Locality in the acquisition of object A’-dependencies: insights from French

Abstract

Children’s difficulties with dependencies involving movement of an object to the left periphery of the clause (object relative clauses/RCs and wh-questions), have been explained in terms of intervention effects arising when the moved object and the intervening subject share a lexical N feature (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi 2009). Such an account raises various questions: (1) Do these effects hold in the absence of a lexical N feature when the object and the intervener share other relevant features? (2) Do phi-features with a semantic role modulate such effects? (3) Does the degree of feature overlap determine a gradience in performance? We addressed these in three sentence-picture matching studies with French-speaking children (4;8 to 6;3), by assessing comprehension of (1) subject and object RCs headed by the demonstrative pronouns celui/celle and matching or mismatching in number; (2) object RCs headed by a lexical N and matching or mismatching in animacy; (3) object who- and which-questions. Our results show that mismatches in number, not in animacy, enhance comprehension of object RCs, even in the absence of a lexical N feature, and confirm previous findings that object who-questions yield better comprehension than object which-questions. Comparing across studies, the following gradation emerges with respect to performance accuracy: disjunction > intersection > inclusion. The global interpretation of these findings is that fine-grained phi-features determining movement are both sufficient and necessary for locality, and the degree of overlap of these features can capture the pattern of performance observed in children, namely higher accuracy as featural differences increase.

The problem of pseudoclefts in French

“…Belletti, Friedmann, Brunato & Rizzi (2012) put forward two major results: i) features that are relevant for intervention may vary crosslinguistically, since their relevance depends on their morphosyntactic status (i.e. a feature involved in triggering movement is relevant); ii) as far as the child grammar is concerned, there is a crucial opposition between disjunction and intersection relations, on the one hand, and relations of identity and inclusion on the other (see also Durrleman & Bentea 2021, who also develop this idea). The child tolerates only the first two.…”

“…The child tolerates only the first two. In (11) we present the relevant set-theoretic relations, proposed by Belletti, Friedmann, Brunato & Rizzi (2012: 1063 In a graded differentiation scale, intersection situates naturally between inclusion and disjunction: disjunction>intersection>inclusion>identity (Belletti, Friedmann, Brunato & Rizzi 2012;Rizzi 2018;Durrleman & Bentea 2021). Identity configurations are excluded in the adult grammar (and also in child grammar) and inclusion configurations are excluded by children, the latter creating well-known subject-object asymmetry effects (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi 2009 and subsequent work).…”

“…In particular, our study intends to contribute to the discussion on the gradience of intervention effects depending on the featural relation between the moved element and the intervener. Following the scale proposed in Belletti, Friedmann, Brunato & Rizzi (2012) and Durrleman & Bentea (2021), we investigate the different effects of structures with intersection relations (French pseudoclefts) compared to structures with inclusion relations (French standard clefts) on the comprehension of clefts.…”

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Intervention effects have been explored in the domain of language acquisition, suggesting that feature similarity between a moved element and an intervening constituent determines the occurrence of processing difficulties. A graded differentiation scale hierarchizing the different possible relations between feature sets Isogloss 2022, 8(5)/13 Soares-Jesel, Lobo & Santos 2 defining the moved and the intervening constituents was suggested: disjunction>intersection>inclusion>identity (Belletti, Friedmann, Brunato & Rizzi 2012;Durrleman & Bentea 2021). It is a well-known fact that young children, unlike adults, have difficulties dealing with inclusion relations.

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Introduction to RLLT 19

“…Intervention effects found in language acquisition research suggest that feature similarity between a moved element and an intervening element is related to processing difficulties. In their paper the authors provide empirical evidence for the differentiation scale ranking the relations between features on the moved and intervening element: disjunction>intersection>inclusion>identity (Belletti et al, 2012;Durrleman & Bentea, 2021).…”