Production and comprehension of sentence negation in child German

Wojtecka, Magdalena; Koch, Corinna; Grimm, Angela; Schulz, Petra

doi:10.1515/9783110259179.217

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The scale Verb meaning assesses whether children are sensitive to the differences between telic and atelic verbs (see Penner et al, 2003). Contrasting true and false negatives, the scale Negation tests children’s knowledge of sentential negation (see Wojtecka et al, 2011). Using a question-after picture-design, the scale Wh-questions (10 test items) assesses knowledge of argument and adjunct wh-questions by asking children to respond to a wh-question with the correct part of a sentence (see Schulz, 2013).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Tsimpli (2014: 295) these phenomena require additional semantic or lexical information, with the possible exception of relativized minimality accounts of wh-movement (see the discussion in Friedmann et al, 2009). Finally, among the very late phenomena, acquired at age 6 and later are sentential negation (Wojtecka et al, 2011), exhaustivity in multiple wh-questions (Roeper et al, 2007; Schulz and Roeper, 2011; Schulz, 2015), grammatical gender in Dutch (Blom et al, 2008), and the case marking paradigm in German (Tracy, 1986; Eisenbeiss et al, 2005). Sentential negation and exhaustivity in wh-questions require semantic information and language-external resources.…”

Section: Factors Influencing Child Bilingual Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Age Factor Revisited: Timing in Acquisition Interacts With Age of Onset in Bilingual Acquisition

Schulz

Grimm

2019

Front. Psychol.

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In this paper, we investigate whether timing in monolingual acquisition interacts with age of onset and input effects in child bilingualism. Six different morpho-syntactic and semantic phenomena acquired early, late or very late are considered, with their timing in L1 acquisition varying between age 3 (subject-verb agreement) and after age 6 (case marking). Data from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) whose mean age of onset to German was 3 months are compared with data from early second language learners of German (eL2) whose mean age of onset to German was 35 months as well as with data from monolingual children. To explore change over time, children were tested twice at the ages of 4;4 and 5;8 years. The main findings were that 2L1 children had an advantage over their eL2 peers in early acquired phenomena, which disappeared with time, whereas in late acquired phenomena 2L1 and eL2 children did not differ. Moreover, 2L1 children performed like monolingual children in early acquired phenomena but had a disadvantage in the late acquired phenomena with the amount of delay decreasing with time. We conclude that age of onset effects are modulated by effects of timing in monolingual acquisition. Contrary to expectation, input in terms of language dominance, measured as the dominant language used at home, did not affect simultaneous bilingual children’s performance in any of the phenomena. We discuss the implications of our findings for the hypothesis that acquisition of late phenomena is determined by input alone and suggest an alternative concept: the learner’s internal need for time to master a phenomenon, which is determined by its complexity and cross-linguistic robustness.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Factors Influencing Child Bilingual Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Age Factor Revisited: Timing in Acquisition Interacts With Age of Onset in Bilingual Acquisition

Schulz

Grimm

2019

Front. Psychol.

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“…We saw no reason to doubt what has been noted in the literature on the acquisition of negation (e.g. Clahsen 1988;Wojtecka et al 2011). Children at the age of the children that were tested master negated sentences in either form, that is negation by a negation particle (nicht 'not'), by a negated determiner (kein 'no'), or by a negative preposition (ohne 'without').…”

Section: Locating the Source Of The Difficultiesmentioning

confidence: 45%

“…We are very grateful to Lilli Schörghofer-Essl for providing the graphic stimuli, to Ms. Christina Brandauer (Kindergarten Kuchl) and Ms. Irene Mellmer 17 Given that the mastery of false negatives precedes the mastery of true negatives (see Wojtecka et al 2011), an analogous effect may play a role for the phenomena under discussion. In one case (situation 1b), children falsely deny, whereas in the other case (situation 1c), they falsely accept that a given description is correct.…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying kids prefer intersecting sets – a pilot study

