The Acquisition of Complex Sentences
The Acquisition of Complex Sentences

Author: Holger Diessel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-09-02

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1139454080

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This book presents a comprehensive study of how children acquire complex sentences. Drawing on observational data from English-speaking children aged 2 to 5, Holger Diessel investigates the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and nonfinite relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and coordinate clauses. His investigation shows that the development of complex sentences originates from simple non-embedded sentences and that two different developmental pathways can be distinguished: complex sentences including complement and relative clauses evolve from simple sentences that are gradually expanded to multiple-clause constructions, and complex sentences including adverbial and coordinate clauses develop from simple sentences that are integrated in a specific biclausal unit. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the ambient language, the semantic and syntactic complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the social-cognitive development of the child.

Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition
Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition

Author: (Vol.1)Barbara Lust

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1317728831

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Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars. The issues surrounding cross-linguistic variation in "Heads, Projections, and Learnability" (Volume 1) and in "Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability" (Volume 2) are arguably the most fundamental in UG. How can principles of grammar be learned by general learning theory? What is biologically programmed in the human species in order to guarantee their learnability? What is the true linguistic representation for these areas of language knowledge? What universals exist across languages? The two volumes summarize the most critical current proposals in each area, and offer both theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on them. Research on first language acquisition and formal learnability theory is placed at the center of debates relative to linguistic theory in each area. The convergence of research across several different disciplines -- linguistics, developmental psychology, and computer science -- represented in these volumes provides a paradigm example of cognitive science.

Principle B, VP Ellipsis, and Interpretation in Child Grammar
Principle B, VP Ellipsis, and Interpretation in Child Grammar

Author: Rosalind Thornton

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780262201193

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This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring expressions. The principle that is relevant for pronouns, Principle B, has provided a fertile ground for the study of linguistic development. Although it has long been known that children make certain kinds of errors that appear to contradict this principle, further experimental and theoretical investigation reveals that the child does know the grammatical principle, but implements the pragmatic knowledge incorrectly. In fact, discoveries concerning children's knowledge of Principle B are among the most well-known in the study of language acquisition because of the dissociation between syntactic and pragmatic knowledge (binding versus reference). In this book the authors deepen and extend the results of years of developmental investigation of Principle B by studying the interaction of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis--properties of "strict" and "sloppy" interpretation. This is the first experimental study of these topics in the developmental literature. The striking results show that detailed predictions from the "pragmatic deficiency" theory seem to be correct. Many novel experimental results concern the question of how children interpret pronouns, including elided pronouns, and how they understand VP ellipsis. The authors present the necessary theoretical background on Principle B, review and critique previous accounts of childrens errors, and present a novel account of why children misinterpret pronouns. The book will thus be of interest not only to readers interested in the development of the binding theory, but to those interested in the development of interpretation and reference by children.

The Processing and Acquisition of Reference
The Processing and Acquisition of Reference

Author: Edward A. Gibson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-03-25

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 0262294729

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How people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend reference, and how children acquire an understanding of and an ability to use reference. This volume brings together contributions by prominent researchers in the fields of language processing and language acquisition on topics of common interest: how people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend such referential expressions, and how children acquire the ability to refer and to understand reference. The contributors first discuss issues related to children's acquisition and processing of reference, then consider evidence of adults' processing of reference from eye-tracking methods (the visual-world paradigm) and from corpora and reading experiments. They go on to discuss such topics as how children resolve ambiguity, children's difficulty in understanding coreference, the use of eye movements to physical objects to measure the accessibility of different referents, the uses of probabilistic and pragmatic information in language comprehension, antecedent accessibility and salience in reference, and neuropsychological data from the event-related potential (ERP) recording literature.

Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar
Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar

Author: David Lebeaux

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9789027225658

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Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar attempts to re-think the ideal organization of the grammar, given its need to be learned. The book proposes a fundamental connection between the form of the adult grammar and the sequence of grammars which the child adopts in first language acquisition. Challenging the conventional division between language acquisition and syntax, this influential work constructs a new understanding of phrase structure, bringing syntactic data to bear on phrase structure composition. Two new phrase structure composition operations are proposed, Adjoin-a, which adjoins adjuncts into the structure, and Project-a, which fuses open class and closed class structures. The author also introduces the novel concept of subgrammars, successively larger grammars that take the child from the initial state to the adult grammar. This work will be of interest to those in the areas of syntax, language acquisition, learnability, and cognitive science in general.

The Acquisition of Spanish
The Acquisition of Spanish

Author: Silvina Montrul

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9789027252975

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This is the first book on the acquisition of Spanish that provides a state-of-the-art comprehensive overview of Spanish morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual situations. Its content is organized around key grammatical themes that form the empirical base of research in generative grammar: nominal and verbal inflectional morphology, subject and object pronouns, complex structures involving movement (topicalizations, questions, relative clauses), and aspects of verb meaning that have consequences for syntax. The book argues that Universal Grammar constrains all instances of language acquisition and that there is a fundamental continuity between monolingual, bilingual, child and adult early grammatical systems. While stressing their similarities with respect to linguistic representations and processes, the book also considers important differences between these three acquisition situations with respect to the outcome of acquisition. It is also shown that many linguistic properties of Spanish are acquired earlier than in English and other languages. This book is a must read for those interested in the acquisition of Spanish from different theoretical perspectives as well as those working on the acquisition of other languages in different contexts.

Language Processing and Language Acquisition
Language Processing and Language Acquisition

Author: Lyn Frazier

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9401138087

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Studies of language acqUiSItion have largely ignored processing prin ciples and mechanisms. Not surprisingly, questions concerning the analysis of an informative linguistic input - the potential evidence for grammatical parameter setting - have also been ignored. Especially in linguistic approaches to language acquisition, the role of language processing has not been prominent. With few exceptions (e. g. Goodluck and Tavakolian, 1982; Pinker, 1984) discussions of language perform ance tend to arise only when experimental debris, the artifact of some experiment, needs to be cleared away. Consequently, language pro cessing has been viewed as a collection of rather uninteresting perform ance factors obscuring the true object of interest, namely, grammar acquisition. On those occasions when parsing "strategies" have been incorporated into accounts of language development, they have often been discussed as vague preferences, not open to rigorous analysis. In principle, however, theories of language comprehension can and should be subjected to the same criteria of explicitness and explanatoriness as other theories, e. g. , theories of grammar. Thus their peripheral role in accounts of language development may reflect accidental factors, rather than any inherent fuzziness or irrelevance to the language acquisition problem. It seems probable that an explicit model of the way(s) processing routines are applied in acquisition would help solve some central problems of grammar acquisition, since these routines regulate the application of grammatical knowledge to novel inputs.

The Acquisition of Heritage Languages
The Acquisition of Heritage Languages

Author: Silvina Montrul

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1107007240

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An authoritative overview of research into heritage language acquisition, covering key terminological and empirical issues, theoretical approaches, and research methodologies.