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)

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

Своє – чуже. Дике – культурне. Базові структури міфологічних когнітивних моделей (до проблеми інваріанта і трансформації в інформаційному просторі)

Відтворення логічних законів міфологічних когнітивних структур, необхідне для виокремлення інваріантів у трансформованому емпіричному етнографічному масиві, зумовлює пошук базових когнітивних структур міфологічної доби. Базові когнітивні структури елементарних суспільств – бінарні символічні класифікації, які починають розгортатися із просторово-часової дихотомії: освоєний – неосвоєний простір, час архетипів – час їхньої реалізації. У статті аналізуються системи спорідненості дуально-родового суспільства, які, на думку авторки, використовувалися як засіб формалізації ієрархічної класифікації понять міфологічної доби.The reconstruction of the logical laws of mythological cognitive structures which is necessary to single out the invariants in the trasforming ethnographic material leads us to the search of basic cognitive structures of the mythological epoch. The basic cognitive structures of elementary societies are the binaric symbolical classifications which begin to develop from the spatialtemporal opposition: assimilated space – space which is not assimilated, the time of the archetypes – the time of their realization. In the article there is an analysis of a system of consanguinity of dual-clan society which on author's mind was used as means of formalization of the hierarchial classification of the mythological epoch concepts

The development of gender assignment and agreement in English-Greek and German-Greek bilingual children

The aim of this experimental study is to examine the development of Greek gender in bilingual English-Greek and German-Greek children. Four gender production tasks were designed, two targeting gender assignment eliciting determiners and two targeting gender agreement eliciting predicate adjectives for real and novel nouns. Participant performance was assessed in relation to whether the ‘other’ language was a gender language or not (English vs. German) along with the role of the bilinguals’ Greek vocabulary knowledge and language input. The results are argued to contribute significantly to disentangling the role of crosslinguistic influence in gender assignment and agreement by bringing together a variety of input measures such as early and current amount of exposure to Greek, the role of area of residence (i.e. whether Greek is the minority or the majority language), the effect of maternal education and the amount of exposure to Greek in a school setting

Syntactic and Story Structure Complexity in the Narratives of High- and Low-Language Ability Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Although language impairment is commonly associated with the autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the Diagnostic Statistical Manual no longer includes language impairment as a necessary component of an ASD diagnosis (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). However, children with ASD and no comorbid intellectual disability struggle with some aspects of language whose precise nature is still outstanding. Narratives have been extensively used as a tool to examine lexical and syntactic abilities, as well as pragmatic skills in children with ASD. This study contributes to this literature by investigating the narrative skills of 30 Greek-speaking children with ASD and normal non-verbal IQ, 16 with language skills in the upper end of the normal range (ASD-HL), and 14 in the lower end of the normal range (ASD-LL). The control group consisted of 15 age-matched typically-developing (TD) children. Narrative performance was measured in terms of both microstructural and macrostructural properties. Microstructural properties included lexical and syntactic measures of complexity such as subordinate vs. coordinate clauses and types of subordinate clauses. Macrostructure was measured in terms of the diversity in the use of internal state terms (ISTs) and story structure complexity, i.e., children's ability to produce important units of information that involve the setting, characters, events, and outcomes of the story, as well as the characters' thoughts and feelings. The findings demonstrate that high language ability and syntactic complexity pattern together in ASD children's narrative performance and that language ability compensates for autistic children's pragmatic deficit associated with the production of Theory of Mind-related ISTs. Nevertheless, both groups of children with ASD (high and low language ability) scored lower than the TD controls in the production of Theory of Mind-unrelated ISTs, modifier clauses and story structure complexity

The on-line processing of unaccusativity in Greek agrammatism

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation of the verb’s syntactically defined antecedent provided in the early part of the sentence. Our results demonstrate that the Broca group showed selective reactivation of the antecedent for the unaccusatives. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the transitivization properties of nonactive and active voice-alternating unaccusatives, the costly procedure claimed to underlie the parsing of active nonvoice-alternating unaccusatives, and the animacy of the antecedent modulating the syntactic choices of the patients

Gender agreement attraction in Greek comprehension

This work explores gender agreement attraction in comprehension. Attraction occurs when an agreement error (such as, “the key to the cabinets are rusty”) goes unnoticed, leading to the illusion of grammaticality due to a mismatch between the value of the head and the value of a local intervening phase (attractor). According to retrieval accounts, these errors occur during cue retrieval from memory and predict illusions of grammaticality. Alternatively, representational accounts predict that the errors occur due to the faulty representation of certain features, thus, illusions of ungrammaticality are also expected. In four experiments we explore: (a) whether gender agreement attraction occurs in Greek and the strategy/-ies employed, (b) the role of the agreement target, (c) the timing of gender agreement attraction, (d) the role of phonological matching between the nominal inflectional morphemes of the attractor and the agreement target, and (e) participants’ sensitivity to agreement when there is no conflict from the attractor. In all four experiments, the grammaticality of the sentence and the attractor value (match or mismatch with the head) and also the phonological matching between the attractor and the agreement target in ungrammatical sentences were manipulated. The agreement target was either an adjectival predicate or an object-clitic and the gender value of the head was feminine or neuter. Attraction was found in all measures during the time-course of adjectival predicates (Experiment 1) and object-clitics (Experiment 2), and in timed (Experiment 3), and untimed (Experiment 4) judgments. Even more, both gender values showed attraction and the results mainly suggest that participants experience illusions of grammaticality, confirming retrieval accounts. Phonological matching did not modulate attraction in any of the experiments, suggesting that the similarity in the morphophonological realization between the agreement target and the attractor does not increase attraction. Furthermore, participants were sensitive to gender agreement violations in the absence of gender mismatch between the head and the attractor, suggesting that they respect agreement rules and have both neuter and feminine available in their feature content repertoire, although with some tendency in favor of neuter in feminine agreement contexts. The impact of these findings is discussed within the concept of attraction and sensitivity to agreement violations

The acquisition of dative alternation by German-English bilingual and English monolingual children

The vulnerability of the syntax–semantics interface in simultaneous bilingual first language acquisition is still up for debate; while some scholars have found crosslinguistic transfer at this interface, others found no such influence. To determine which kinds of syntax–semantics interface phenomena may be vulnerable, this study examines the acquisition and use of dative alternation by German-English bilingual children and adults compared with English monolingual children and German and English monolingual adults. The study shows that bilingual children interpret and comprehend dative constructions in English like their monolingual peers but their production of dative constructions in German is influenced by English. This suggests that syntax–semantics interface phenomena relating to the representation of verbs’ objects are vulnerable to influence. However, bilingual adults perform like monolinguals in both languages. These results suggest that any indeterminacy in the use of dative alternation in the adult state is due to L1 attrition rather than incomplete L1 acquisition

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