Cecile McKee

Relatives Children Say

In an experiment designed to elicit restrictive relatives clauses, 28 children ranging in age from 2:2 to 3:10 provided a corpus of communicatively appropriate relative clauses. In evaluating this corpus, we found that most children produced mostly adult relative clauses most of the time. Detailed study of these utterances uncovered a few error patterns, which we analyzed in light of several considerations (e.g., the overall frequency of an error type, its distribution across children and items, its relation to the construction under study, and the similarity of the error to what children do elsewhere). Only one error pattern, namely some childrens production of inappropriate relative pronouns, is argued to reflect a systematic feature of language development. We conclude that childrens ability to represent the syntactic structure of the embedded clause is on target very early.

Visiting Relatives in Italy

Not so long ago, a story was told about the course of language acquisition. The story goes like this. A child begins with a simple grammar and gradually extends it to include more and more complex syntactic constructions. When presented with a sentence that he or she cannot analyze, the child will systematically assign it a structural analysis consistent with the current grammar, but not necessarily consistent with the adult grammar. That is, instead of being merely perplexed by sentences beyond their grammatical knowledge, children sometimes supply incorrect interpretations of them, at least if the sentences are presented in contexts which are open to an incorrect construal. The experimental technique of presenting sentences in intentionally ambiguous contexts was applied in several studies, leaving a great many disparities between child and adult grammars for researchers of language acquisition to explain.

Il clitico: C'è ma non si vede

This paper re-examines data from Italian children that Antinucci and Miller (1976) used to demonstrate a stage of obligatory object agreement — a stage representing a significant failure of correspondence between childrens developing grammars and the target adult grammar. We interpret the relevant utterances as consistent with the target grammar, and argue that this is a more plausible construal. We also present an elicited production study which corroborates our interpretation. We replicate the kind of data Antinucci and Miller report and in gaps in their corpus. Our interpretation of the data thus crucially undermines the positions of both Antinucci and Miller (1976) and Borer and Wexler (1992). They use the object agreement to support theoretical claims violating the hypothesis that developing grammars obey the constraints of Universal Grammar throughout.

Which Children Did They Show Obey Strong Crossover

This study examines children’s knowledge of strong crossover in two-clause sentences. The relevant constructions are illustrated in Types Ito IV below, where the intended interpretation of each question is indicated by indexing in the question. The answers provided correspond to the indexing in the question.

Multiple influences on children's language performance

Our commentary concerns the Competing Factors Model (CFM). As Drozd says, the CFM is fictitious and without proponents. (See also McDaniel, 2001.) But we will argue that something like it is necessary to our field. Everyone recognizes multiple influences on language performance, even C&T. Most important, recognizing these factors does not require a denial of the grammars existence or even of its dominance.

What’s Thats?

It is the divergence from the standard that we address in this paper. We will follow Seppänen and Kjellmer’s (1995) lead in further documenting the occurrence of thats in American English, and we will consider in more detail hypotheses about its syntax. We will also present new data from experimental investigations of the thats construction. These data reveal two important patterns: first, thats is accepted more in the east of the United States than in the west; second, its acceptance is both more widespread and more systematic among children than among adults. We will argue, based on these patterns, that American English is beginning to allow the thats construction. Seppänen and Kjellmer discuss the genitive thats diachronically and consider geographic trends in its current occurrence. Their general claim is that thats is making its way into standard English usage. They note that while it is unacceptable in all forms of written English, it can be found in texts describing the colloquial English of Ireland, Scotland, and parts of Northern England. In a small supplemental survey, they also found that speakers of American English accepted the genitive thats. Importantly, they explain the usage of thats as filling a gap in the English language. The inanimate wh-form in English is which, but which has no genitive counterpart *whichs. Speakers of English generally find whose unnatural with inanimates in sentences like (3).

Public Outreach in Linguistics: Engaging Broader Audiences

Linguistics is traditionallya universitysubject.Wedescribeherecomprehensive effortsthattheUniversity of Arizona’s Linguistics Department makes to engage with additional audiences: K–12 and community college students, lifelong learners, and festival-goers. Our coordination of these efforts is relatively recent, and this article emphasizes what we are learning in areas like adjustment to different audiences and efficient use ofresources. While many individual linguists and somedepartments are engaged inoutreach activities such as those described here, our work is unusual in its breadth, in terms of both external contacts and department-internal participants.

Dominio del ASL y ortografía inglesa. Manejo de la ortografía inglesa del niño con dominio del ASL

Este estudio acerca del dominio de los ninos sordos de los patrones ortograficos de la lengua inglesa hace referencia a su proceso de alfabetizacion. Se comparan tres grupos de ninos en un ejercicio de decision lexica basado en la regularidad o irregularidad de la fonologia de las palabras; estos tres grupos estaban formados por: ninos con capacidad auditiva normal y dominio del ingles, ninos con capacidad auditiva normal con dominio del espanol, y ninos sordos con dominio del ASL. El dominio del lenguaje y el tipo de palabras afecto a los resultados obtenidos por los distintos grupos. Sin embargo, fue el grupo de ninos con dominio del ASL el que mostro mayores variaciones. El estudio de estos individuos sugiere implicaciones en su educacion linguistica y alfabetizacion. Los ninos sordos se enfrentan a una formidable labor doble de aprendizaje: aprender a leer un sistema de escritura basado en fonemas, al tiempo que aprenden simultaneamente el lenguaje que codifica dicho sistema. La presente investigacion supone un avance en la comprension de los retos que supone esta doble labor de aprendizaje.