Language Variation and Child Language Acquisition: Laying Ground for Evaluating Parametric Proposals

Isobe, Miwa

doi:10.1080/10489220802142532

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Over the decades, researchers have been interested in learning the order of difficulty of relative clauses. Considering relative clause structure, it has been observed that internally-headed relative clauses emerge at around age 2 (Isobe 2003(Isobe , 2005Ozeki & Shirai 2007), while externally-headed relative clauses appear at around age 4 (Guasti et al 2012). Relative clauses occurring in copular construction (This is the sugar that goes in there) also precede those occurring in main clause construction (The horse that pushed the goat stands on the lion) (Diessel & Tomasello 2005).…”

Section: Typically Developing Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquisition of Chinese relative clauses by deaf children in Hong Kong

Lam

2022

LALI

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This paper is a study of how deaf children in Hong Kong acquire Chinese relative clauses. The relative clause is reported to be a difficult structure for deaf children (Friedmann & Szterman 2006). While it may be true for postnominal relative clauses, it is unclear whether prenominal relative clauses are equally difficult for deaf children. This paper explores this question by examining deaf children’s comprehension and production of Chinese relative clauses via an elicited production task, a picture selection task and a dots-connecting task, which are all presented in written format. In addition to deaf children, typically developing Cantonese children and Cantonese adults with high Chinese proficiency are also recruited for comparison. The results show that deaf children fall behind typically developing Cantonese children in production. But deaf children with higher Chinese proficiency can perform similarly with typically developing Cantonese children. The error types and the types of non-RC responses produced by deaf children are also present in the data of typically developing Cantonese children, suggesting that deaf children do not undergo a different pathway in the development of relative clauses. While typically developing Cantonese children demonstrate non-significant subject advantage in production but object advantage in comprehension, deaf children do not demonstrate subject-object asymmetry in production and object advantage in comprehension.

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Section: Typically Developing Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquisition of Chinese relative clauses by deaf children in Hong Kong

Lam

2022

LALI

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“…Another good example of mysterious acquisition can be found in Isobe's (2005) work on head-internal relative clauses (HIRCs) in Japanese. Isobe demonstrated that HIRCs are exceedingly rare in child-directed Japanese.…”

Section: Mysterious Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A parametric approach to the acquisition of syntax

Snyder¹

2021

J. Child Lang.

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Three case-studies, using longitudinal records of children's spontaneous speech, illustrate what happens when a child's syntax changes. The first, examining acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining acquisition of prepositional questions in English or Spanish, shows that children (i) may go as long as 9 months producing both direct-object questions and declaratives with prepositional phrases, before first attempting a prepositional question; and (ii) at some point, abrubtly begin producing prepositional questions that are correctly formed for the target language. The third case study shows that in children acquiring English, the onset of verb-particle constructions occurs almost exactly when that child begins using novel noun-noun compounds. After a discussion of the implications for the nature of syntactic knowledge, and for the mechanisms by which it is acquired, two examples are presented of as-yet untested acquisitional predictions of parametric proposals in the syntax literature.

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Language Variation and Child Language Acquisition: Laying Ground for Evaluating Parametric Proposals

Cited by 2 publications

References 1 publication

Acquisition of Chinese relative clauses by deaf children in Hong Kong

Acquisition of Chinese relative clauses by deaf children in Hong Kong

A parametric approach to the acquisition of syntax

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