On Recursive Modification in Child L1 French

Abstract

This paper investigates nominal recursive modification (RM) in the L1 acquisition of French. Although recursion is considered the fundamental property of human languages, recursive self-embedding is found to be difficult for children in a variety of languages and constructions. Despite these challenges, the acquisition of RM proves to be resilient; acquirable even under severely degraded input conditions. From a minimalist perspective on the operations of narrow syntax, recursive embedding is essentially the application of a sequence of Merge operations (Chomsky 1995; Trotzke and Zwart 2014); therefore, given the universality of Merge, we do not expect to find cross-linguistic differences in how difficult recursion is. But if the challenging nature of recursion stems from factors which might differ from language to language, we expect different outcomes cross-linguistically. We compare new data from French to existing English data (Pérez-Leroux et al. 2012) in order to examine to what extent language-specific properties of RM structures determine the acquisition path. While children's production differs significantly from their adult's counterparts, we find no differences between French-speaking and English-speaking children. Our findings suggest that the challenging nature of recursion does not stem from the grammar itself and that what shapes the acquisition path is the interaction between universal properties of language and considerations not specific to language, namely computational efficiency.

Can prosody encode recursive embedding? Children's realizations of complex NPs in Japanese

“…Five-year-olds produced target recursive possessives in over 30% of the trials, whereas six-year-olds succeed at almost double those rates. These figures are fully comparable to data in Spanish and English; and similar to the five-year-olds’ data in Roberge's et al (2018) French study, which reports no increase for recursive possessives by age six. However, we found no association between production of recursive possessives and realization of a prosodic contrast between recursive and non-recursive configurations.…”

“…If prosodic ability is needed to scaffold syntactic productive ability, we expect a positive correlation. Table 4 shows that production of the target recursive possessor in the elicited production task lies within the expected range for children this age, given previous results in English and French (Pérez-Leroux et al , 2012; 2018; Roberge et al , 2018). These studies suggest that most have started producing recursive possessives by age five, but their success is still limited.…”

“…Between the ages of four and six, most children start producing recursive NPs, but do so at far lower rates than adults. This is true of English (Pérez-Leroux et al , 2012; 2018), French (Roberge, Pérez-Leroux & Frolova, 2018), Spanish (Pérez-Leroux, in press), and Mandarin (Giblin, Zhou, Bill, Shi & Crain, 2019).…”

On the L1 acquisition of recursive no in Japanese

“…Our review of the previous literature suggests that simple use of modifiers ( no ) and of relative clauses enter the speech of young Japanese children very early. While there is no documentation on initial use of recursive structures in Japanese, studies from other languages indicate that children first start to use recursive descriptions around the age of four (Pérez-Leroux et al 2012, Roberge et al 2018, Giblin et al 2018, for English; Roberge et al 2018, for French; Pérez-Leroux (2022), for Spanish; Pérez-Leroux et al 2021, for German). In these studies, many four-year-old children still do not produce any form of recursive modification, but rates grow substantively over time.…”

“…For instance, previous studies have examined recursive possession and recursive PP modification in English, noting that these constructions are difficult for children to understand and also, not very frequent in the input; see Roeper and Snyder (2004), Limbach and Adone (2010), and Roeper (2011). Studies of elicited production suggest that specific recursive constructions might become productive at different ages (Pérez-Leroux et al 2012, Roberge et al 2018). At the same time, despite substantial cross- and intra-linguistic variation in the structures that can be recursive and in the type of embedding markers involved (prepositions, particles, case-marker, etc.)…”