Editorial: Language Acquisition in Diverse Linguistic, Social and Cognitive Circumstances

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The acquisition of partitive clitics in Romance five‐year‐olds

In this paper we look at a previously unexplored empirical domain: the acquisition of partitive clitics in Catalan, French, and Italian. The course of acquisition of third person object clitics is well known and clitic omission is limited to a first stage in the languages in which it is found, so that at age five children do not omit clitics any more, unless they suffer from Specific Language Impairment. Partitive clitics share many properties with third person object clitics and here we develop two experiments, an elicitation and a repetition experiment, of partitive clitics in transitive sentences, and report results for 60 children. Of the two experiments, repetition shows to be the more reliable method, while elicitation gives rise to more pragmatically adequate answers which nevertheless do not present a clitic. The results from both experiments show that partitive clitic omission is not found for any of the languages tested at age five, just like third person object clitics.Este artículo aborda un campo de estudios empíricos previamente inexplorados: la adquisición de clíticos partitivos en catalán, francés e italiano. El curso de adquisición de clíticos de tercera persona de objeto es bien sabido: la omisión de clíticos se limita a la primera etapa en las lenguas donde ocurre y a la edad de cinco años los niños ya no omiten los clíticos a menos que sufran Deficiencias Lingüísticas Específicas. Los clíticos partitivos comparten muchas propiedades con los clíticos de tercera persona de objeto. Aquí se desarrollan dos experimentos, una elicitación y un experimento de repetición de clíticos partitivos en oraciones transitivas, contando con resultados obtenidos a partir de 60 niños. De los dos experimentos, la repetición demuestra ser el método más fiable, mientras que la elicitación da lugar a respuestas pragmáticamente más adecuadas que sin embargo no presentan clíticos. Los resultados de los dos experimentos muestran que la omisión de clíticos partitivos no se encuentra en ninguna de las lenguas examinadas a la edad de cinco años, tal y como ocurre en el caso de los clíticos de tercera persona de objeto.  Neste artigo investigamos um domínio empírico ainda não explorado: a aquisição de clíticos partitivos em Catalão, Francês e Italiano. O processo de aquisição de clíticos de objecto da terceira pessoa é bem conhecido e a omissão de clíticos está limitada a um primeiro estádio das línguas em que se verifica, sendo que aos cinco anos de idade as crianças já não omitem clíticos, exceto quando sofrem de Perturbação Específica de Linguagem. Os clíticos partitivos partilham várias propriedades com os clíticos de objecto da terceira pessoa. Desenvolvemos aqui dois experimentos, um experimento de elicitação e um experimento de repetição, de clíticos partitivos em frases transitivas, apresentando os resultados de 60 crianças. De entre os dois experimentos, a repetição mostra ser o método mais fiável, enquanto a elicitação dá lugar a respostas pragmaticamente mais adequadas, que, no entanto, não apresentam um clítico. Os resultados de ambos os experimentos mostram que a omissão de clíticos partitivos não se verifica em nenhuma das línguas testadas aos cinco anos de idade, tal como acontece com os clíticos de objecto de terceira pessoa. 

Overt Subject Distribution in early Italian Children

The distribution of the subjects in early Italian productions is used to retrieve information about the grammatical knowledge of children. We performed a cross-sectional study of 59 children’s productions (age 22/35 months) and a longitudinal study of 4 children’s utterances (age 18/39 months). The subject use is analysed in * copula versus lexical verbs. * unaccusative versus unergative/transitive. The overt subjects were analized for: * the nominal/pronominal status. * the pre/ post verbal position. We found that the subject use is greater with copula than main verbs and with unaccusative than unergative verbs and that SV order is preferred with “to be”, “transitive” and “unergative” verbs, while VS order with “unaccusative” verbs. These findings suggest that children distinguish between copula and lexical verbs and between “unergative” and “unaccusative” verbs, showing that the subject of the unaccusative verbs is generated in internal argument positio

Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

The Meaning First Approach offers a model of the relation between thought and language that includes a Generator and a Compressor. The Generator build non-linguistic thought structures and the Compressor is responsible for its articulation through three processes: structure-preserving linearization, lexification, and compression via non-articulation of concepts when licensed. One goal of this paper is to show that a range of phenomena in child language can be explained in a unified way within the Meaning First Approach by the assumption that children differ from adults with respect to compression and, specifically, that they may undercompress in production, an idea that sets a research agenda for the study of language acquisition. We focus on dependencies involving pronouns or gaps in relative clauses and wh-questions, multi-argument verbal concepts, and antonymic concepts involving negation or other opposites. We present extant evidence from the literature that children produce undercompression errors (a type of commission errors) that are predicted by the Meaning First Approach. We also summarize data that children’s comprehension ability provides evidence for the Meaning First Approach prediction that decompression should be challenging, when there is no 1-to-1 correspondence.Peer Reviewe

Chinese Children's Knowledge of Topicalization : Experimental Evidence from a Comprehension Study

There is a debate as to whether topic structures in Chinese involve A'-movement or result from base-generation of the topic in the left periphery. If Chinese topicalization was derived by movement, under the assumptions of Friedmann et al.'s Relativized Minimality (Lingua 119:67-88, ), we would expect children's comprehension of object topicalization (with OSV order) to be worse than their comprehension of subject topicalization (with SVO order). This study examined 146 Mandarin-speaking children from age three to age six by means of a picture-sentence matching task with an appropriate context. The results showed a subject/object asymmetry when the topic marker is overt, and no asymmetry when the topic marker is covert. This suggests that the presence or absence of topic markers play an important role in children's comprehension of topicalization. We propose that both structures involve movement in the adult grammar, but not in the child grammar, at least initially. Sentences without overt topic markers are base-generated on a par with gapless sentences with a topic, and the base-generation analysis is abandoned as soon as children learn the syntax and semantics of topic markers, which function as attractors of topics

Is it possible to differentiate multilingual children and children with Developmental Language Disorder?

The language profiles of monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typically developing multilingual children can overlap, presenting similar paths and delays in learning specific aspects of language in comparison with typically developing monolingual children of the same age. • In an increasingly multilingual society, it is essential to develop guidelines and tools for differentiating the two populations, avoiding both under- and overdiagnosis of language disorders in multilingual children. • Many multilingual children have a narrower vocabulary compared with monolinguals of the same age. Therefore, grammatical features are considered more reliable clinical markers of a possible disorder. • Clinical markers for children with DLD are language-specific. For example, in English-speaking children with DLD, verb endings may be omitted, as in “*Mary cook it”. For Italian or French children with DLD, a reliable marker is the realisation of certain pronouns, as in Mary lo cucina, “Mary it cooks”, with omissions or substitution of the pronoun lo depending on age. • Despite similarities between multilingual children and children with DLD, it is possible to distinguish between the two groups after multilingual children have at least two years of exposure to their second language (L2). • Multilingual children can learn their L2 fully, while this is generally not the case for monolingual children with DLD; however, children’s success in learning their L2 depends on length of exposure to the language, the type of multilanguage experience, and the structural relatedness of the two languages

Reasoning about alternative forms is costly:The processing of null and overt pronouns in Italian using pupillary responses

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are found to be less costly to process than overt pronouns. We argue that this difference is caused by an additional reasoning step that is needed to process marked overt pronouns but not unmarked null pronouns. A comparison with data from Dutch, a language with overt but no null pronouns, demonstrates that Italian pronouns are processed differently from Dutch pronouns. These findings suggest that the processing of a marked form is influenced by alternative forms within the same language, making its processing costly

Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment*

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI