Effects of variable input in the acquisition of plural in two dialects of Spanish

Miller, Karen; Schmitt, Cristina

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2008.05.009

Cited by 61 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Interestingly, the rates of clitic omission are not the same everywhere: children distinguish non-reflexive clitics in simple clauses from reflexive clitics and from island contexts. Other authors have argued that input variability causes delays in acquisition: Miller and Schmitt (2010) have shown that the variation in the overt marking of plural morphology in the nominal domain determines a slower development of plural identification.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Input variability and late acquisition: Clitic misplacement in European Portuguese

Costa

Fiéis

Lobo

2015

Lingua

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Please cite this article in press as: Costa, J., et al. AbstractThis paper reports a study on the acquisition of clitic placement by European Portuguese children aged 5, 6 and 7, using an elicitation task. Contrarily to what has been found for other languages, where children correctly place clitic pronouns from a very early age, our results show that European Portuguese children still misplace clitics at age 7, although there is a developmental effect from 5 to 7: they overuse enclisis in proclisis contexts, but not the other way round. This confirms previous studies based on spontaneous production. Our study shows, however, that: i) the rates of clitic misplacement are not identical in all proclisis contexts; ii) proclisis is acquired earlier in some contexts; iii) the contexts that are harder to acquire are the ones where we find more variability in the adult control group, and where diachronic data are not so categorical. We argue that, since clitic placement in European Portuguese is not linked to the finite/non finite distinction, there is a slower developmental path, reflecting the complexity of the input and the specific properties of lexical items and syntactic contexts.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Input variability and late acquisition: Clitic misplacement in European Portuguese

Costa

Fiéis

Lobo

2015

Lingua

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Compared with Mexican and standard Spanish, the Chilean variety pronounces plural morphology only half of the time. Therefore, Miller and Schmitt (2010) found that Chilean children were far less accurate than their Mexican age-matched counterparts in understanding the meaning of the plural morpheme. Similarly, Pires et al (2011) found that European Portuguese 6-7 year olds already mastered some of the semantic consequences of inflected infinitives in Portuguese, whereas the same property was not mastered until much later (from age 10 on) by children learning Brazilian Portuguese (Pires & Rothman 2009).…”

Section: Sensitivity To Morphosyntax and Role Of Inputmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…This means that the quality of the English language input our adolescents have received may not be as consistent as that for the four-year olds in Barner and Snedeker (2005). Even in first language learning contexts, variability in input influences children's progression towards target-like knowledge, as seen in the comparison between Chilean and Mexican children with respect to Spanish plural morphology (Miller & Schmitt 2010). Compared with Mexican and standard Spanish, the Chilean variety pronounces plural morphology only half of the time.…”

Section: Sensitivity To Morphosyntax and Role Of Inputmentioning

confidence: 95%

Mass-count distinction in Chinese-English bilingual students

Yin¹,

O’Brien²

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There has been increased interest in examining the relationship between different linguistic modules in second language learners' grammar system. One such interface concerns learners' ability to map morphosyntax to target-like semantic interpretations, especially in cases where the first and second languages differ in morphosyntax-semantics mapping. We examined this issue by investigating Chinese-English bilingual adolescents' knowledge regarding the semantic consequences of mass-count morphosyntax in English. 228 Chinese-English bilingual students from Singapore took part in a quantity judgment task. Following previous studies, we tested five noun conditions including count (e.g., shoe), substance mass (e.g., ketchup), object mass (e.g., furniture) and two conditions involving items that can occur flexibly in both mass and count contexts (e.g., string/strings). The last two conditions specifically probe learners' ability to make use of morphosyntax in deriving semantics. The representation of quantity for objects/substance was manipulated for number or combined volume (e.g., two large shoes/portions of ketchup versus six tiny shoes/portions of ketchup). Participants were asked to make judgments on the quantity of items, in response to questions presented in a count and/or mass frame (Who has more shoes/ketchup/furniture/string/strings?). Results show that our bilingual participants were able to make appropriate semantic judgments of quantity in response to manipulation of morphosyntax. We compare our findings with previous research in first and second language contexts and discuss the differences in terms of the quantity and quality of input in shaping learners' grammar system.

show abstract

“…An infant raised in Italy will acquire the vocabulary of Italian and not of Japanese, and unless exposed to physics or linguistic literature, an English speaker might never acquire the terms white dwarf or fundamental frequency, respectively. Similarly, if children are exposed to a dialect that doesn't mark plural reliably, they will be less likely to produce and comprehend plural morphology (Miller and Schmitt 2010). Importantly, linguistic units are not independent of one another but form a system.…”

Section: The Role Of Input In Shaping Our Knowledgebasementioning

confidence: 99%

Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

Lev‐Ari

2016

Linguistics Vanguard

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

People learn language from their social environment. Therefore, individual differences in the input that their social environment provides could influence their linguistic performance. Nevertheless, investigation of the role of individual differences in input on performance has been mostly restricted to first and second language acquisition. In this paper I argue that individual differences in input can influence linguistic performance even in adult native speakers. Specifically, differences in input can affect performance by influencing people's knowledgebase, by modulating their processing manner, and by shaping expectations. Therefore, studying the role that individual differences in input play can improve our understanding of how language is learned, processed and represented.Keywords: individual differences, social networks, PsychLingvarOne of the main goals of psycholinguistic research is to understand how we make sense of incoming input and manage to transform it into meaningful utterances. On the face of it, this is a task that most of us seem to succeed at, yet a closer look reveals great variation in the degree of success at different aspects of the task, from speech perception to the comprehension of pragmatic intentions. So far, the study of individual differences in language processing has mostly focused on differences due to variation in cognitive skills. Much less attention has been devoted to individual differences in the social environment, and in particular, to differences in the properties of the input it provides, especially among adult native speakers. In this paper, I argue that the characteristics of the input that people receive play an important role in shaping their linguistic performance. I will focus on three manners by which input can do so: by influencing the knowledgebase that feeds the analysis of incoming language, by influencing the manner of processing, such as the mechanisms that are relied on and the cues that are attended to during language processing, and by shaping expectations, which, in turn, influence performance. From noise to structured differencesThe realization that individual differences in performance can be informative about language processing and representation and are not merely noise that needs to be reduced has only gained popularity in Psycholinguistics over the last couple of decades. For many decades, experimental studies in psycholinguistics, as well as in other fields, focused on the commonalities, on how people in general perform certain tasks, and how the average participant is influenced by certain manipulations. Individual differences in performance were treated as noise. After all, by definition, participants' score on any task is composed of their "true" score and the measurement error, and so differences might simply be noise. If the experiment is conducted well, the measurement errors should cancel each other, and the general trend would be discovered. It is only in the 90s that the systematicity in this "noise" has started to be explo...

show abstract

Effects of variable input in the acquisition of plural in two dialects of Spanish

Cited by 61 publications

References 27 publications

Input variability and late acquisition: Clitic misplacement in European Portuguese

Input variability and late acquisition: Clitic misplacement in European Portuguese

Mass-count distinction in Chinese-English bilingual students

Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About