Cornelia Hamann

Aspects of grammatical development in young French children with SLI

This paper presents an exploratory study of the spontaneous production of 11 French children clinically diagnosed as specific language impaired (SLI). In a cross-sectional study of the children under and over 5 years of age, we investigate the production of finite and non-finite verbal forms, of sentences with overt and null subjects, and of pronominal clitics. A comparison between younger and older children with SLI highlights developmental patterns which parallel normal syntactic development in important respects, though at a slower pace. An area of difficulty which clearly persists for the older group involves the domain of pronominal complement clitics.

Subjectless Sentences in Child Danish.

Three alternative accounts of subject omission, pragmatic, processing and grammatical, are considered from the perspective of child Danish. Longitudinal data for two Danish children are analyzed for subject omission, finite and infinitival verb usage and discourse anchorage of sentence subjects (overt and missing). The data exhibit a well-defined phase of subject omission which coincides with a well-defined phase of infinitival verbal utterances. No evidence is found for input driven accounts of subject omission. Danish adults rarely omit subjects from utterance initial position. Neither is there any evidence to support the claim that omitted subjects are anchored in previous discourse. Evidence supporting a processing constraint explanation of missing subjects is equivocal. The pattern of subject omission, infinitival usage and third person pronoun and past tense usage points to a grammatical explanation of the phenomenon. However, current grammatical accounts have difficulty accommodating several aspects of the data reported. Contrary to structure building theories, the Danish children do not exhibit a phase of development where only uninflected verb forms are used. Danish children also omit subjects from finite utterances. Furthermore, the decline of subject omissions in finite utterances coincides with decline in usage of infinitival utterances. These findings challenge tense-based accounts of childrens subject omission. Finally, Danish children exhibit an asymmetry in subject omission according to verb type; subjects are omitted from main verb utterances more frequently than from copula utterances. Given the language typology associated with Danish, this asymmetry is difficult to accommodate within truncation and tense or number-based accounts of subject omission. We suggest that a proper treatment of child subject omission will involve an integration of grammatical and discourse-based approaches.

Development and evaluation of a linguistically and audiologically controlled sentence intelligibility test

To allow for a systematic variation of linguistic complexity of sentences while acoustically controlling for intelligibility of sentence fragments, a German corpus, Oldenburg linguistically and audiologically controlled sentences (OLACS), was designed, implemented, and evaluated. Sentences were controlled for plausibility with a questionnaire survey. Verification of the speech material was performed in three listening conditions (quiet, stationary, and fluctuating noise) by collecting speech reception thresholds (SRTs) and response latencies as well as individual cognitive measures for 20 young listeners with normal hearing. Consistent differences in response latencies across sentence types verified the effect of linguistic complexity on processing speed. The addition of noise decreased response latencies, giving evidence for different response strategies for measurements in noise. Linguistic complexity had a significant effect on SRT. In fluctuating noise, this effect was more pronounced, indicating that fluctuating noise correlates with stronger cognitive contributions. SRTs in quiet correlated with hearing thresholds, whereas cognitive measures explained up to 40% of the variance in SRTs in noise. In conclusion, OLACS appears to be a suitable tool for assessing the interaction between aspects of speech understanding (including cognitive processing) and speech intelligibility in German.

The acquisition of scrambling and cliticization

Introduction: The Acquisition of Clause-internal Rules S.M. Powers, C. Hamann. Part I: Scrambling. Scrambling: Whats the State of the Art? H. Haider. An Experimental Study of Scrambling and Object Shift in the Acquisition of Dutch I. Barbier. Object Scrambling and Specificity in Dutch Child Language J. Schaeffer. Scrambling in the Acquisition of English? S.M. Powers. Where Scrambling Begins: Triggering Object Scrambling at the Early Stage in German and Bernese Swiss German Z. Penner, et al. Part II: Cliticization. Overview: The Grammar (and Acquisition) of Clitics A. Cardinaletti, M. Starke. Parameters and Cliticization in Early Child German M. Haverkort, J. Weissenborn. On the Non-parallelism in the Acquisition of Reflexive and Non-reflexive Object Clitics B. Crysmann, N. Muller. Dissociations in the Acquisition of Clitic Pronouns by Dysphasic Children: A Case Study from Italian P. Bottari, et al. The Acquisition of Clitic Doubling in Spanish V. Torrens, K. Wexler. The Automatic Identification and Classification of Clitic Pronouns S. Kapur, R. Clark. The L2 Acquisition of Cliticization in Standard German M. Young-Scholten. Part III: Related Issues. Null Subjects in Early Child English and the Theory of Economy of Projection T. Roeper, B. Rohrbacher. The PP-CP Parallelism Hypothesis and Language Acquisition: Evidence from Swedish G. Josefsson, G. Hakansson. Negation, Infinitives and Heads C. Hamann. Left-branch Extraction as Operator Movement: Evidence from Child Dutch J. van Kampen.

The acquisition of pronouns by French children: A parallel study of production and comprehension

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the reflexive clitic chain is nested within it. We argue that this structural difference introduces differences in processing complexity, chain crossing being more complex than nesting. In support of this analysis, both production and comprehension experiments show that children have more difficulty with object than with reflexive clitics (with more omissions in production and more erroneous judgments in sentences involving Principle B in comprehension). Concerning the morphological aspect, French subject and object pronouns agree in gender with their referent. We report serious difficulties with pronoun gender both in production and comprehension in children around the age of 4 (with nearly 30% errors in production and chance level judgments in comprehension), which tend to disappear by age 6. The distribution of errors further suggests that the masculine gender is processed as the default value. These findings provide further insights into the relationship between comprehension and production in the acquisition process.

