Running head: AGREEMENT INFLECTION IN CHILD L2 DUTCH The impact of verb form, sentence position, home language and L2 proficiency on subject-verb agreement in child L2 Dutch (original) (raw)
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Applied Psycholinguistics, 2012
Blom, E., and R. H. Baayen It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present study focuses on factors that explain errors with subject–verb agreement in the speech of children learning Dutch as their L2. Analyses of experimentally obtained production data from 4- to 9-year-old L2 children reveal that verb form, sentence position, home language, and L2 proficiency determine accuracy with subject–verb agreement in the L2. Most errors were omissions of inflection, in line with the above hypothesis. However, in more exceptional contexts, the children also substituted verb forms, which is more difficult to reconcile with the claim that L2 children's errors reflect insertion of a default form.
Morphophonological and conceptual effects on Dutch subject–verb agreement
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2010
Language production theories differ in their assumptions about the information flow between levels. Serial models hypothesise that different types of information, such as conceptual factors and morphophonological make up, would have an effect at different points during the implementation of agreement and would, therefore, not interact. Constraint-based models, on the other hand, entail an interplay of these two types of
“Les copains *dit au revoir”: On Subject–Verb Agreement in L2 French and Cross-Linguistic Influence
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This study focuses on the production of subject–verb (SV) agreement in number in L2 French and investigates the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in this particular morphosyntactic domain. CLI is a well-known phenomenon in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research but it has rarely been investigated systematically in relation to SV agreement in French. The participants of the study are 114 learners with Italian, German, Dutch and Swedish as L1. The source languages are all inflectional languages but they vary in terms of morphological richness in the verb paradigm, ranging from very poor (Swedish) to very rich (Italian). The participants performed an oral narrative task contrasting singular and plural contexts of SV agreement. Results indicate a significant difference between L1 groups in terms of correct SV agreement but they also show that the overall presence of rich verb morphology in the L1 does not, on its own, result in a more correct SV agreement. It is when comparin...
Nominal agreement in the interlanguage of Dutch L2 learners of Spanish
Nominal agreement in the interlanguage of Dutch L2 learners of Spanish, 2019
Inflectional morphology causes persistent difficulties for second language (L2) learners (Montrul, Silvina & Kim Potowski. 2007. Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 11(3). 301-328; Montrul, Silvina, Israel de la Fuente, Justin Davidson & Rebecca Foote. 2013. The role of experience in the acquisition and production of diminutives and gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 learners and heritage speakers. Second Language Research 29(1). 87-118). Learners operate with a default gender value, and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners and modifiers (White, Lydia, Elena Valenzuela, Martyna Kozlowska-Macgregor & Ingrid Leung. 2004. Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics 25(1). 105-133; Schlig 2003). 111 essays written were collected containing 799 correct uses and 281 errors from Dutch students whose written ability in Spanish is A2 (Common European Framework). The results show that singular masculine nominal agreement marking at the determiner is significantly better produced by Dutch L2 learners of Spanish than when the marking of nominal agreement is plural, feminine or at the adjective. This study corroborates the previous results where learners operate with a default gender value and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners. Also these results show that L2 learners of Spanish are significantly less accurate in gender agreement with adjectives than with determiners.
Dutch children�s acquisition of verbal and adjectival inflection
2010
formulate the ideas behind this thesis. First of all, I would like to thank my thesis advisors Fred Weerman, Hans Bennis and Elma Blom for their expert guidance through all stages of this Ph.D. process, for encouraging me to visit international conferences and write scientific papers. I also thank Fred for giving me the opportunity to proceed with the perception experiment in the Baby lab in Utrecht and Hans for his to-the-point comments in the later stages of the thesis. Elma was not only my co-promotor but we also shared a workspace. It was truly fascinating to see her daily enthusiasm for linguistic research. I want to thank Elma for always finding time to listen to my questions, ideas and doubts. This thesis would be virtually barren of ideas without Elma's inspiration. I am grateful to the committee members for the time and energy they put into reading and commenting on the manuscript.
Verbal inflection errors in child L1
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2013, 2013
Song, Sundara & Demuth (2009) find an asymmetrical pattern for verbal inflection errors in child English: They observe more errors in sentence medial position than in sentence final position. To account for this asymmetry, they point towards the surface differences of both sentence positions. A similar asymmetry in Dutch, in which embedded clauses cause fewer problems for verbal inflection than main clauses, has been related to V2 (van Kampen 1997; Bastiaanse & van Zonneveld 1998; Weerman, Duinmeijer & Orgassa 2011). The present study disentangles both explanations (sentence position, i.e. ‘phonology’ vs. V2, i.e. ‘syntax’), and aims to provide a unified account for both the patterns found in English and Dutch. The inclusion of PP-over-V constructions in a sentence repetition task with monolingual Dutch children (aged 4;0 to 6;2) enables us to show that the phonological account proposed for English can account for the Dutch pattern as well.
Cracking the cluster: The acquisition of verb raising in Dutch
In this paper, we argue that ascending verb cluster orders (1-2 and 1-2-3, e.g. moet eten 'must eat' and moet hebben gegeten 'must have eaten') are not only the default verb cluster orders in Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands, but also play a crucial role in the acquisition of verb clusters. We administered a series of three sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) to a total of 120 children (2;8–5;6), and found that children, in contrast to what previous literature might predict, are much more likely to produce 1-2 orders than 2-1 orders. We propose an acquisition pathway in which we assume an OV stage (V-FIN final) and a 1-2 stage before children completely fine-tune their preferences toward adult-like behavior. We further argue that this pathway first applies to bipartite modal-infinitive clusters but is quickly expanded to include all cluster types. We believe our proposal has three advantages: it answers an important learnability question, explains the differences attested between the way children of different ages handle verb clusters, and strongly suggests that verb clusters follow one general rule, rather than several separate construction-specific ones.
International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 2013
Both children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children who acquire a second language (L2) make errors with verb inflection. This overlap between SLI and L2 raises the question if verb inflection can discriminate between L2 children with and without SLI. In this study we addressed this question for Dutch. The secondary goal of the study was to investigate variation in error types and error profiles across groups. Data were collected from 6-8-year-old children with SLI who acquire Dutch as their first language (L1), Dutch L1 children with a typical development (TD), Dutch L2 children with SLI, and Dutch L1 TD children who were on average 2 years younger. An experimental elicitation task was employed that tested use of verb inflection; context (3SG, 3PL) was manipulated and word order and verb type were controlled. Accuracy analyses revealed effects of impairment in both L1 and L2 children with SLI. However, individual variation indicated that there is no specific error profile for SLI. Verb inflection use as measured in our study discriminated fairly well in the L1 group but classification was less accurate in the L2 group. Between-group differences emerged furthermore for certain types of errors, but all groups also showed considerable variation in errors and there was not a specific error profile that distinguished SLI from TD.
Journal of Neurolinguistics, 2004
We report a study on the spoken production of subject -verb agreement in number by four age groups of normally developing children (between 5 and 8;5) and a group of 8 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; between 5;4 and 9;4), all French speaking. The production of verb agreement was experimentally elicited by asking children to complete sentence preambles containing a head noun and a potentially attracting 'local noun'. In contrast to previous studies that focused on attraction with local nouns within the subject constituent (postmodifiers), we also studied attraction with local nouns in structures that are not part of the subject constituent (interpolated adjuncts). In normally developing children, we report that (1) attraction effects appear from early on;