Angeliek van Hout | University of Groningen (original) (raw)

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Papers by Angeliek van Hout

Reasoning About Other …, 2011

Mills, A., & van Hout, A. (2019). Cognitive bias overrides syntactic bootstrapping in novel verb ... more Mills, A., & van Hout, A. (2019). Cognitive bias overrides syntactic bootstrapping in novel verb learning. In M. M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 404-414). Cascadilla Press.

Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing... more Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 2, 2016

University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 1998

Lingua, Nov 1, 2008

This paper presents a crosslinguistic study into the acquisition of form-to-meaning correspondenc... more This paper presents a crosslinguistic study into the acquisition of form-to-meaning correspondences in the domain of aspect. How may form affect the acquisition process and how may meaning do so? The results from aspectual comprehension experiments with Dutch, Italian and Polish L1 learners reveal that both form and meaning properties affect the acquisition path and lead to developmentally different patterns across languages. The semantics of perfective aspect is acquired earlier than imperfective aspect. Moreover, there is a surprising discrepancy in the understanding of perfective aspect. Whereas Dutch and Polish children have acquired the completion entailment of their Present Perfect and Perfective aspect respectively by the age of 3, Italian 3-year-olds perform at chance with their Present Perfect. These results do not support the hypothesis of Uniformity of Aspect Acquisition, which claims that certain aspectual notions (in particular, perfective aspect) are acquired around the same age independent of the language-specific encoding. Instead I put forward an acquisition theory of form-to-meaning correspondences that is sensitive both to form-Morphological Salience, namely, the idea that the semantics of morphologically salient paradigms is acquired early-and to meaning-Semantic Complexity, namely, the idea that the semantics of simple aspectual operations is acquired early.

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 8, 2004

Routledge eBooks, Oct 11, 2013

Trends in language acquisition research, Jul 13, 2018

There is quite a high rate of acceptance of telic-perfective predicates as descriptions of non-cu... more There is quite a high rate of acceptance of telic-perfective predicates as descriptions of non-culminating events in children learning Germanic and Romance languages. What causes children, much more so than adults, to accept non-culminating interpretations of telic-perfective sentences? In this review, I discuss learners' difficulties in each of three grammatical dimensions that contribute to event culmination: the notion of 'result' as encoded in the lexical semantics of verbs, telicity of verb phrases, and perfectivity of tense-aspect morphology. I conclude that telicity and perfectivity do not cause the non-culmination acceptance patterns. Instead, the learnability challenge for event culmination lies in the acquisition of verb meanings. I sketch several new angles for further research, including the role of agentivity of the subject.

We investigated the interpretation of Dutch wie 'who'-and welke 'which'questions in Dutch 5-year-... more We investigated the interpretation of Dutch wie 'who'-and welke 'which'questions in Dutch 5-year-olds. In contrast to wh-questions in many languages, Dutch wh-questions are structurally ambiguous between a subject and an object reading. We used test items in which the ambiguity was resolved by number agreement. The participants (N = 20) heard a wh-question and had to choose the corresponding picture out of a set of four; this method revealed their interpretation as either subject or object question. The results show that 5-year-olds interpret all question types as subject questions, independent of the agreement cues. Thus, they effectively do not attend to the agreement mismatch that this interpretation causes for the object questions. These errors suggest an overly strong subject-first bias in 5-year-olds. We argue that number agreement is too weak a cue for children to overcome this tendency.

Language, cognition and neuroscience, Jan 17, 2021

Some questions about the vP in Distributed Morphology * I would like to thank Angeliek van Hout, ... more Some questions about the vP in Distributed Morphology * I would like to thank Angeliek van Hout, Martha McGinnis, Jeffrey Lidz, Rolf Noyer and Andrew Carnie, as well as the participants in the Roundtable and the University of Pennsylvania Lexical Categories Reading Group, for valuable discussion and suggestions. Defects, should any be apparent, are not the fault of any of the above-named. More likely, they were caused by kudzu, positive "anymore", and talk radio.