Dummy auxiliaries in child and adult second language acquisition of Dutch

Spoken grammar practice and feedback in an ASR-based CALL system

“…From the learners' point of view, it is a difficult feature to master (cf. Blom & de Korte, 2011). Nevertheless, it would be interesting to investigate learning with CF of other grammatical structures in our system to shed light on this issue.…”

Dummy auxiliaries in Dutch dialects, L1 and L2 acquisition

“…If reducing complexity remains an important force in the adult language then it is unclear why children stop producing periphrastic 'do' Moreover, the fact that the geographic distribution of periphrastic 'do' is sensitive to clause type is a serious problem for accounts in terms of reduced complexity. For example, Blom and De Korte (2011) show in their study that dummy auxiliaries are most frequent in clauses with subject-verb inversion (e.g. questions), less frequent in subject initial declarative main clauses, and least frequent in relative clauses which have the finite verb in clause final position.…”

“…Blom and De Korte 2011 for an overview and references). Dummy auxiliaries are defined as semantically empty words that in certain stages of L1 or L2 acquisition occur in syntactic positions where the main verb occurs in the native adult language.…”

“…If a dummy occurs in T/AGR or C, the finite main verb does not move to those positions, which would yield a less complex derivation (Zuckerman 2001;Blom and De Korte 2011). According to Blom (2003), insertion of a dummy in T/AGR or C reduces inflectional complexity.…”

Input and age effects: Quo vadis?

“…There is a potential counterexample in Tsimpli's review of the acquisition of word order by late successive bilinguals. Blom and De Korte (2011) argue that late bilingual children acquiring Dutch place the finite verb in V2 position in embedded clauses in an elicitation task consisting of relative clauses like (1). The italic part is given by the researcher and the child has to fill in the sentence.…”