Sanne Berends

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.

Designing research on bilingual development: Behavioral and neurolinguistic experiments

Chapter 1. Introduction by Monika S. Schmid.- Chapter 2. Multi-factorial studies: Populations and linguistic features by Monika S. Schmid.- Chapter 3. The multi-lab, multi-language, multi-method challenge By Bregtje J. Seton and Laurie A. Stowe.- Chapter 4. Collecting and analyzing spontaneous speech data by Christopher Bergmann.- Chapter 5. Eye-tracking and the visual world paradigm by Sanne Meike Berends, Susanne M. Brouwer and Simone A. Sprenger.- Chapter 6. EEG and event-related brain potentials by Nienke Meulman, Bregtje J. Seton and Laurie A. Stowe.

Eye-Tracking and the Visual World Paradigm

This chapter will focus on the use of eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm. This method can be employed to investigate a number of language comprehension issues, and we will begin with a brief overview of the history of the method and some of the applications. More centrally, we will discuss how it can be used to assess the impact of cross-linguistic interference, proficiency levels, and age of onset in L2 acquisition and L1 attrition, with an introduction to the issues that are involved in designing a study using this technique. As a case in point, we present and discuss the specific experiment employed within the multi-task, multi-language and multi-lab study on which this book is based, with special attention to the issues for analysis that arise when data from multiple systems must be combined.