The Boy for the Cookie" – Some Evidence for the Nonviolation of the Case Filter in Child Second Language Acquisition (original) (raw)
Related papers
Child Second Language Acquisition of Syntax
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1995
Recent advances in linguistic theory within the principles and parameters framework have exerted considerable influence on the field of second language acquisition. SLA researchers working within this framework of syntactic theory have investigated the extent to which developing second language grammars are constrained by principles of Universal Grammar (UG). Much of the UG-based SLA research in the 1980s focused on adult L2 acquisition, but the role of UG principles in child L2 acquisition remained largely unexplored. More recently, however, this state of affairs has begun to change as SLA researchers are becoming more and more interested in child second language syntactic development. In this paper, I review recent and current developments in UG-based child SLA research, and I argue that child SLA has a valuable role to play in enabling us to arrive at a better understanding of the role of biological factors in language acquisition and in strengthening the links between SLA and li...
Copula omission in the English developing grammar of English/Spanish bilingual children
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2010
stage-level (SL) and the individual-level (IL) predicates. We attribute this to crosslinguistic influence from Spanish, specifically, to the existence of two distinct copulas in Spanish, ser and estar; in particular, we propose that the lexical distinction between these two predicates may trigger the earlier projection of inflection and with it the use of an overt copula in both languages, but specifically in English, and for both SL and IL predicates.
LIA, 2020
Flanders (FWO) 2 Hopp's results are in line with computation difficulty approaches, like MSIH. Several other studies on case morphology in different language have provided similar findings. For example, Haznedar (2006) and Papadopoulou et al. (2011) on L2 Turkish, but also Satorno (2007, 2011) on clitic case morphology in L2 Italian and L2 Spanish and Grüter (2006) on L2 French object clitics, show that case morphology and clitics are fully acquirable, despite its absence in L1 grammar. The problems with inflectional morphology do not reflect a syntactic deficit, instead the learners in these studies faced difficulties only with the surface realization of Case. and setting up distinct specific research questions concerning different L2s, all articles share the common aim to unravel how learners assign meaning to the seemingly superfluous and cumbersome case markers in the L2. The articles in this special issue stem from a workshop on the L2 acquisition of case and agreement in typologically diverse languages; the workshop was organized at Ghent University and co-funded by a EuroSLA Workshop Grant in 2015. Perspective 1: form-meaning mappings Research within the perspective of form-function mappings investigates the ability of learners to link certain forms with certain functions. From a functionalist point of view, general cognitive principles (such as generalization and analogy) and input characteristics (such as frequency and transparency), instead of innate constraints, guide this linking process. It is assumed that case contrasts in the input provide sufficient information for the learner to infer the case system of the target language. An influential model in this research paradigm is the so-called Competition Model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987). This model posits that linguistic means such as case, word order, animacy, and pronominality compete for cue reliability (i.e., what is the most reliable cue for determining the subject and direct object in a sentence?), and it examines whether or not learners are able to switch from their L1 cues to L2 cues or whether they simply transfer their L1 cues. Studies on case marking within the Competition Model have dealt with a number of L2s, such as Japanese, German and Russian. For example, Mitsugi and MacWhinney (2010) examined whether L1 English speakers can switch from a reliance on word order cues to a reliance on case marking cues in processing L2 Japanese sentences with different non-canonical word order structures (i.e., noncanonical variants of canonical sentences such as John gaNOM Mary niDAT hon oACC ageta, 'John gave Mary a book'). The findings of the self-paced reading experiment showed that there was no additional processing cost associated with non-canonicity. In other words, L2 learners are able to acquire native-like processing strategies. However, the self-paced reading experiment did not seem sensitive enough to capture the effect of non-canonicity, as Shigenaga (2012), in a study using a correctness decision task, did find longer reaction times and higher error rates for non-canonical sentences than for canonical sentences. In other words, L2 learners do seem to experience difficulties in processing information from case markers. Other studies within the competition model found that these processing difficulties can be mediated by semantic information. In a timed sentence comprehension experiment with intermediate and advanced L2 learners of German, Jackson (2007, 2008) demonstrated that animacy has an effect on the comprehension of individual German sentences. Sentences containing only one animate noun were easier to comprehend than those containing two animate nouns, regardless of word order (i.e., subject-first or object-first). For sentences containing two animate nouns, subject-first sentences were easier to comprehend than object-first sentences. Interestingly, the intermediate learners' comprehension of both subject-first and object-first sentences containing two animate nouns improved as the experiment