Jeannette Schaeffer

The acquisition of direct object scrambling and clitic placement : syntax and pragmatics

This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the “real time acquisition” of grammar in First Language Acquisition Theory. It combines detailed and quantitative observations of object placement in Dutch and Italian child language with an analysis that makes use of the Modularity Hypothesis. Real time development is explained by the interaction between two different modules of language, namely syntax and pragmatics. Children need to build up knowledge of how the world works, which includes learning that in communicating with someone else, one must realize that speaker and hearer knowledge are always independent. Since the syntactic feature referentiality can only be marked if this (pragmatic) distinction is made, and assuming that certain types of object placement (such as scrambling and clitic placement) are motivated by referentiality, it follows that the relevant syntactic mechanism is dependent on the prior acquisition of a pragmatic distinction.

Subject Realization in Early Hebrew/English Bilingual Acquisition: The Role of Crosslinguistic Influence.

This study reports on the use of (c)overt subjects and subject–verb agreement in Hebrew in the spontaneous speech of a child, EK, acquiring Hebrew and English simultaneously from birth and of five slightly younger Hebrew monolingual controls. Analysis shows that EKs production of pragmatically inappropriate overt subjects is more than three times that of the controls, while she resembles the controls in terms of subject–verb agreement, a purely syntactic phenomenon. These results strongly suggest that influence from English is restricted to phenomena that involve the syntax/pragmatics interface, supporting Hulk and Mullers (2000) hypothesis that crosslinguistic influence in early bilingual acquisition is a predictable and systematic phenomenon.

Syntactic development in children with hemispherectomy : The I-, D-, and C-systems

This study reports on functional morpheme (I, D, and C) production in the spontaneous speech of five pairs of children who have undergone hemispherectomy, matching each pair for etiology and age at symptom onset, surgery, and testing. Our results show that following left hemispherectomy (LH), children evidence a greater error rate in the use of functional category elements than their right hemispherectomy (RH) counterparts. Nevertheless, error rates are surprisingly low and comparable across groups. We interpret these results as (a) weak empirical evidence for a left hemisphere advantage in acquisition of functional structure, (b) strong support that functional structure is a property of all human grammars, and (c) strong support that each isolated developing hemisphere has the potential to acquire a grammar embodying and constrained by highly specific structural principles defining human language.

On Root Infinitives in Child Hebrew

This squib attempts to make two contributions to the study of Root Infinitives (RIs) in child language. The first, and more important, contribution is to show that Hebrew-acquiring children older than the age of 2 do not show an extensive use of RIs, whereas before age 2, they do produce a fairly robust number of RIs. This phenomenon resembles the production of RIs in early Russian but differs from the typical RI languages such as early Dutch, German, French, and the Scandinavian languages, which show productive use of RIs until at least age 3. Our second goal is to shed some light on the theoretical underpinnings of these similarities and differences. The structure of the squib is as follows: Section 2 reviews the background for the issue of child RIs in general and child RIs in Hebrew in particular. Sections 3 and 4 describe the present study of child RIs in Hebrew-speaking children. Section 5 contains an empirical conclusion and a brief discussion in light of the theoretical claims made in Hoekstra and Hyams (1995).

Object Scrambling and Specificity in Dutch Child Language

During the past decade, many investigators of child language have reported that in early grammar verbs often surface without finite morphology in root clauses (for example, Jordens (1990), Weverink (1989) for Dutch). Wexler (1994) refers to this phenomenon as the optional infinitive stage because such examples occur alongside finite sentences. Examples of optional infinitives are given in (1) for Dutch, French, and German:

GCS: A grammatical coding system for natural language data

This article presents a rationale and description of GCS, or Grammatical Coding System. GCS is a general-use grammatical coding system designed for research on the language of normal and language-impaired children or adults and is especially useful for studies in which a relatively large number of participants are involved. It implements recent theoretical developments in linguistics to characterize development and/or language disorder in children and adults. In addition to the coding system, a computerized method for reading coded transcripts and calculating relevant descriptive statistics is presented. A full coded transcription is included in the Appendix. A detailed GCS manual may be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive.

Linguistic and Cognitive Abilities in Children with Specific Language Impairment as Compared to Children with High-Functioning Autism

ABSTRACT This study investigates the question as to whether and how the linguistic and other cognitive abilities of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) differ from those of children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA). To this end, 27 Dutch-speaking elementary-school-age children with SLI, 27 age-matched children with HFA, and a control group of 27 age-matched Typically Developing (TD) children were experimentally tested on various components of grammar, pragmatics, and nonverbal cognition. Prima facie, the results suggest a resemblance between SLI and HFA in their lower-than-TD performance on pragmatics. However, the children with SLI perform significantly weaker than the TD children on grammar and several cognition tests, while the children with HFA do not. It is concluded that, despite their initial resemblance in terms of pragmatics, children with SLI have profoundly different profiles from children with HFA in terms of grammar and nonverbal cognition and can thus not be considered as instantiations of the same continuum, as proposed by Bishop (2010).

Article choice, theory of mind, and memory in children with high-functioning autism and children with specific language impairment

Previous studies show that young, typically developing (TD) children ( age 5) make errors in the choice between a definite and an indefinite article. Suggested explanations for overgeneration of the definite article include failure to distinguish speaker from hearer assumptions, and for overgeneration of the indefinite article failure to draw scalar implicatures, and weak working memory. However, no direct empirical evidence for these accounts is available. In this study, 27 Dutch-speaking children with high-functioning autism, 27 children with SLI, and 27 TD children aged 5–14 were administered a pragmatic article choice test, a nonverbal theory of mind test, and three types of memory tests (phonological memory, verbal, and nonverbal working memory). The results show that the children with high-functioning autism and SLI (a) make similar errors, that is, they overgenerate the indefinite article; (b) are TD-like at theory of mind, but (c) perform significantly more poorly than the TD children on phonological memory and verbal working memory. We propose that weak memory skills prevent the integration of the definiteness scale with the preceding discourse, resulting in the failure to consistently draw the relevant scalar implicature. This in turn yields the occasional erroneous choice of the indefinite article a in definite contexts.

Scales and Non-scales in (Hebrew) Child Language

This paper reports adult and child knowledge of the generalized scalar implicature (GCI) of disjunction, the non-scalar ‘Allover’ GCI and the particularized no-contrast implicature. The contributions of scales, generalization, and relational complexity to the developmental difficulty of phenomena at the semantic–pragmatic interface are discussed. Results show that children as old as 9 years do not demonstrate adultlike knowledge of the scalar GCI of disjunction or the no-contrast PCI, while the ‘Allover’ GCI is demonstrated at 5 years. We conclude that the quaternary level relational complexity of the later developing implicature and the ternary level complexity of the earlier developing implicature, as analyzed by Halford et al. (1998) Relational Complexity Metric, can account for this developmental pattern, and not scales or generality.