Maria-José Ezeizabarrena

A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production

ABSTRACT This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain cross-linguistic differences discussed in the article.

Cross-linguistic patterns in the acquisition of quantifiers.

Significance Although much research has been devoted to the acquisition of number words, relatively little is known about the acquisition of other expressions of quantity. We propose that the order of acquisition of quantifiers is related to features inherent to the meaning of each term. Four specific dimensions of the meaning and use of quantifiers are found to capture robust similarities in the order of acquisition of quantifiers in similar ways across 31 languages, representing 11 language types. Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here, we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier’s specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for “all,” “none,” “some,” “some…not,” and “most” in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-y-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language- and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.

Differential and selective morpho-syntactic impairment in Spanish-Basque bilingual aphasia

This paper reports on the comprehension of movement-derived structures by a Spanish-Basque bilingual with chronic Brocas aphasia. The study reveals a differential impairment which affects mostly Basque and a selective impairment in this language that affects only object questions and subject relatives. The impairment pattern observed is discussed in light of the predictions made by different representational and processing accounts for (monolingual as well as bilingual) Spanish and Basque agrammatism. The asymmetry observed between the two languages suggests that the patient resorts to language-specific morpho-syntactic cues, which cannot be transferred from one language to the other because of the typological distance between Spanish and Basque. The data confirm results from previous studies showing that (major) typological distance hinders cross-language effects from arising in bilingual aphasia.

Adaptación de los inventarios MacArthur-Bates al euskara : desarrollo comunicativo entre los 8 y 30 meses

Resumen Los Inventarios del Desarrollo Comunicativo MacArthur-Bates (Communicative Development Inventories, CDI) miden el desarrollo comunicativo de niñas/os entre 8 y 30 meses. Este instrumento ha sido adaptado a gran cantidad de lenguas por lo que constituye una herramienta útil para las comparaciones interlingüísticas. Este artículo muestra los resultados de la adaptación al euskara en las escalas principales de los inventarios, así como los resultados referentes a fiabilidad y validez, los cuales avalan la consistencia interna, la estabilidad de las puntuaciones a lo largo del tiempo y el valor predictivo de las escalas.

Overt subjects in early Basque and other null subject languages

This study focuses on person marking in early Basque and other null subject languages. From very early on, person marking on the verb and quite regular, adult-like, null subject rates are attested across early acquisition studies on genetically related and unrelated pro-drop languages. We survey several studies on bilingual children simultaneously acquiring two languages with the opposite value for the pro-drop parameter. The conclusion drawn is that children display a monolingual-like pattern in the production of person marking, overt subjects, and personal pronouns in the null subject language, whereas, in the non-null subject language, bilinguals evidence delayed target person marking and overt subject production. These data are compatible with the view that children correctly set the default parametric value at early stages and separate the languages being acquired. However, it is argued that accounts based on the lexical learning of features in the functional category T(ense) may better account for the crosslinguistic data. Moreover, the accuracy observed in overt person inflection production leads to the proposal that (the spelling out of) the [person] or [D] feature in T(ense) is the first subject feature available to the language acquirer, previous to other candidates such as number or case.

Pronoun preferences of children in a language without typical third-person pronouns

This study presents comprehension data from 6–7-and 8–10-year-old children as well as adults on the acceptability of null vs overt anaphoric forms (the demonstrative hura ‘that’ and the quasipronoun bera ‘(s)he, him-/herself’) in Basque, a language without true third-person pronouns. In an acceptability judgement task, a developmental change occurred in the preference for hura (Experiment 1): 6–7-year-olds showed a preference for the null pronoun in both topic-shift and topic-continuity contexts, while 8–10-year-olds, like adults, preferred hura in topic-shift contexts and null pronouns in topic-continuity contexts. However, no developmental shift was observed in the preference for bera (Experiment 2): unlike adults, neither 6–7 nor 8–10-year-old children selected bera over null pronouns in topic-shift contexts. They instead showed a general preference for null pronouns, an indication of tolerance for ambiguity – a pattern which differs from prior studies in other null-subject languages, where ambiguous pronouns declined with age. The results reveal a different developmental pattern for hura and bera, which may be explained by the more rigid (syntactic) constraints operating on hura in comparison to bera in antecedent choice.

La influencia del grado de exposición a la lengua en la adquisición del euskera (8-30 meses)

Resumen En este artículo se estudia la influencia del grado de exposición a la lengua en el desarrollo comunicativo de 1.378 niños vascos de entre 8 y 30 meses de edad con diferentes grados de exposición al euskera o lengua vasca. El desarrollo comunicativo se ha medido mediante la adaptación a esta lengua de los inventarios MacArthur- Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Una primera aproximación a los datos revela la ausencia de diferencias entre los niños de 8 a 15 meses de edad con distintos grados de exposición a la lengua vasca, contrariamente a los datos de niños de 16 a 30 meses, entre los que sí se encuentran diferencias, ya que los monolingües arrojan puntuaciones más elevadas que los bilingües en todas las escalas analizadas. Sin embargo, un estudio más detallado permite comprobar que las diferencias detectadas en el desarrollo léxico y gramatical no distinguen a los monolingües de los bilingües con alta exposición al euskera, sino a los grupos con mayor grado de exposición al euskera (monolingües o no) respecto de los bilingües con menor exposición (media o baja) a esta lengua, si bien esta diferencia sólo se manifiesta entre los 26 y los 30 meses.

Language Delay and Amount of Exposure to the Language: Two (Un)Related Phenomena in Early Spanish-Basque Bilingualism

This chapter investigates the effect of the amount of exposure to the Basque language on the expressive vocabulary and grammar size of early bilingual children exposed to B(asque) and S(panish) in their closest family environment from a very early age, and with a varying degree of (relative) B/S input. Four groups are distinguished: (a) Basque monolinguals; (b) Basque-dominant bilinguals; (c) Balanced bilinguals and (d) Spanish-dominant bilinguals, and three levels of vocabulary knowledge, based on the Percentiles (P) of expressive vocabulary: (a) large (P> 90); (b) normal (P10–90); and (c) small vocabulary size (P< 10). The chapter focuses specifically on the effect of the amount of exposure to the language, on bilinguals’ linguistic level, paying special attention to children located at the lowest percentiles (P< 10) of expressive vocabulary in Basque, the minority language.