Matthew Rispoli

Acquisition of complementation.

This study concerns the acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs that take a second verb in their complements. The acquisition of complementation began between two and three years of age in this longitudinal study of four childrens spontaneous speech. The results of the study showed that (1) complement types and complementizer connectives and (2) the discourse contexts in which complementation occurred were specific to individual matrix verbs. The most frequent verbs acquired were the perception verbs see and look and the epistemic verbs think and know. Developments in both discourse and syntax indicated that these verbs expressed attitudes of certainty/uncertainty toward the content expressed in their complements. The results are discussed in terms of both linguistic and psychological factors in the acquisition of complex sentences with complementation.

Pronoun case overextensions and paradigm building

Pronoun case errors, or overextensions, like *me want it are characteristic of English child language. This paper explores a hypothesis that the morphological structure of a pronoun influences the pattern of these errors. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) attempts to analyse English pronoun case forms into stems and affixes, but cannot because of their irregularity. Nevertheless the LAD extracts a phonetic core for each pronoun (e.g./m-/ for the 1st sg.,/h-/ for the 3rd masc. sg.). The phonetic core blocks the overextension of suppletive nominative forms like I and she. This hypothesis predicts strong differences in the frequency and types of errors between pronouns with suppletive nominatives and those without. Evidence for this hypothesis was found in a transcript database of twelve children, with data collected in one hour samples every month from 1;0 to 3;0. 20,908 pronouns were examined, 1347 of which were errors. Statistical analyses of these data provide support for this hypothesis.

Incomplete and Continuing: Theoretical Issues in the Acquisition of Tense and Aspect

Weist et al. demonstrate quite elegantly the ecological invalidity of many of the early psycholinguistic experiments that attempted to neutralize the linguistic context while eliciting one or another linguistic form, such as in the study of verb tenseaspect inflection by Bronckart & Sinclair (1973). By neutralizing morphological priming, Bronckart & Sinclair proposed that the child would exhibit an unprejudiced selection of tense-aspect forms. However, such unbiased selection does not occur in the real world. Weist et al. clearly demonstrate that biasing the linguistic context aids children in using temporal deictic notions appropriately, as it does in real-life situations.

When children reach beyond their grasp: why some children make pronoun case errors and others don't

This research addresses the question of why some children are disposed to making a large number of pronoun case errors and others are not. The answer proposed is that when pronoun paradigm building outstrips the development of INFL, children become especially vulnerable to erring in the choice of pronominal word form, resulting in pronoun case error. On the other hand, when pronoun paradigm building proceeds more conservatively, the risk of error is reduced. The spontaneous sentence production of children observed in naturalistic caregiver--child interaction from a cross-section of 44 children (2;0-4;0) is used to support this proposal. The data show that pronoun case error was minimal among children who had strong INFL. However, among children with weak INFL there was a wide range of variation, some children making many errors and others making none. Analysis of variance confirmed that this variation was strongly related to the dispersion of production attempts across an extended pronoun paradigm, such that, the fewer cells attempted, the lower the error rate. These findings show that pronoun case errors are not an inevitable result of grammatical development, but may conceivably be avoided altogether if paradigm building proceeds at a rate commensurate with the childs development of INFL.

Case and agreement in English language development

This study examines the relationship between third person singular (3Psg) subject pronoun case and agreement, focusing on the hypothesis that these two grammatical subsystems develop together. This hypothesis is broken down into two separate, empirically testable hypotheses: (a) that correct subject case pronoun production and the production of agreement are correlated, and (b) that at the sentence level, correct case is dependent on the presence of agreement. Twenty-nine children between the ages of 2;6 and 4;0 were each audiotaped for approximately two hours playing and interacting with their primary caregivers. Transcribed production data showed that 3Psg masculine subject pronoun case was correlated with agreement marking, whereas 3Psg feminine subject pronoun case was not. This result suggests the influence of a retrieval factor, termed the double-cell effect, on the her for she pronoun case error. At the utterance level, pronoun case was independent of the presence of agreement. Overall, the study indicates that the relationship between case and agreement may be discernible as a general correlation, yet indiscernible at the level of sentence production.

