Do case and gender information assist sentence comprehension and repetition for German- and Hebrew-speaking children?

Biran, Michal; Ruigendijk, Esther

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2015.06.012

Cited by 17 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…We found that these individuals failed to understand the sentences with object topicalization, but did not perform below chance on these structures, indicating that they were sensitive to the presence of the object marker, but could not use it for sentence interpretation. A similar pattern was found in our analysis of data from Biran and Ruigendijk (2015) on typically developing Hebrew-speaking children: the children failed to understand OVS sentences but did not consistently reverse the interpretation. These results bear on the general issue of what causes the difficulty with object A'-dependencies in children and syntactically-impaired populations.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…Overall, our results share similarity to those presented in a recent study by Biran and Ruigendijk (2015) for typically developing children. Biran and Ruigendijk tested the comprehension of OVS topicalized sentences in Hebrew-speaking children aged 3-6 years.…”

Section: Typically-developing Children (Biran and Ruigendijk 2015)supporting

confidence: 91%

“…In German, Biran and Ruigendijk (2015) have shown that Case morphology does not help in the comprehension of which object questions. They tested children's comprehension of German object questions, which display the order 'Object-acc Verb Subject-nom', so that only the Case marking on the DPs indicates that the structure is an object, rather than a subject, question (the two DPs matched in number): children aged 3-6 years were only 51% correct on these questions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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No case for Case in locality: Case does not help interpretation when intervention blocks A-bar chains

Friedmann

Rizzi

Belletti

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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We discuss a robust yet at first sight surprising fact: individuals who have problems understanding sentences with object A-bar movement cannot use overt Case marking of the object to interpret these sentences and to associate the DPs with thematic roles. We tested the effect of overt Case marking of the object in typically developing Hebrew-speaking children by comparing their comprehension of which object questions with and without the object Case marker et, and found that there was no difference in comprehension between the two. A similar pattern was found in an adolescent with syntactic SLI. We then tested the comprehension of object topicalized structures in the order OVS, where the only element identifying these sentences as objectfirst sentences and distinguishing them from simple SVO sentences was the object marker. We tested this in three populations with object A-bar movement problems: individuals with agrammatism, adolescents with syntactic SLI, and orally-trained children with hearing impairment, as well as in analysis of previous data on typically-developing children acquiring Hebrew. All populations failed to understand the sentence, but did not consistently reverse the thematic roles of the two noun phrases. This suggests that they were sensitive to the presence of the Case marker but could not use it for interpretation. We argue that these findings immediately follow from the way intervention and locality are computed, under the featural Relativized Minimality approach. Case is not among the features triggering movement, therefore a Case difference is not taken into account in trying to build a movement chain across an intervener. As a result, the object chain cannot be built across the intervening subject in the relevant cases, and overt Case marking of the object cannot help rescue the structure. Thematic role assignment in complex movement configurations requires the building of movement chains; if chain formation fails, strategies based on overt morphological cues do not help. These results argue for a featureselective approach to locality and for encapsulated syntactic computation of movement.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Typically-developing Children (Biran and Ruigendijk 2015)supporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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No case for Case in locality: Case does not help interpretation when intervention blocks A-bar chains

Friedmann

Rizzi

Belletti

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Sentences in which the theme (the object of the sentence here) moves across the agent (the subject) to a position in the beginning of the sentence are especially difficult for various populations: young children who have not yet completed the acquisition of syntax in their language (Friedmann et al, 2009, 2010a; Belletti et al, 2012; Biran and Ruigendijk, 2015), children with developmental syntactic impairment, SySLI (Friedmann and Novogrodsky, 2004, 2011; Friedmann et al, 2015), and individuals with agrammatism (Grodzinsky et al, 1999). In studies of English, Hebrew, and Palestinian Arabic, the difficulty in these structures is cast in terms of word order: the theme moves to a position before the agent, and the word order is not the canonical one; to distinguish between an object and a subject question in English, for example (Which grandfather did the boy tickle vs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…12There seem to be some differences between German child language and for instance Hebrew child language in this respect, as discussed by Biran and Ruigendijk (2015).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Deficit in Movement-Derived Sentences in German-Speaking Hearing-Impaired Children

Ruigendijk

Friedmann

2017

Front. Psychol.

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Children with hearing impairment (HI) show disorders in syntax and morphology. The question is whether and how these disorders are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The aim of this paper is to examine whether moderate to severe hearing loss at a young age affects the ability of German-speaking orally trained children to understand and produce sentences. We focused on sentence structures that are derived by syntactic movement, which have been identified as a sensitive marker for syntactic impairment in other languages and in other populations with syntactic impairment. Therefore, our study tested subject and object relatives, subject and object Wh-questions, passive sentences, and topicalized sentences, as well as sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. We tested 19 HI children aged 9;5–13;6 and compared their performance with hearing children using comprehension tasks of sentence-picture matching and sentence repetition tasks. For the comprehension tasks, we included HI children who passed an auditory discrimination task; for the sentence repetition tasks, we selected children who passed a screening task of simple sentence repetition without lip-reading; this made sure that they could perceive the words in the tests, so that we could test their grammatical abilities. The results clearly showed that most of the participants with HI had considerable difficulties in the comprehension and repetition of sentences with syntactic movement: they had significant difficulties understanding object relatives, Wh-questions, and topicalized sentences, and in the repetition of object who and which questions and subject relatives, as well as in sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. Repetition of passives was only problematic for some children. Object relatives were still difficult at this age for both HI and hearing children. An additional important outcome of the study is that not all sentence structures are impaired—passive structures were not problematic for most of the HI children

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German-speaking children use sentence-initial case marking for predictive language processing at age four

et al. 2022

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Do case and gender information assist sentence comprehension and repetition for German- and Hebrew-speaking children?

Cited by 17 publications

References 35 publications

No case for Case in locality: Case does not help interpretation when intervention blocks A-bar chains

No case for Case in locality: Case does not help interpretation when intervention blocks A-bar chains

A Deficit in Movement-Derived Sentences in German-Speaking Hearing-Impaired Children

German-speaking children use sentence-initial case marking for predictive language processing at age four

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