Maximality Trouble? Japanese-Speaking Children’s Interpretation of Comparatives

Ito, Masuyo; Wexler, Kenneth

doi:10.1007/978-94-024-1932-0_8

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…This type of movement occurs when an argument moves from a lower position inside the VP (verb phrase) to the position of the specifier of TP (tense phrase) to become a subject. Many studies have provided support for the Maturation Hypothesis (Miyamoto et al, 1999;Babyonyshev et al, 2001;Lee & Wexler, 2001;Ito & Wexler, 2002). Importantly for the present study, this type of movement is found with unaccusative and anti-causative se-verbs in Serbian.…”

Section: Maturation Hypothesis Versus Continuity Hypothesissupporting

confidence: 77%

“…By simply looking at the number of non-target answers for anti-causative verbs produced, one could easily say that the results speak in favour of the Maturation Hypothesis, which predicts difficulty with anticausative verbs due to the children's inability to form A-chains (Borer & Wexler, 1987;Miyamoto et al, 1999;Babyonyshev et al, 2001;Lee & Wexler, 2001;Ito & Wexler, 2002). However, in order to interpret the obtained results in the most accurate way, children's non-target answers need to be carefully looked at.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reflexive and Anti-Causative Verb Production Revisited

Ilić

2024

SLM

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The aim of the present research was to reexamine the production of reflexive and anti-causative se-verbs in Serbian at different stages of language acquisition after a nine-month period from the first experiment (Ilić, 2019). The results of the first experiment suggest the following order of acquisition: lexical reflexive > true reflexive > anti-causative verbs. Moreover, they speak in favour of the Continuity Hypothesis (Snyder et al., 1995; Snyder & Hyams, 2015), since the children were able to produce reflexive forms correctly from the earliest tested age. The verbs which were tested in both experiments were true reflexive (e.g. kupati se ‘wash oneself’), lexical reflexive (e.g. vrteti se ‘spin’) and anti-causative se-verbs (e.g. otvoriti se ‘open’). A total of sixty subjects belonging to three age groups (40-51, 52-63, 65-77 months, twenty participants in each group) took part in the research. The data collection technique was a verb elicitation task, and the children were asked to name the activities presented in the visual stimuli. The number of tested verbs was the same for each verb type (six per group). The production of verbs across age groups improved in comparison with the first experiment. The production of lexical reflexive verbs was significantly better than the production of anti-causative verbs in the youngest group. Therefore, the results of the follow-up experiment have confirmed the suggested order of acquisition. However, no differences were found in the two older groups, which indicates that the production of more complex verb types improves considerably between the ages of four and five.

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Section: Maturation Hypothesis Versus Continuity Hypothesissupporting

confidence: 77%