Growth of Finiteness in the Third Year of Life: Replication and Predictive Validity

PURPOSE The authors of this study investigated the validity of tense and agreement productivity (TAP) scoring in diverse sentence frames obtained during conversational language sampling as an alternative measure of finiteness for use with young children. METHOD Longitudinal language samples were used to model TAP growth from 21 to 30 months of age for 37 typically developing toddlers. Empirical Bayes (EB) linear and quadratic growth coefficients and child sex were then used to predict elicited grammar composite scores on the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI; Rice & Wexler, 2001) at 36 months. RESULTS A random-effects quadratic model with no intercept best characterized TAP growth, replicating the findings of Rispoli, Hadley, and Holt (2009). The combined regression model was significant, with the 3 variables accounting for 55.5% of the variance in the TEGI composite scores. CONCLUSION These findings establish TAP growth as a valid metric of finiteness in the 3rd year of life. Developmental and theoretical implications are discussed.

The acquisition of the transitive and intransitive action verb categories in Japanese

The goal of this study was to use evidence from production data to identify three dimensions along which Japanese children may dis criminate transitive from intransitive verbs. The three dimensions are: (1) case marking, (2) locus of change animacy, as indicated by theme animacy, and (3) planning, as indicated by the appropriate use of verb suffixes denoting request, desire, and prohibition. Production data from two Japanese boys were used in cluster analyses that modelled the role of semantic and formal factors in the organization of the childrens verb lexicons. The results confirmed that the semantic dimensions of theme animacy and the planning of an action were sufficient to classify childrens verbs into transitive and intransitive groups. It is concluded that at a time when these Japanese children did not use case marking for classification, the children had verb lexicons that were already dif ferentiated into transitive and intransitive classes.

Encounters with Japanese verbs: Caregiver sentences and the categorization of transitive and intransitive action verbs

Familial Japanese has a high rate of noun phrase ellipsis and optional case marking. Because of these traits, caregiver sentences seldom allow for the specification of thematic roles and their syntactic encod ing. A model is proposed for the acquisition of the transitive and intransitive action verb classes in Japanese. The child matches action verbs to three semantic causal types: self-agentive, non-agentive, or causal agentive events. The model uses minimal sentences consisting of only a verb, its inflections, and auxiliaries by paying attention to: 1) the intentionality of the figure-patient referent, and 2) the expression of intentional, planned action by verb suffixes, auxiliaries and adverbs. A sample of 300 action verb sentences spoken by six Japanese care- givers to their two-year-old children, and previous research, support the plausibility of the model.

The acquisition of verb subcategorization in a functionalist framework

This paper takes a functionalist perspective on the development of verb subcategorization, concentrating on a subclass of action verbs. The acquisition of verb subcategorization is viewed as the construction of logical structures (LSs) for the predicate in which a verb can appear. The LS motivates a verbs syntactic specifications through linking rules which reflect, in part, universals, and, in part, language specific generalizations. Crucial information for the construction of an LS are combinations of input and context which can unambiguously specify aspects of the meaning of a predicate. One consequence of this approach is that arrays of explicit NP arguments with syntactic encoding play a minor role in this process. Information about three semantic dimensions figure in the construction of the LS of an action predicate; (1) animacy of the theme or patient referent, whether implicit or explicit; (2) intentionality of the theme or patient referent as expressed by morphemes that imply the intentional origin of an action; and (3) the temporal contour of an action, in particular, whether a predicate is telic.

Discourse and the acquisition of eat

English has several classes of transitive verbs which can optionally appear without an undergoer. Despite their similar syntactic subcategorization, there are at least three different semantic subclasses that allow undergoer omission. Information sources based on surface structure, for example, syntactic bootstrapping, cannot inform the child of the semantic representation of these verbs. The focus of this paper is the acquisition of a single English verb, eat. The transcripts of 40 children, who were audiotaped monthly from 1;0 to 3;0, showed that eat was the first member of this verb class to be acquired. Some 1276 eat sentences were analysed for the presence of overt undergoer arguments across levels of cumulative verb lexicon (CVL) size, and two discourse conditions: (1) UNDERGOER ACCESSIBLE and (2) OPEN (to undergoer omission). Results indicate that undergoer omission became associated with discourse conditions when CVL size rose above 75 types, at MLU approximately 2.4 and age approximately 2;3. This suggests that two-year-old children are sensitive to a relationship between undergoer omission and discourse context.