The acquisition of dative alternation by German-English bilingual and English monolingual children

Woods, Roberta

doi:10.1075/lab.5.2.04woo

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The findings showed that Mazurkerwich's (1984) hypothesis was confirmed i.e., the unmarked constructions were acquired first. In another study, Woods (2012) examined the acquisition of the dative alternation by German-English bilingual and English monolingual children, showing the differences between the two groups. The acquisition of the locative alternation has also been studied by several researchers.…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This instrument was used by other researchers (e.g., Mazurkerwich, 1984;Woods, 2012) to investigate other types of alternation, such as the dative alternation. The two researchers deemed the GJT reliable to test the participants' knowledge of different types of alternation as it elicits fruitful results and deep insight into the participants' answers.…”

Section: The Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Acquisition of the Passive Alternation by Kuwaiti EFL Learners

Alotaibi

Al-Ajmi²

2015

IJEL

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This study attempts to test whether fifty advanced Kuwaiti EFL learners have acquired the English passive alternation. To this end, the researchers used a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) to check whether the participants would be able to distinguish between alternating and non-alternating verbs. The verbs used in the test were chosen based on their frequency in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results reveal that positive transfer from L1 played a big role in the participants' correct answers on the test, especially with regard to the verbs that passivise. Additionally, the participants may have provided wrong answers on the GJT due to their unfamiliarity with some of the verbs. However, the participants faced various difficulties with the verbs that do not passivise. These difficulties could be ascribed to over-generalising the passivisation rule, or confusing the non-causative with the passive construction. Their overall score suggests that they have not acquired the English passive alternation (total mean=45%). The study concludes with some recommendations for further research.

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Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Acquisition of the Passive Alternation by Kuwaiti EFL Learners

Alotaibi

Al-Ajmi²

2015

IJEL

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“…A prior analysis of CHILDES data showed that these verbs were used frequently in the DO form and occasionally in the PO form in the child and child-directed speech of five German-speaking children aged 1;6-7;5 (MacWhinney 2000;Leo: Behrens 2006;Cosima, Pauline, Sebastian: Lieven and Stoll 2013;Caroline: Von Stutterheim 2014). Further, most of the verbs are documented in the literature on the acquisition of the dative alternation in German (Eisenbeiss et al 2006;Woods 2015).…”

Section: Sentence Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstract Priming and the Lexical Boost Effect across Development in a Structurally Biased Language

Kholodova,

Peter,

Rowland

et al. 2023

Languages

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The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of abstract representations for syntactic structures in children. In a structural priming experiment on the dative alternation in German, we primed children from three different age groups (3–4 years, 5–6 years, 7–8 years) and adults with double object datives (Dora sent Boots the rabbit) or prepositional object datives (Dora sent the rabbit to Boots). Importantly, the prepositional object structure in German is dispreferred and only rarely encountered by young children. While immediate as well as cumulative structural priming effects occurred across all age groups, these effects were strongest in the 3- to 4-year-old group and gradually decreased with increasing age. These results suggest that representations in young children are less stable than in adults and, therefore, more susceptible to adaptation both immediately and across time, presumably due to stronger surprisal. Lexical boost effects, in contrast, were not present in 3- to 4-year-olds but gradually emerged with increasing age, possibly due to limited working-memory capacity in the younger child groups.

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“…The dative alternation has been a poster child of generative approaches to second language acquisition and widely recognized as an instance of a poverty-of-stimulus phenomenon, since the L2 learner must somehow determine which verbs allow alternating syntactic forms and which ones do not from a limited set of data in the input (Juffs, 1996; Perpiñán and Montrul, 2006; White, 2003). There are several studies of the L2 acquisition of the dative alternation in English by L1 speakers of Spanish (Agirre, 2015), Brazilian Portuguese (Zara et al, 2013), French (Hawkins, 1987; Le Compagnon, 1984; Mazurkewich, 1984), Japanese (Bley-Vroman and Yoshinaga, 1992), Chinese (Chang, 2004), Japanese and Chinese (Inagaki, 1997), Korean and Mandarin (Oh, 2006, 2010; Oh and Zubizarreta, 2006), Korean and Japanese (Whong-Barr and Schwartz, 2002), Russian (De Cuypere et al, 2009–10), Turkish (Marefat, 2005), and German (Jäschke and Plag, 2016; Woods, 2015). These studies, most of them experimental, have addressed the role of L1 transfer on the acquisition of the dative alternation English, the developmental stages L2 learners go through in acquiring the dative alternation, and how L2 learners acquire different subclasses of verbs based on finer-grained semantic and morphological constraints (e.g.…”

Section: How Datives Come and Gomentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning datives: The Tolerance Principle in monolingual and bilingual acquisition

Yang

Montrul

2016

Second Language Research

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We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ( give the book to library/ give the library the book), while excluding negative exceptions ( donate the book to the library/* donate the library the book). Our solution for first language acquisition is based on The Tolerance Principle, a formal model that detects productivity from the distributional properties of the input data (Yang, 2005, 2016). This principle predicts an acquisition stage where the constructions are productive, followed by a stage where learners retreat from overgeneralization and form more finely grained rules. This work calls for a formally rigorous model of acquisition, which can incorporate input effects and retain the benefits of an abstract generative grammar without resorting to piecemeal learning. We provide an analysis of child-directed speech in the CHILDES database to support the learning proposal for first language acquisition, while considering its potential applicability to second language (L2) acquisition and first language (L1) attrition.

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The acquisition of dative alternation by German-English bilingual and English monolingual children

Cited by 5 publications

References 42 publications

The Acquisition of the Passive Alternation by Kuwaiti EFL Learners

The Acquisition of the Passive Alternation by Kuwaiti EFL Learners

Abstract Priming and the Lexical Boost Effect across Development in a Structurally Biased Language

Learning datives: The Tolerance Principle in monolingual and bilingual acquisition

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