Silke Brandt

Object relatives made easy: A cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children's processing of relative clauses

We present the results from four studies, two corpora and two experimental, which suggest that English- and German-speaking children (3;1–4;9 years) use multiple constraints to process and produce object relative clauses. Our two corpora studies show that children produce object relatives that reflect the distributional and discourse regularities of the input. Specifically, the results show that when children produce object relatives they most often do so with (a) an inanimate head noun, and (b) a pronominal relative clause subject. Our experimental findings show that children use these constraints to process and produce this construction type. Moreover, when children were required to repeat the object relatives they most often use in naturalistic speech, the subject-object asymmetry in processing of relative clauses disappeared. We also report cross-linguistic differences in childrens rate of acquisition which reflect properties of the input language. Overall, our results suggest that children are sensitive to the same constraints on relative clause processing as adults.

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

Abstract In numerous comprehension studies, across different languages, children have performed worse on object relatives (e.g., the dog that the cat chased) than on subject relatives (e.g., the dog that chased the cat). One possible reason for this is that the test sentences did not exactly match the kinds of object relatives that children typically experience. Adults and children usually hear and produce object relatives with inanimate heads and pronominal subjects (e.g., the car that we bought last year) (cf. Kidd et al., Language and Cognitive Processes 22: 860–897, 2007). We tested young 3-year old German- and English-speaking children with a referential selection task. Children from both language groups performed best in the condition where the experimenter described inanimate referents with object relatives that contained pronominal subjects (e.g., Can you give me the sweater that he bought?). Importantly, when the object relatives met the constraints identified in spoken discourse, children understood them as well as subject relatives, or even better. These results speak against a purely structural explanation for childrens difficulty with object relatives as observed in previous studies, but rather support the usage-based account, according to which discourse function and experience with language shape the representation of linguistic structures.

The acquisition of German relative clauses: A case study*

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with main-clause word order. In the course of the development, more complex relative constructions emerge, in which the relative clause is embedded in a fully-fledged main clause. We argue that German relative clauses develop in an incremental fashion from simple non-embedded sentences that gradually evolve into complex sentence constructions.

'Lisa filled water into the cup': The roles of entrenchment, pre-emption and verb semantics in German speakers' L2 acquisition of English Locatives

A central challenge for learners of English is discovering verbs’ argument structure privileges; for example which verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground locative construction (e.g. Lisa poured water into the cup/ *Lisa poured the cup with water), which show the opposite pattern (e.g. *Lisa filled water into the cup/ Lisa filled the cup with water), and which may appear in both (e.g. Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers/ Lisa sprayed the flowers with water). This study investigated how adult L1 German learners of L2 English acquire these restrictions, in the face of potential transfer effects from a similar - but subtly different - pattern in the L1. The study took the form of a replication of a previous grammaticality judgment study conducted with native-speaking adults. The findings provide some evidence that, like L1 learners, advanced L2 leaners use the fit between verb and construction semantics to acquire verbs’ argument structure restrictions. Unlike L1 learners, how-ever, they did not display any evidence of spontaneously using surface-based “inference-from-absence” processes such as entrenchment and pre-emption. We end by offering some potential learning and teaching strategies for L2 learners of English.

The constructivist approach

Abstract In this article we outline the constructivist (or usage-based) approach to childrens language development. We argue that linguistic abstractions emerge from the interaction between childrens desire to communicate, their intention-reading skills and a distributional analysis of the input. We illustrate our approach by discussing: the development of constituency; inflectional marking; utterance level constructions; more complex syntax in the form of complement-clause structures and relative clauses. We also address explanations for some systematic errors made by English-speaking children that have been much discussed in the literature: optional infinitive errors, accusative for nominative errors and wh-inversion errors. We conclude with some outstanding issues for this approach.

Flexibility in the semantics and syntax of children’s early verb use

Linguistic communication almost always concerns events, actions, or states of affairs. Declaratives or informatives invite the listener to attend to some event, action, or state of affairs, and imperatives or directives enjoin the listener to do something to bring about a desired action or state of affairs. Thus, even when young children are using object labels as single word utterances, from the point of view of the communicative intention as a whole there is almost always some underlying event or action at issue. When the infant exclaims ‘‘Airplane!’’ she is exhorting her mother to attend to it or to notice its presence, and when the infant requests ‘‘Juice!’’ she is rousing her mother into action to satisfy her desire. One could argue that the appropriate gloss of such utterances is something along the lines of ‘‘Look at the airplane!’’ (or ‘‘The airplane is there!’’) and ‘‘Get me some juice!’’ The action or state of affairs intended, and its corresponding verb, is implicit; the utterance is what has been called a holophrase. The one potential exception is naming objects. But naming objects is actually a kind of metalinguistic speech act. It is not using language but rather ‘‘mentioning’’ it, mostly teaching it. Western, middle-class parents do this with some regularity with their children, and their children learn the names and then show off by using them in return. But in many other cultures the pedagogical or demonstrative naming of objects is a very rare type of speech act and plays very little role in the acquisition of language.

