Aspects of the acquisition of object control and ECM-Type verbs in European Portuguese

Santos, Ana Lúcia; Gonçalves, Anabela; Hyams, Nina

doi:10.1080/10489223.2015.1067320

Cited by 16 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…In this case, very early occurrences of querer "want" with an infinitival complement clause are found in spontaneous speech before 2;00 (Santos, 2009). However, infinitival complement clauses under object control verbs (such as ensinar "teach" or ajudar "help") and subject control verbs of the type of prometer "promise" have been shown to cause difficulties in comprehension (Agostinho et al, 2018), as well as in production (Santos et al, 2016b;Santos, in press). These difficulties are salient until at least 4 years in the case of object control structures and until later in the case of subject control with prometer "promise" (see Chomsky, 1969 for the prolonged difficulty in the comprehension of control structures with promise).…”

Section: The Emergence Of Complex Syntax After Age 2 and The Specificities Of European Portuguesementioning

confidence: 86%

Parental Reports of Preschoolers' Lexical and Syntactic Development: Validation of the CDI-III for European Portuguese

et al. 2021

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This study presents the validation analysis of the European Portuguese version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory III (CDI-III-PT). The CDI-III-PT is a parental report measure allowing researchers to assess expressive vocabulary and the syntactic abilities of children aged 2;6–4;0. In this study, we present a version comprising a lexical subscale which follows the Swedish adaptation and an original syntactic subscale allowing us to include language-specific structures. The reports of 739 children were collected; in addition, a standardized measure of language was also administered to a sub-sample of these children and the reports of preschool teachers were collected for another sub-sample. The results indicate a high internal consistency of the lexical and syntactic subscales. As for sociodemographic variables often found to be predictors of language development, as measured by this type of instrument, the results indicate that age and maternal education are significant predictors of the scores, and that first-born children attain higher scores in vocabulary than later born children, but no significant gender differences were found. The scores of the CDI-III-PT are positively correlated with the ones obtained in the standardized language measure, thus supporting their validity. A high agreement between the reports of parents and teachers was also found. These findings indicate that the CDI-III-PT has adequate psychometric properties and that it can be a useful tool for research and clinical practice. The age-based norms that are now provided can be used to evaluate whether a child is performing poorly compared to their peers.

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Section: The Emergence Of Complex Syntax After Age 2 and The Specificities Of European Portuguesementioning

confidence: 86%

Parental Reports of Preschoolers' Lexical and Syntactic Development: Validation of the CDI-III for European Portuguese

et al. 2021

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“…In their elicited production study, Santos et al (2015) found that children produced few object control complements, strongly preferring inflected infinitives instead. This is in accordance with SASH (and the CFC, as inflected infinitives are complete functional complements) (cf.…”

Section: Control In Ep: Intervention Vs Sashmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comments on the acquisition of complementation in Portuguese

Hyams

2018

Complement Clauses in Portuguese

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The four acquisition papers in this volume deal with different facets of complementation in the L1 and L2 development of Portuguese. The backdrop for two of these papers is an earlier study by Santos, Gonçalves & Hyams (2016) that looked broadly at the question of which complement types are acquired earliest by European Portuguese-speaking (EP) children and why. Recognizing that a verb may select for a variety of complement types (and Portuguese is especially rich in this regard), Santos et al. wanted to see which complements children would use when given a choice in a sentence completion task. The children were told a story accompanied by pictures and then asked to complete a lead-in sentence with the complement of their choosing. The verbs in the lead-in allowed for various complement types including finite indicative, subjunctive, inflected infinitive, Raising to Object (RtO), among othres. The guiding assumption was that the complement types that children used most often were easier for them and hence mastered earlier than those which occurred less frequently in their answers. In the current volume, Agostinho, Santos & Duarte investigate children's comprehension of control in European Portuguese (EP), complementing the production study just described. Gonçalves, Santos, Duarte and Justino replicate a portion of the Santos et al. production study in children acquiring Mozambican Portuguese, (MozP). Silva's contribution looks at a different aspect of complementation, how children interpret null and overt subject pronouns in indicative and subjunctive complements. Finally, Madeira's study investigates the acquisition of inflected infinitives by Spanish and Chinese L2 learners of EP, evaluating competing hypotheses concerning the degree to which adult L2 learners can successfully acquire structures not available in their L1. Collectively, these papers represent a substantial contribution to the literature on children's development of complementation, and they considerably broaden the empirical base Nina Hyams Commentary 2 of research into Portuguese L1 and L2 acquisition, specifically. As would be expected, some of the findings and claims raise additional questions, especially as regards the status of principles like the Single Argument Selection Hypothesis (SASH) and the Complete Functional Complement Hypothesis (CFC) (Santos et al. 2015), discussed below, and the possible influence of extra-grammatical factors such as frequency, as well as processing and pragmatic effects in the acquisition of complementation. In what follows I offer some brief remarks on these issues. My comments are intended to open up areas for discussion in the hope of pushing forward this ambitious research program on the acquisition of complements in Portuguese and also possibly extending it to other languages. Universal biases: SASH and the CFC in European and Mozambican Portuguese A central finding of Santos et al. (2015) was that EP children (ages 3-5) showed a preference to produce finite complements and inflected infinitives over oth...

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“…Hence, different syntactic structures underlie the two superficially similar sentence patterns. This presents a learnability problem known as the “string identity problem,” as children must infer two different syntactic structures from almost identical input (see Santos, Gonçalves, & Hyams, 2016 for discussion).…”

Section: Incomplete Grammars Exist In All Acquisition Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Terminology Choice in Generative Acquisition Research

Domínguez

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Slabakova

2019

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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Pascual y Cabo and Rothman (2012) and Kupisch and Rothman (2018) argue against the use of term incomplete to characterize the grammars of heritage speakers, claiming that it reflects a negative evaluation of the linguistic knowledge of these bilingual speakers. We examine the reasons for and against the use of “incomplete” across acquisition contexts and argue that its use is legitimate on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Our goal is to present arguments for using the term, not to evaluate the scientific validity of incomplete acquisition over other possible accounts. Although our conclusion is that the term should not be abandoned, we advocate a position whereby researchers consider the possible negative impact of the terminology they use and how they use it. This position aims to resolve the tension between the need to prioritize scientific effectiveness and the need to avoid terminology that can be negatively misconstrued by the general public.

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Aspects of the acquisition of object control and ECM-Type verbs in European Portuguese

Cited by 16 publications

References 42 publications

Parental Reports of Preschoolers' Lexical and Syntactic Development: Validation of the CDI-III for European Portuguese

Parental Reports of Preschoolers' Lexical and Syntactic Development: Validation of the CDI-III for European Portuguese

Comments on the acquisition of complementation in Portuguese

Terminology Choice in Generative Acquisition Research

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