Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation

Shin, Naomi Lapidus; Miller, Karen

doi:10.1080/15475441.2021.1941031

Cited by 20 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 81 publications

(121 reference statements)

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“…The animacy effect among the children in our study may be based on distributional patterns in the input. Previous research indicates that animacy affects adults' direct object types (Mykhaylyk & Sopata, 2015) and research on structured variation suggests that children attend to variable patterns in the input (Shin & Miller, 2022). It is also possible that learners have a predisposition to detect linguistic patterns based on animacy due to how salient a cue animacy is for pattern seeking in general (Childers & Echols, 2004).…”

Section: Structured Variation: Direct Objects and Animacy Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Structured variation is defined as the interchange of linguistic forms where the choice to use one form over the other is probabilistically conditioned by linguistic and social factors (Labov, 1994). Traditionally, child language research has focused on more categorical aspects of language; however, the growing body of research on acquisition of structured variation suggests that monolingual and bilingual children alike learn probabilistic patterns by attending to these patterns in the input (Shin & Miller, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Structured variation, language experience, and crosslinguistic influence shape child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects

2022

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This study investigates child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects. A task designed to elicit direct objects was completed in Spanish and English by 40 child heritage speakers of Spanish in the U.S., and in Spanish by 24 monolingual children in Mexico. Both participant groups varied their direct object forms, following the same ranking: clitics>lexical NPs>omission>doubling. Animate referents promoted clitics; inanimate referents promoted lexical NPs. Among the heritage speakers, more Spanish experience and Spanish lexical proficiency predicted more clitic use (less omission and lexical NP use). We also argue that the child heritage speakers’ production of strong pronouns, more lexical NPs, and masculine clitic lo with inanimate feminine referents suggest English influence. The study underscores the importance of examining structured variation, which revealed both similarities and differences between heritage and monolingual speakers.

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Section: Structured Variation: Direct Objects and Animacy Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structured variation, language experience, and crosslinguistic influence shape child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects

2022

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“…The dearth of studies investigating such FRC effects in child language in general and the lack of prior studies of FRC effects in children's acquisition of variable morphosyntax specifically make this a ripe avenue for research that aims to understand how children's acquisition of variation unfolds. Shin and Miller's (2022) proposed developmental pathway of acquisition of variation acknowledges the importance of frequency effects, but it does not delve into FRC effects and how they shape lexical representation over time. Thus, this study adds a novel component to the pathway, as it elucidates a mechanism that may lead to the strengthening of word combinations over time.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Frequency effects are also evident in children's acquisition of linguistic variation. In their proposed four-step developmental pathway for acquisition of morphosyntactic variation across languages, Shin and Miller (2022) note the importance of frequency effects for each step in development. For example, children first produce only one of the forms in variation (Step 1) and that form is generally the one that is most frequent in the input.…”

Section: Frequency Effects In Child Language Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More specifically, we predict that the FRC effect will be apparent among older children, but not among younger ones. Indeed, research on children’s acquisition of morphosyntactic variation suggests that some probabilistic patterns may take time to emerge (Shin & Miller, 2022). In summary, investigating the cumulative effect of contextual conditioning of morphosyntactic variation provides a way to test hypotheses derived from exemplar models of child language acquisition (Ambridge, 2020a) and simultaneously informs our understanding of how children learn morphosyntactic variation (Shin & Miller, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquisition of cumulative conditioning effects on words: Spanish-speaking children’s [subject pronoun + verb] usage

Brown

Shin

2022

First Language

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Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular discourse context that conditions usage accumulates in memory over time and shapes the lexical representation of that form. This study contributes to the body of research on frequency effects in child language acquisition by testing whether such cumulative conditioning effects are also found among children, and, if so, at what age such effects appear. Specifically, the study investigates the influence of a distributional frequency measure (each verb form’s likelihood of use in a switch vs same-reference discourse context) on variable subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression ( N = 2227) in Spanish (e.g. yo voy ~ voy, both meaning ‘I go’) in the speech of 65 monolingual children in two age cohorts. Results reveal sensitivity to the contextual conditioning of discourse continuity (switch reference) among both the younger (6- and 7-year-olds) and older (8- and 9-year-olds) children in support of previous research. In addition, each verb’s likelihood of use in a switch-reference context significantly predicted the SPP use among the older children, but not the younger ones, suggesting that the cumulative effect of a probabilistic pattern takes time to emerge during childhood. The lexically specific accumulation in memory of contextual conditioning effects supports exemplar models of child language acquisition: each instance of use in discourse contributes to the lexical representation of that form and, over time, plays a role in the creation of morphosyntactic patterns during language development.

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Agreeing when to disagree: A corpus analysis of variable agreement in caregiver and child English

Lukyanenko

Miller

2023

Lang Var Change

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We characterized the patterns of agreement variation and consistency in three corpora of child and child-directed US English to better understand preschoolers’ input and to compare preschoolers’ own agreement production. We examined sentences with third-person subjects and tensed forms of be in two large single-family corpora and one cross-sectional corpus collected during a Search-and-Find activity. Caregivers’ agreement variation consistently reflected patterns previously found in adult-to-adult speech. Children's variation was conditioned by many of the same factors (e.g., sentence type, pronoun subject, and order of subject and verb) and clearly demonstrated acquisition of the categorical-variable split. However, some children showed substantially higher rates of nonagreeing forms (There's the cherries) than their caregivers and differed in their ranking of conditioning factors. We suggest that this reflects children's developing production processing abilities: shorter sentence-planning spans may make nonagreement a useful strategy for avoiding early number commitments in verb-first sentences.

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Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation

Cited by 20 publications

References 81 publications

Structured variation, language experience, and crosslinguistic influence shape child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects

Structured variation, language experience, and crosslinguistic influence shape child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects

Acquisition of cumulative conditioning effects on words: Spanish-speaking children’s [subject pronoun + verb] usage

Agreeing when to disagree: A corpus analysis of variable agreement in caregiver and child English

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