The Late Development of Raising: What Children Seem to Think about Seem

In many contexts, pronouns are interpreted as referring to the character mentioned first in the previous sentence, an effect called the ‘first-mention bias’. While adults can rapidly use the first-mention bias to guide pronoun interpretation, it is unclear when this bias emerges during development. Curiously, experiments with children between two and three years old show successful use of order of mention, while experiments with older children (four to five years old) do not. While this could suggest U-shaped development, it could also reflect differences in the methodologies employed. We show that children can indeed use first-mention information, but do so too slowly to have been detected in previous work reporting null results. Comparison across the present and previously published studies suggests that the speed at which children deploy first-mention information increases greatly during the preschool years.

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“…A number of studies (e.g. Choe, 2012; Hirsch & Wexler, 2007) have found that children have difficulty comprehending (6a) but not (6b):…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of the first-mention bias

2014

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“…The second argument against the subset strategy is that in speech to children, raising verbs occur disproportionately more frequently in the ambiguous surface frame (2) than in disambiguating environments, such as with an expletive subject (Hirsch and Wexler 2007). Therefore, presumably learners will need to at least make a guess about the category of a verb encountered in this sentence frame prior to encountering the verb in other frames.…”

Section: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 95%

Computational Models of Learning the Raising-Control Distinction

Mitchener

Becker

2010

Res on Lang and Comput

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We consider the task of learning three verb classes: raising (e.g., seem), control (e.g., try) and ambiguous verbs that can be used either way (e.g., begin). These verbs occur in sentences with similar surface forms, but have distinct syntactic and semantic properties. They present a conundrum because it would seem that their meaning must be known to infer their syntax, and that their syntax must be known to infer their meaning. Previous research with human speakers pointed to the usefulness of two cues found in sentences containing these verbs: animacy of the sentence subject and eventivity of the predicate embedded under the main verb. We apply a variety of algorithms to this classification problem to determine whether the primary linguistic data is sufficiently rich in this kind of information to enable children to resolve the conundrum, and whether this information can be extracted in a way that reflects distinctive features of child language acquisition. The input consists of counts of how often various verbs occur with animate subjects and eventive predicates in two corpora of naturalistic speech, one adult-directed and the other child-directed. Proportions of the semantic frames are insufficient. A Bayesian attachment model designed for a related language learning task does not work well at all. A hierarchical Bayesian model (HBM) gives significantly better results. We also develop and test a saturating accumulator that can successfully distinguish the three classes of verbs. Since the HBM and saturating accumulator are successful at the classification task using biologically 123 170 W. G. Mitchener, M. Becker realistic calculations, we conclude that there is sufficient information given subject animacy and predicate eventivity to bootstrap the process of learning the syntax and semantics of these verbs.

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“…For example, the difficulties of dyslexic individuals with object relatives versus subject relatives (Bar-Shalom et al, 1993) reflect similar difficulties in child comprehension during normal language acquisition (McDaniel, McKee, & Bernstein, 1998). And the same is true of dyslexic performance on passive sentences in comparison with active ones (normal language acquisition: Hirsch & Wexler, 2007; dyslexia: Wiseheart et al, 2009), on comprehension of binding principle B (normal language acquisition: McDaniel, Cairns, & Hsu, 1990;dyslexia: Waltzman & Cairns, 2000) and on the eager/easy distinction (dyslexia: Byrne, 1981; normal language acquisition: Chomsky, 1972).…”

Section: What These Agreement Errors Arementioning

confidence: 97%

Independence of syntactic and phonological deficits in dyslexia: A study using the attraction error paradigm

2018

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This paper addresses the question of whether dyslexic children suffer from syntactic deficits that are independent of limitations with phonological processing. We looked at subject‐verb agreement errors after sentence subjects containing a second noun (the attractor) known to be able to attract incorrect agreement (e.g., “the owner(s) of the house(s) is/are away”). In the general population, attraction errors are not straightforwardly dependent on the presence or absence of morphophonological plural markers but on their syntactic configuration. The same would be expected for dyslexic children if their syntactic problems are not phonological in nature. We also looked at the possible effect of system overload on syntactic processing by comparing auditory and written presentation of stimuli and stimuli with high and low frequency attractors. Dyslexic children produced more agreement errors than age‐matched controls, but their errors were distributed in the expected manner and did not align with the presence of morphophonological number markers in the subject overall. Furthermore, there was no effect of either presentation mode or attractor frequency on the number of agreement errors. Our results confirm the existence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and suggest that they are not due to a phonological deficit or to verbal working memory limitations.

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The Late Development of Raising: What Children Seem to Think about Seem

Cited by 30 publications

References 41 publications

Development of the first-mention bias

Development of the first-mention bias

Computational Models of Learning the Raising-Control Distinction

Independence of syntactic and phonological deficits in dyslexia: A study using the attraction error paradigm

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