Haider

Schörghofer-Essl

Seethaler

2017

Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft

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Abstract:Children between approximately four and five years of age are known to fail in picture matching tasks with verbal stimuli presenting an existentially quantified object NP in the scope of a universally quantified subject NP. In this paper, we suggest an experimentally tested provisional answer to a question that has not been asked in any previous work on the very phenomenon: Would they also fail for the truth-conditionally equivalent stimuli in which the universal quantifier is replaced by a negated existential quantifier (plus a negated predicate, as in Every boy walks with a balloon vs. No boy walks without a balloon).The experimental results indicate that the latter task is indeed much easier. This lends support to the hypothesis that the primary source of the difficulties lies in the acquisition of a special aspect of compositional semantics, that is, in computing the semantic effects of a universal vs. an existential quantifier as subject in combination with an existential quantifier in the predicate. For a universally quantified subject, the relation between the restrictor set of the quantified subject and the set denoted by the predicate is one of set inclusion. For an existentially quantified subject, it is set intersection. At least for the picture matching tasks, the intersection relation seems to be easier to handle than the inclusion relation, even for semantically equivalent stimuli.

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“…While not requiring a full reparsing of the utterance, an unanticipated final negation at the very least provokes an instant revision of expectations, the cognitive impact of which presumably depends both on the complexity of the utterance and on the subjective level of dissonance. Thus for the Nilo-Saharan Sudanic language Kresh, which also has clause-final NEG, Brown (1994, p. 165) observes that “[i]n some contexts one is not expecting a negative statement and may interpret a clause positively until reaching the end.” Similarly, in referring to a cluster of Papuan and Austronesian languages with strict clause-final NEG and the confusion experienced by second language learners of these languages, Reesink (2002, p. 260) notes that “[n]ative speakers will be aided, when no clear prosodic signals are available to clear up the vagueness of a negative utterance, by their in-depth knowledge of contextual clues, if not by the general pragmatic principles that apply universally.” Even German potentially allows for long main clauses ending in NEG, so that as noted by Jespersen (1917, p. 10) “The hearer or reader is sometimes bewildered at first and thinks that the sentence is to be understood in a positive sense, till suddenly he comes upon the nicht , which changes everything […].” In naturalistic spoken German, such instances of surprise-ridden final negation are quite uncommon, although in early child language there is some evidence that clause-final negation not adjacent to the verb poses some processing difficulty (Wojtecka, Koch, Grimm, & Schultz, 2011).…”

Section: Possible Processing Difficulties Associated With Negationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can NEG placement have negative consequences (for efficient processing)? A bilingual test case

Lipski

2018

Applied Psycholinguistics

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The present study examines the relative processing efficiency of two typologically diverse configurations of sentential negation: immediately preverbal NEG and unbounded clause-final NEG. In order to effect a head-to-head comparison, the data are drawn from a bilingual speech community in the Afro-Colombian village of San Basilio de Palenque, in which two lexically cognate languages are in contact, differing principally in the placement of the sentential negator: Spanish (preverbal NEG) and the Afro-Hispanic creole language Palenquero (clause-final NEG). The results of a series of experiments suggest that preverbal negation is quite robust, while processing of clause-final negation is degraded under increased cognitive demands. Contextual and pragmatic cues ameliorate the processing of likely negative utterances, while unbounded clause-final negation is more vulnerable in ambiguous utterances. The contrasting behavior of Spanish and Palenquero negation highlights the possible role of processing mechanisms as contributing to typological differences among languages.

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Production and comprehension of sentence negation in child German

Cited by 7 publications

References 10 publications

The Age Factor Revisited: Timing in Acquisition Interacts With Age of Onset in Bilingual Acquisition

The Age Factor Revisited: Timing in Acquisition Interacts With Age of Onset in Bilingual Acquisition

Quantifying kids prefer intersecting sets – a pilot study

Can NEG placement have negative consequences (for efficient processing)? A bilingual test case

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