Relative gradable adjective recursion such as <em>small small big mushrooms</em> is more challenging for children than possessive recursion such as <em>the deer’s friend’s sister’s mushrooms</em>

Abstract

Our experiment investigates whether children handle recursive possessives (R-Poss) in a more adult-like manner than recursive relative gradable adjectives (R-RGA). While the abstract notion of indirect recursion underlies both categories, we ask whether individual syntactic-semantic properties determine different acquisition paths in English for R-Poss and R-RGA at the 2-Level (the deer’s friend’s mushrooms, small big mushrooms) and at the 3-Level (the deer’s friend’s sister’s mushrooms, small small big mushrooms). The results indicate that older children perform better than younger children on 2- and 3-Level R-Poss. However, this trend is not observed for R-RGA where both age groups perform similarly, successfully handling 2- but not 3-Level R-RGA. Analysis of individual results reveal that children who are successful with comprehension and production at 3-Level R-RGA are also successful with 3-Level R-Poss, but not the other way around. We conclude that 3-Level R-RGA is more challenging than 3-Level R-Poss, arguing that this difficulty arises from R-RGA syntax-semantics which involves a set-subset relation and gradability relative to comparative scales.

The role of intonation and context in lack of necessity meanings in negated deontic necessity modals in child Romanian

“…Context has been shown to play a very important part in language acquisition. Overall, children tend to perform more adult-like in tasks that are story-based (e.g., Guasti et al 2005;Bleotu & Roeper 2021a,b;Foucault et al 2021). Moreover, Crain & Thornton (1998) recommend that, when designing Truth Value Judgment tasks, researchers should create plausible contexts for the sentences children have to evaluate.…”