Normal and pathological development of subject–verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children

We report a study on the spoken production of subject–verb agreement in number by four age groups of normally developing children (between 5 and 8;5) and a group of 8 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; between 5;4 and 9;4), all French speaking. The production of verb agreement was experimentally elicited by asking children to complete sentence preambles containing a head noun and a potentially attracting ‘local noun’. In contrast to previous studies that focused on attraction with local nouns within the subject constituent (postmodifiers), we also studied attraction with local nouns in structures that are not part of the subject constituent (interpolated adjuncts). In normally developing children, we report that (1) attraction effects appear from early on; (2) singular is produced as the default number until age 7 included; (3) more errors are produced with adjunct structures than with postmodifiers, but only from age 8;5 on. In contrast, even the older SLI children showed no attraction effect, a predominance of the singular as default, no effect of syntactic structure and, more generally, persistent high error rates. The turning point observed between 7 and 8;5 in normal children, characterized by a reduced error rate and a significant effect of syntactic structure, is interpreted as an index of the automatization of agreement. The syntactic structure effect is discussed in terms of the interplay of structural and working memory factors in the computation of long-distance relationships.

How does linguistic complexity influence intelligibility in a German audiometric sentence intelligibility test

Abstract Objective: We investigated if linguistic complexity contributes to the variation of the speech reception threshold in noise (SRTN) and thus should be employed as an additional design criterion in sentence tests used for audiometry. Design: Three test lists were established with sentences from the Göttingen sentence test (25). One list contained linguistically simple sentences, the other two lists contained sentences with two types of linguistic complexity. For each listener the SRTN was determined for each list. Study Sample: Younger and older listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with hearing impairment were tested. Results: Younger listeners with normal hearing showed significantly worse SRTNs on the complex lists than on the simple list. This difference could not be found for either of the older groups. Conclusions: The effect of linguistic complexity on speech recognition seems to depend on age and/or hearing status. Hence, pending further research, linguistic complexity seems less relevant as a sentence test design criterion for clinical-audiological purposes, but we argue that a test with larger variation in linguistic complexity across sentences might show a relation between linguistic complexity and speech recognition even in a clinical population. Sumario Objetivo: Investigamos si la complejidad lingüística contribuye a la variaciones en el umbrales de recepción del lenguaje en ruido (SRTN) y por tanto, si deberían usarse como un criterio adicional de diseño en las pruebas con frases que se usan en audiometría. Diseño: Se establecieron tres listas de pruebas con frases de la Prueba de Frases de Göttingen (Kollmeirer & Wesselkamp, 1997). Una lista contenía frases lingüísticamente simples, las otras dos contenían frases con dos tipos distintos de complejidad lingüística. Se determino el SRTN para cada sujeto en cada lista. Muestra del Estudio: Se evaluaron sujetos jóvenes y viejos con audición normal y sujetos viejos con alteraciones auditivas. Resultados: Los sujetos más jóvenes con audición normal mostraron resultados de SRTN significativamente peores en las listas complejas que en la lista simple. Esta diferencia no fue encontrada en ninguno de los dos grupos de sujetos más viejos. Conclusiones: Por tanto, el efecto de la complejidad lingüística sobre el reconocimiento del lenguaje parece depender de la edad y/o de la condición auditiva. Portanto – pendiente de una investigación ulterior – la complejidad lingüística parece menos relevante como criterio de diseño de pruebas de frases para propósitos clínico-audiológicos. Pero argumentamos que una prueba con una mayor variación en la complejidad lingüística en sus frases podría mostrar una relación entre complejidad lingüística y el reconocimiento del lenguaje, aún en una población clínica.

Binding and Coreference: Views from Child Language

The chapter reviews work on a central topic in acquisition from the perspective of generative grammar: the Binding principles that dictate how pronouns and reflexives behave. The core issue is the “Pronoun Interpretation Problem (PIP)”: do children actually know Principle B of binding and their knowledge is masked in performance, or is there a real problem with pronoun interpretation that may require integrating syntax and pragmatics? Hamann provides a summary of recent theoretical and empirical work on binding that makes it clear that there is more involved in interpretation of pronouns than the simple binding principles. The cross –linguistic asymmetries are reviewed, since pronominal clitics in Romance languages are found to be better understood than non-clitic pronouns, but not in the case of clitic climbing (ECM) environments. Yet recent results on successful performance of children acquiring German belie any simple account of the PIP. Various theorists have proposed coreference rules that require consideration of pragmatics in one way or another, and the interaction of the principles with discourse antecedents. Others stress the possibility of an underspecification of the features of the pronoun in acquisition. Recent work considering the roles of referentiality and topic-hood is explored.

Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language

The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabruck in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshopdeveloped fromthe observation that childrens production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.

Negation and truncated structures

which in turn could translate yet bigger compilers, until the final, fullblown compiler has been compiled.’ (ibid.) In developmental psycholinguistics, what became known as the ’bootstrapping problem’ refers to the problem of how children, who are, after all, confronted with unlabelled input, could gain access to those abstract syntactic levels of representation at which principles of Universal Grammar apply (cf. Pinker 1987). More recently, the concept has been extended to cover various kinds of system-internal deductions (cf. Atkinson 1992, Penner 1994).