealed a parallel performance across the three groups in all linguistic domains. The highest means of accuracy were noted with phonology and the lowest with semantics. Analysis of the participants’ performance by age evidenced a virtually identical performance across the three groups after age 6 or 7, but considerable variations were noted with younger children. Results from the current study contradict results from previous work showing considerably high rates of risk for a language disorder for the SAAE-speaking children, as their performance is parallel to not only that of SE-speaking children but it also the performance of MAE-speaking children. Results from the current study could help guide educational policies, especially for early education programs, as well as diagnostic assessment and rehabilitation

Categorical and Dimensional Diagnoses of Dyslexia: Are They Compatible?

Dyslexia is often assessed using categorical diagnoses, and subtypes of dyslexia are also recognized in a categorical fashion. Children may meet the criteria for dyslexia, and they may more specifically meet the criteria for a subtype of it, and thus get a diagnosis. This approach to diagnosis clashes with the actual distribution of reading performance in children (which is normal and continuous), and it has received criticism. This article offers a conceptual framework for conciliating these two positions. In short, the proposal is to use a set of multicomponent continuous assessments of reading, rather than thresholds. The proposal is explained using original data obtained from a sample of 30 children (age 7 to 11), tested in the United Kingdom. Using an assessment based on categorical-thresholds, only five children in our sample qualify for extra assistance, and only one may get a diagnosis of dyslexia, while with the mixed system proposed, a few additional children in the gray area would receive attention. This approach would not discard previous categorical approaches such as those distinguishing between surface and phonological dyslexia, but it would rather see these subtypes of dyslexia as the instance of a lower score on the continuum obtained on a single component of the multicomponent assessment

The role of bilingualism, age of onset of L2 acquisition & literacy in sentence repetition: The case of Albanian-Greek speaking children

The present study examines how bilingualism, age of onset (AoO) of exposure to Greek and degree of literacy affect the performance of Greek/Albanian bilingual children on a Sentence Repetition (SR) task. Sixty 8 to 10-year-old children were tested, twenty per group, i.e. monolinguals, simultaneous bilinguals and late- sequential bilinguals. The analysis showed that (a) the monolingual group outperforms the bilingual groups, (b) there is strong relationship between vocabulary development and SR performance and (c) the amount of early and current oral input in Greek affects SR performance

Object Clitic production in monolingual and bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment: A comparison between elicited production and narratives

Abstract Pronominal clitics are sensitive to both morphosyntax and discourse. Problems in clitic use could therefore stem from morphosyntactic or discourse management problems in children with SLI. Previous studies focused on 3rd person clitic use identifying morphosyntactic problems. We compare 1st with 3rd person clitic elicitation by monolingual and bilingual children with SLI to examine whether perspective-switching in the same task would affect performance. Elicited 3rd person clitics were further compared with clitic use in narratives to investigate the role of richer discourse context in clitic production. Perspective-taking was independently examined with first- and second-order Theory of Mind tasks. Bilingual were more accurate than monolingual children with SLI in 1st person clitics, in the use of unambiguous clitics in narratives and in second-order ToM reasoning. We conclude that bilingualism seems to enhance SLI children’s discourse use and perspective-taking strategies which, in turn, improve their use of clitics in context-sensitive conditions.</jats:p

Anaphora resolution and reanalysis during L2 sentence processing: evidence from the visual world paradigm

In a visual world paradigm study, we manipulated gender congruence between a subject pronoun and two antecedents to investigate whether L2 learners with a null subject first language (L1) acquire and process overt subject pronouns in a non-null subject L2 in a nativelike way. We also investigated whether L2 speakers revise an initial interpretation assigned to an ambiguous pronoun when information in the visual context subsequently biased against it. Our results indicated both L1 English speakers and Greek L2 English speakers rapidly used gender information to guide pronoun resolution. Both groups also preferentially coindexed ambiguous pronouns to a sentence subject and current discourse topic, despite the fact that overt subject pronouns in the learners’ L1 index a topic shift. We also observed that L2 English speakers were less likely to revise their initial interpretation than L1 English speakers. These results indicate that L2 speakers from a null subject background can acquire the interpretive preferences of overt pronouns in a non-null subject L2. The eye-movement data indicate that anaphora processing can become qualitatively similar in native and non-native speakers in the domain of subject pronoun resolution, but indicate reanalysis may cause difficulty during L2 processing

Reference maintenance in the narratives of Albanian–Greek and Russian–Greek children with Developmental Language Disorder: A study on crosslinguistic effects

Although a considerable number of studies have shown D(eterminer) elements, i.e. determiners and pronominal clitics, to be particularly vulnerable to impairment in monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), little is known about the use of appropriate or/and grammatically correct referring expressions in the children’s narrative production. Grammars of languages that differ in the way they encode and realize their D system may be viewed as the ideal context to disentangle the contribution of language (L1) transfer and morpho-syntactic impairment to reference use in the L2. The aim of the current study is to examine L1 effects in the use of referring expressions of 5- to 11-year-old Albanian–Greek and Russian–Greek children with DLD, along with typically developing (TD) bilingual groups speaking the same language pairs when maintaining reference to characters in their narratives. The three languages differ in their D elements, since Albanian and Greek have morphologically rich D systems in contrast to Russian, which lacks a definiteness distinction. Children produced oral narratives in Greek by using the Greek versions of two stories ( Cat and Dog) which have been designed within the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) tool of the COST Action IS0804. Results show that the groups did not differ in referential appropriateness. Regarding grammatical correctness, both groups with DLD produced more ungrammatical forms than TD children, while Russian–Greek children with DLD produced more ungrammatical article-less NPs than the other groups. The overall results reflect the joint contribution of language impairment and L1-specific typological properties in the definite forms used for character maintenance by bilingual children with DLD.</jats:p