A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives

Abstract

Sentences where like-moves-over-like, e.g. this is the cat that the dog was chasing <the cat>, have occupied language researchers over the past two decades. They are often described as "intervention" sentences as one element intervenes in the movement of another. Such structures are difficult to comprehend by children or adults, and this effect is exacerbated in language-impaired individuals. Dominant theories, e.g. Rizzi's Relativised Minimality (RM), propose that the two NPs interfere with each other by virtue of having overlapping features. However, such sentences are also rarely encountered due to discourse constraints. For example, subject NPs (the dog) tend to be pronominal as they are typically aligned with topic-hood. This paper investigates whether discourse can account for intervention in questions. It employs a mixed methodology. Firstly, corpora were investigated to assess the degree to which discourse impacts on input frequency. Secondly, a behavioural study was conducted to unpack the relationship between frequency and processing in children. It was found that the input frequencies of intervention structures are predominantly influenced by discourse, and that intervention structures are vanishingly rare in the input. However, a link between frequency and processing was not observed, with the findings more supportive of RM. It is suggested that a consideration of discourse as an external phenomenon may yield new insights into intervention structures.

The Peaceful Co-existence of Input Frequency and Structural Intervention Effects on the Comprehension of Complex Sentences in German-Speaking Children

“…The hypothesis put forward by Belletti et al ( 2012 ) is precisely the version of the structural intervention account that we will investigate in the present study and whose predictions will be compared to the predictions of the input frequency account (see Riches and Garraffa, 2017 for pursuing a similar goal but focusing on different structures). The properties of German suit well these purposes as we know from previous studies that object relative clauses with inanimate heads are more frequent in the input (Mak et al, 2002 ), easier to imitate (Kidd et al, 2007 ) and to comprehend (Brandt et al, 2009 ) than object relative clauses with two animate NPs.…”

Linguistic and Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism with Regional Minority Languages: A Study of Sardinian–Italian Adult Speakers

“… 2 It is possible that the effect on the dominant language of bilingualism in another language is visible both in production and in comprehension due to the necessary involvement of a production step for comprehension of complex sentences, as predicted by working memory-based models [see also Riches and Garraffa (2017) for an overview of grammatical-based effects in children and adults]. …”

Grammar as a Maturational Controlled Behavior: Minimality in Development and Impairment

“…This dissociation arises, according to Wexler, because the relevant linguistic knowledge (expressed as a parameter) adheres to a genetically-determined time frame. A similar argument could be put forward to explain the data reported in a recent study on intervention structures in children, where the performance on Object which-questions was reported as not correlated with aspects of performance on sentence comprehension in different grammatical conditions, such as subject-extracted questions or binding (Riches & Garraffa 2017). Intervention effects may be subject to a maturational constraint based on intervention and consequently they are divorced from other domain-general language abilities.…”