Michaela Nerantzini

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.

Wh-questions and relative clauses in Greek agrammatism : Evidence from comprehension and production

Background: Cross-linguistic studies on the production and comprehension of wh-questions and relative clauses, have revealed selective deficits in agrammatism with better performance observed in (a) subject questions and relative clauses compared to object ones; (b) object non-referential who questions compared to object referential questions; and (c) object what questions compared to object who questions. These selective deficits have been discussed within several neurolinguistic accounts (i.e., D-Linking Hypothesis, Derived Order Problem Hypothesis, and Relativised Minimality), which make different predictions. Limited research on wh-questions and relative clauses has been conducted in Greek agrammatism with inconclusive results, leaving open the question of which linguistic factors affect the agrammatic performance and which account best explains the attested patterns. Aims: The aim of the present study is twofold: (a) to investigate the role of three linguistic factors (syntactic function, referentiality, and φ-features) in the production and comprehension of wh-questions and relative clauses in six agrammatic Greek-speaking participants; and (b) to examine which neurolinguistic account can explain the observed patterns. Methods and Procedures: Two elicitation tasks (one for wh-questions and one for relative clauses) and two picture-pointing tasks (one for wh-questions and one for relative clauses) were used. All tasks targeted the following structures: referential and non-referential (who/what) questions, half with subject and half with object extraction, and relative clauses, half with subject and half with object dependencies. Outcomes and Results: Referentiality had a greater impact οn the production and comprehension of wh-questions compared to the other two linguistic factors under investigation, i.e., syntactic function and φ-feature assignment. Syntactic function did not affect the production or comprehension of relative clauses given that no subject/object dissociations were attested. Conclusion: With respect to wh-questions, the patterns observed in our data can be accounted for within the D-Linking Ηypothesis. The lack of subject/object dissociations attested in relative clauses is attributed to the case mismatch between the head of the relative clause and the relativisation site, and to the high proportion of complementiser omission observed in these structures.

Comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition: a test for Relativized Minimality

Cross-linguistic studies have shown that typically developing children have difficulties comprehending non-canonical structures. These findings have been interpreted within the Relativized Minimality (RM) approach, according to which local relations cannot be established between two terms of a dependency if an intervening element possesses similar morphosyntactic features. In an extension of RM, Friedmann, Belletti, and Rizzi (2009) suggested that lexical NP restriction is the source of minimality effects in non-canonical sentences. The present study aimed at investigating whether the predictions of their account can be confirmed in Greek. Our results indicate that although lexical NP restriction is a crucial factor in generating minimality effects, it is not always sufficient to account for the comprehension difficulties that young children face with non-canonical sentences, since the internal structure (i.e. the feature specification) of the moved element and of the intervener affects their performance, as well.