progressed, which means that they learned to rely on case information. Similar results were observed by Kempe and MacWhinney (1998). In a picture-choice task, their learners of L2 German and L2 Russian also mainly relied on animacy and word order. Remarkably, the learners of Russian made fewer errors than the learners of German with a similar length of exposure to the L2. Although the Russian six-case system may be considered more complex than the German four-case system, Russian case markers seem to provide more reliable cues to sentence interpretation than German case markers. Theoretically indebted to the work of the Competition Model, the first article in the present special issue examines form-function associability in the early stages of the acquisition of case in L2 Polish. Saturno and Wątorek examine the ability of 89 learners of L2 Polish, with varying L1s and no previous experience with learning Polish, to comprehend and produce nominative and accusative case markers in canonical and non-canonical sentences. Their data are taken from the VILLA project, which investigates learners' developing linguistic abilities within an instructional context that is fully controlled for input (Varieties of Initial Learners in Language Acquisition, Dimroth et al., 2013). The results corroborate findings of previous studies within the competition model, meaning that most learners rely on word order in comprehension and production. Remarkably, some learners already show the ability to comprehend and produce case markers appropriately after only 9 hours of exposure, which the authors attribute to the possible transfer of L1 cues. Perspective 2: the time course of development Research on the time course of development builds on a long tradition in SLA. In fact, already in the very beginning of SLA as a field, Corder (1967) formulated the idea of a "built-in syllabus". According to this idea, learners were said to pass through a learner-generated sequence with systematic errors at every point in the development, providing evidence of a system of transitional competence. The notion of a built-in syllabus set the stage for the field to accumulate an extensive body of research on developmental patterns, to the extent that it can now be considered an accepted finding in SLA that learners follow predictable paths with predictable stages in the acquisition of a given structure (see,
Toward a new understanding of syntactic CLI : evidence from L 2 and L 3 acquisition
2017
formal feature, let us consider here a behavioural acquisition study comparing the structural constraints of children and adult code-switching. Paradis et al. (2000) looked at how production data of children and adult French-English bilinguals reflect learners’ knowledge of the functional category INFL for these languages. The presence of system morphemes in their utterances, such as tense, agreement or aspect markers, copulas, Flynn, Suzanne. & Berkes, Éva. (2017). Toward a new understanding of syntactic CLI: evidence from L2 and L3 acquisition. In T. Angelovska and A. Hahn (Eds.), L3 Syntactic Transfer: Models, New Developments and Implications (pp. 35-61). Book series: Bilingual Processing and Acquisition, Ed. John W. Schwieter. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. auxiliaries, etc. was considered as overt reflexes of the mentioned functional category. Accepting that INFL-related morphology in English emerges later in development than in French, the authors claim that English-French biling...
Autonomous linguistic systems in the language of young children
Journal of Child Language, 1997
This paper considers cross-linguistic findings concerning the early development of formal, arbitrary, grammatical systems in normal hearing and deaf children and in children with congenital brain abnormalities. The paper reviews evidence showing an early acquisition of grammatical forms. Such learning is typically dissociated from the development of the relevant semantics. Form-function correspondences were not required for the development of morphological paradigms and for certain aspects of formal syntax. This finding held across all the populations studied. It is hypothesized that the autonomous nature of these formal paradigms accounts for their priority in learning cross-linguistically. The assertion that form-function correlation is crucial for children as they come to ' crack the code ' of their language (Bates & MacWhinney, , ) is among the most plausible assumptions relating to language acquisition. Intuitively, such a statement has to be right both because the mapping between form and function is at the heart of proper linguistic functioning (function here and throughout the paper refers to semantic and pragmatic meaning) and because important social-cognitive developments in infants predate language and thus might be used by the child to ' bootstrap ' language. But how general is this statement ? Are there linguistic subsystems that young children master for which form-function correlations are not a necessary requirement ? Is the learning of such systems delayed or is the time
A general assumption is that acquiring a language very early (birth to age 4 years) will result in the attainment of native-like linguistic ability. Theoretical interest in bilingualism and second language (L2) acquisition has focused on how grammatical proficiency in L2 declines as a function of age of acquisition (e.g.). Clearly more information is needed about the different circumstances and range of language types which result in how grammars influence each other during early bilingual acquisition. The idea of languages influencing each other means that bilingual speakers will not have the same language processing structures as monolingual speakers, which challenges the received wisdom that becoming bilingual in early childhood invariably results in native-like linguistic knowledge.