German Children’s Use of Word Order and Case Marking to Interpret Simple and Complex Sentences: Testing Differences Between Constructions and Lexical Items

ABSTRACT Children and adults follow cues such as case marking and word order in their assignment of semantic roles in simple transitives (e.g., the dog chased the cat). It has been suggested that the same cues are used for the interpretation of complex sentences, such as transitive relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., that’s the dog that chased the cat) (Bates, Devescovi, & D’Amico, 1999). We used a pointing paradigm to test German-speaking 3-, 4-, and 6-year-old children’s sensitivity to case marking and word order in their interpretation of simple transitives and transitive RCs. In Experiment 1, case marking was ambiguous. The only cue available was word order. In Experiment 2, case was marked on lexical NPs or demonstrative pronouns. In Experiment 3, case was marked on lexical NPs or personal pronouns. Whereas the younger children mainly followed word order, the older children were more likely to base their interpretations on the more reliable case-marking cue. In most cases, children from both age groups were more likely to use these cues in their interpretation of simple transitives than in their interpretation of transitive RCs. Finally, children paid more attention to nominative case when it was marked on first-person personal pronouns than when it was marked on third-person lexical NPs or demonstrative pronouns, such as der Löwe ‘the-NOM lion’ or der ‘he-NOM.’ They were able to successfully integrate this case-marking cue in their sentence processing even when it appeared late in the sentence. We discuss four potential reasons for these differences across development, constructions, and lexical items. (1) Older children are relatively more sensitive to cue reliability. (2) Word order is more reliable in simple transitives than in transitive RCs. (3) The processing of case marking might initially be item-specific. (4) The processing of case marking might depend on its saliency and position in the sentence.

Iconicity affects children’s comprehension of complex sentences: The role of semantics, clause order, input and individual differences

Complex sentences involving adverbial clauses appear in childrens speech at about three years of age yet children have difficulty comprehending these sentences well into the school years. To date, the reasons for these difficulties are unclear, largely because previous studies have tended to focus on only sub-types of adverbial clauses, or have tested only limited theoretical models. In this paper, we provide the most comprehensive experimental study to date. We tested four-year-olds, five-year-olds and adults on four different adverbial clauses (before, after, because, if) to evaluate four different theoretical models (semantic, syntactic, frequency-based and capacity-constrained). 71 children and 10 adults (as controls) completed a forced-choice, picture-selection comprehension test, providing accuracy and response time data. Children also completed a battery of tests to assess their linguistic and general cognitive abilities. We found that childrens comprehension was strongly influenced by semantic factors - the iconicity of the event-to-language mappings - and that their response times were influenced by the type of relation expressed by the connective (temporal vs. causal). Neither input frequency (frequency-based account), nor clause order (syntax account) or working memory (capacity-constrained account) provided a good fit to the data. Our findings thus contribute to the development of more sophisticated models of sentence processing. We conclude that such models must also take into account how childrens emerging linguistic understanding interacts with developments in other cognitive domains such as their ability to construct mental models and reason flexibly about them.

Syntactic and semantic coordination in finite complement-clause constructions: a diary-based case study.

This study investigates the coordination of matrix and subordinate clauses within finite complement-clause constructions. The data come from diary and audio recordings which include the utterances produced by an American English-speaking child, L, between the ages 1;08 and 3;05. We extracted all the finite complement-clause constructions that L produced and compared the grammatical acceptability of these utterances with that of the simple sentences of the same length produced within the same two weeks and with that of the simple sentences containing the same verb produced within the same month. The results show that L is more likely to make syntactic errors in finite complement-clause constructions than she does in her simple sentences of the same length or with the same verb. This suggests that the errors are more likely to arise from the syntactic and semantic coordination of the two clauses rather than limitations in performance or lexical knowledge.

Priming the comprehension of German object relative clauses

ABSTRACT Structural priming is a useful laboratory-based technique for investigating how children respond to temporary changes in the distribution of structures in their input. In the current study we investigated whether increasing the number of object relative clauses (RCs) in German-speaking children’s input changes their processing preferences for ambiguous RCs. Fifty-one 6-year-olds and 54 9-year-olds participated in a priming task that (i) gauged their baseline interpretations for ambiguous RC structures, (ii) primed an object-RC interpretation of ambiguous RCs, and (iii) determined whether priming persevered beyond immediate prime-target pairs. The 6-year old children showed no priming effect, whereas the 9-year-old group showed robust priming that was long lasting. Unlike in studies of priming in production, priming did not increase in magnitude when there was lexical overlap between prime and target. Overall, the results suggest that increased exposure to object RCs facilitates children’s interpretation of this otherwise infrequent structure, but only in older children. The implications for acquisition theory are discussed.