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 crosslinguistic differences discussed in the article. ARTICLE HISTORY
This paper reports evidence for a convergence between child language acquisition and Broca’s aphasia in the domain of copula omission. Our data shows that, in the spontaneous speech of people with Broca’s aphasia (PWBA), copula omission is confined to aspectual predicates, replicating a finding previously reported by Becker (2002) for child English. This grammatical property is a much stronger predictor of copula omission than alternative, extra-grammatical factors, such as predicate length or utterance length. We argue that grammatical accounts which predict the fragility of Tense by virtue of its cartographic location, in terms of ‘tree- pruning’/‘growing trees’, fare better than others in explaining similarities in patterns of omission in these two populations.
Classical statue sentences (‘Ringo hit himself’ meaning ‘Ringo hit his statue’) are a long-standing puzzle for binding theories. We enrich the Partition theory (Schwarzschild, 1996) to allow semantic partitions (based on contextual contrasts) to explain acquisition experiments. The semantic partitions, in turn, correspond to a syntactic analysis of bimorphemic versus monomorphic reflexives. Only morphologically complex anaphors allow near-reflexive reference to a statue. Two experiments on the acquisition of near-reflexivity in Italian and English show that this innate interface is present very early. Results from yes/no questions-after-stories given to children 4;0–6;0 years (Italian: N = 29; English: N = 36) and adult controls (Italian: N = 30; English: N = 72) supported our prediction: English children allowed near-reflexivity with herself, Italian children blocked near-reflexivity with se.
Online adult processing of English pronouns is subject to early structural constraints. However, if a sentence fails to provide a licit antecedent for a pronoun, ungrammatical antecedents may be fleetingly considered, causing processing disruption. This paper investigates whether illicit antecedents exert any interference in the processing of clitic pronouns. Given an established asymmetry between simple and Exceptional Case Marking predicates in the acquisition of binding Principle B (Baauw & Cuetos 2003), this study asks whether the notion of coargumenthood plays a role during the online processing of clitic pronouns by Italian-speaking adults. I report experimental evidence from a self-paced reading study suggesting that the time course of pronoun resolution is affected by coargumenthood. In Exceptional Case Marking predicates, comprehenders appear to temporarily consider a feature-matching local antecedent as soon as the clitic trace is processed in its thematic position.
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