Refining intervention: The acquisition of featural relations in object A-bar dependencies

Bentea, Anamaria; Durrleman, Stéphanie; Rizzi, Luigi

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2015.10.001

Cited by 31 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Although animacy is not part of the feature set of the clausal inflectional head, this feature has been argued to be relevant for movement (see Bianchi, 2006), which may then be the crucial ingredient for a feature to enter into the computation of locality, rather than a feature being part of the featural composition of the clausal inflectional head. For more on this perspective, see Bentea, Durrleman, and Rizzi (2016).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic complexity in the comprehension ofwh-questions and relative clauses in typical language development and autism

Durrleman

Marinis

Franck

2016

Applied Psycholinguistics

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This study investigates effects of syntactic complexity operationalized in terms of movement, intervention, and noun phrase (NP) feature similarity in the development of Aʹ-dependencies in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old typically developing (TD) French children and children with autism spectrum disorder. Children completed an offline comprehension task testing eight syntactic structures classified in four levels of complexity: Level 0: no movement; Level 1: movement without (configurational) intervention; Level 2: movement with intervention from an element that is maximally different or featurally “disjoint” (mismatched in both lexical NP restriction and number); and Level 3: movement with intervention from an element similar in one feature or featurally “intersecting” (matched in lexical NP restriction, mismatched in number). The results show that syntactic complexity affects TD children across the three age groups, but also indicate developmental differences between these groups. Movement affected all three groups in a similar way, but intervention effects in intersection cases were stronger in younger than in older children, with NP feature similarity affecting only 4-year-olds. Complexity effects created by the similarity in lexical restriction of an intervener thus appear to be overcome early in development, arguably thanks to other differences of this intervener (which was mismatched in number). Children with autism spectrum disorder performed less well than the TD children although they were matched on nonverbal reasoning. Overall, syntactic complexity affected their performance in a similar way as in their TD controls, but their performance correlated with nonverbal abilities rather than age, suggesting that their grammatical development does not follow the smooth relation to age that is found in TD children.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic complexity in the comprehension ofwh-questions and relative clauses in typical language development and autism

Durrleman

Marinis

Franck

2016

Applied Psycholinguistics

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“…This possibility could be tested in future studies by performing experimental manipulations currently examined in the A‐bar dependency field, e.g. by using inanimate interveners, which appear to be less disruptive than animate ones (Bentea and Durrleman ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pronoun comprehension in individuals with Down syndrome: the role of age

Sanoudaki

Varlokosta

2014

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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Background: A number of studies have suggested that language in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may not be simply delayed compared to language in typically developing (TD) children, but deviant. The deviance has been detected in the comprehension of pronouns, and it has triggered proposals for the existence of a specific syntactic deficit in individuals with DS. However, the developmental path of pronoun comprehension in individuals with DS is unknown, as there are no studies examining individuals of different ages.Aims: A pilot study examining pronoun comprehension in adolescents and adults with DS in comparison with TD children. Research questions include: 1. Are some pronoun types more difficult than others for each of the two groups (DS and TD)? 2. Is there a difference in performance between the two groups? 3. Does performance correlate with chronological age in the DS group?Methods and Procedures: Using a manual picture selection task, we examined the comprehension of different types of pronouns in fourteen Greek-speaking individuals with DS, ranging from ten to thirty-four years of age. We also tested a control group of TD children as well as a typical adult group. The TD and DS groups were recruited and tested in pre-schools and schools/centres for individuals with learning disabilities, respectively. Within-and between-group comparisons were performed for all conditions. For the DS group, correlations between chronological age and performance in each condition were also explored. Outcomes and Results:Results reveal a significant positive correlation of age with performance in the DS group, but only in structures that also presented difficulties to TD children. Structures that presented difficulties only to individuals with DS do not appear to be less problematic for older participants. 3Conclusions and Implications: These findings provide support to the deviance hypothesis, by suggesting that the syntactic deficit in the comprehension of pronouns in individuals with DS is present in individuals of a wide age range. At the same time, our results, if corroborated by large scale studies, suggest that some aspects of grammatical development in individuals with DS may continue even after adolescence, well into adulthood. We argue that these findings can contribute towards more targeted intervention practices by increasing our knowledge of the behavioural phenotype of DS.

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“…By contrast, the discourse properties of object questions have received little attention in the literature on intervention. However, recent studies have found that these questions also exhibit strong intervention effects, particularly in language-impaired individuals (Garraffa & Grillo 2008;Friedmann & Novogrodsky 2011;Bentea et al 2016). As the discourse function of object questions differs markedly to that of object relatives, they provide a rigorous test of the generalisability of the discourse account.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives

Riches

Garraffa²

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Sentences where like-moves-over-like, e.g. this is the cat that the dog was chasing , have occupied language researchers over the past two decades. They are often described as "intervention" sentences as one element intervenes in the movement of another. Such structures are difficult to comprehend by children or adults, and this effect is exacerbated in language-impaired individuals. Dominant theories, e.g. Rizzi's Relativised Minimality (RM), propose that the two NPs interfere with each other by virtue of having overlapping features. However, such sentences are also rarely encountered due to discourse constraints. For example, subject NPs (the dog) tend to be pronominal as they are typically aligned with topic-hood. This paper investigates whether discourse can account for intervention in questions. It employs a mixed methodology. Firstly, corpora were investigated to assess the degree to which discourse impacts on input frequency. Secondly, a behavioural study was conducted to unpack the relationship between frequency and processing in children. It was found that the input frequencies of intervention structures are predominantly influenced by discourse, and that intervention structures are vanishingly rare in the input. However, a link between frequency and processing was not observed, with the findings more supportive of RM. It is suggested that a consideration of discourse as an external phenomenon may yield new insights into intervention structures.

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Refining intervention: The acquisition of featural relations in object A-bar dependencies

Cited by 31 publications

References 42 publications

Syntactic complexity in the comprehension ofwh-questions and relative clauses in typical language development and autism

Syntactic complexity in the comprehension ofwh-questions and relative clauses in typical language development and autism

Pronoun comprehension in individuals with Down syndrome: the role of age

A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives

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