Early passive acquisition in Inuktitut

The use of complex structures with a word class change in Inuktitut child-directed speech

Caregivers typically use a simplified mode of the language – child-directed speech (CDS) – when addressing young children. In this study, we investigate the use of complex morphological structures with a word class change within a single word in Inuktitut CDS. Inuktitut is a polysynthetic agglutinative language of the Inuit–Yupik–Unangan language family spoken in arctic Quebec, which allows more than 10 morphemes per word and in which the meaning of an entire sentence can be expressed in one word. Clearly, such a complex morphological system presents special challenges for young children, which raises the question of whether caregivers shape their CDS in ways that facilitate acquisition. Using the data from mothers addressing eight Inuktitut-speaking children aged 0;11 to 3;6, we investigated whether the frequency and complexity of polysynthetic structures in CDS are dependent on the stage of the children’s linguistic development. The results demonstrate that the number and morphological complexity of the structures with a word class change increased as the children developed linguistically. The variety of nominalizers and verbalizers – the key components of such structures – also increased through the stages and were used in variation sets, which help children acquire morphological items by providing examples of use of the same morpheme in morphologically contrasting environments. These results show the presence of morphological simplification in Inuktitut CDS and demonstrate that such simplification is fine-tuned, i.e., that mothers are sensitive to their children’s level of linguistic development.

Passive Voice Comprehension during Thematic-Role Assignment in Russian-Speaking Children Aged 4-6 Is Reflected in the Sensitivity of ERP to Noun Inflections

Children tend to rely on semantics rather than syntax during sentence comprehension. In transitive sentences, with no reliance on semantics, the syntax-based strategy becomes critical. We aimed to describe developmental changes of brain mechanisms for syntax processing in typically developing (TD) four to six year old’s. A specially designed sentence-picture matching task using active (AV) and passive (PV) voice enforced children to use grammar cues for sentence comprehension. Fifty children with above >60% level of accuracy in PV sentences comprehension demonstrated brain sensitivity to voice grammar markers-inflections of the second noun phrase (NP2), which was expressed in a greater event-related potentials (ERP) amplitude to PV vs. AV sentences in four-, five-, and six-year-old children. The biphasic positive-negative component at 200−400 ms was registered in the frontocentral and bilateral temporoparietal areas. Only in six-year-old children P600 was registered in the right temporoparietal area. LAN-like negativity seems to be a mechanism for distinguishing AV from PV in the early stages of mastering syntax processing of transitive sentences in four to five year old children. Both behavioral and ERP results distinguished six-year-olds from four-year-old’s and five-year-old’s, reflecting the possible transition to the “adult-like” syntax-based thematic role assignment.

Syntactic Representations Are Both Abstract and Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Children's and Adults' Comprehension and Production/Priming of the English Passive

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained, varying according to the distance between the semantics of the verb and those of the construction. In a forced-choice pointing study (Experiment 1), both 4- to 6-year olds (N = 60) and adults (N = 60) showed support for the prediction of this semantic construction prototype account of an interaction such that the observed disadvantage for passives as compared to actives (i.e., fewer correct points/longer reaction time) was greater for experiencer-theme verbs than for agent-patient and theme-experiencer verbs (e.g., Bob was seen/hit/frightened by Wendy). Similarly, in a production/priming study (Experiment 2), both 4- to 6-year olds (N = 60) and adults (N = 60) produced fewer passives for experiencer-theme verbs than for agent-patient/theme-experiencer verbs. We conclude that these findings are difficult to explain under accounts based on the notion of A(rgument) movement or of a monostratal, semantics-free, level of syntax, and instead necessitate some form of semantic construction prototype account.

Language Endangerment in Childhood

Language endangerment by definition excludes children and childhood, as the most endangered languages are those which are no longer being used, spoken, or acquired by the youngest generations. By and large, research in this area reflects this exclusion by focusing primarily on the documentation of grammatical knowledge elicited from the oldest speakers for storage in archives (what Maliseet anthropologist Bernard Perley has termed “zombie linguistics”). However, when approached from a language socialization orientation, the seeming paradox of language endangerment in childhood dissolves. Investigations of endangered languages in childhood reveal surprisingly vibrant and complicated amalgams of linguistic practices, socializing discourses, and cultural ideologies. They underscore the need to apply mixed methods to understanding processes of language endangerment. They challenge the grammatical boundedness of languages as (transparently) discrete objects. They recognize the vitalities emergent from situations of aggressive contact. Thus, attention to children and childhood not only calls into question the privileged rhetoric of zombie linguistics but also accentuates and challenges the socially constructed dimensions of languages and linguistic boundaries.

Hebrew verbal passives in Later Language Development: the interface of register and verb morphology

The current study examined the production of Hebrew verbal passives across adolescence as mediated by linguistic register and verb morphology. Participants aged eight to sixteen years and a group of adults were asked to change written active-voice sentences into corresponding passive-voice forms, divided by verb register (neutral and high), binyan pattern (Qal / Nif'al, Hif'il / Huf'al, and Pi'el / Pu'al), and verb tense (past and future tense). Results showed that Hebrew passive morphology is a very late acquisition, almost a decade later than in other languages, that passivizing neutral-register verbs was less challenging than high-register verbs, and that past tense verbs were easier to passivize than future tense verbs. An order of acquisition was determined among the three binyan pairs. The paper provides an account of these findings grounded in the event-telling role of Hebrew passives in discourse and the spurt of abstract, lexically specific vocabulary in Later Language Development.

Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences?: A permutation analysis

We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investigated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active from passive sentences, after processing the remainder of the sentence frame. For this second question we used eye-tracking (Study 1) and forced-choice pointing (Study 2). For both studies, we used a paradigm in which participants simultaneously saw two novel actions with reversed agent-patient relations while listening to active and passive sentences. We compared English-speaking 25-month-olds and 41-month-olds in between-subjects sentence structure conditions (Active Transitive Condition vs. Passive Condition). A permutation analysis found that both age groups showed a bias to incrementally map the first noun in a sentence onto an agent role. Regarding the second question, 25-month-olds showed some evidence of distinguishing the two structures in the eye-tracking study. However, the 25-month-olds did not distinguish active from passive sentences in the forced choice pointing task. In contrast, the 41-month-old children did reanalyse their initial first-NP-as-agent bias to the extent that they clearly distinguished between active and passive sentences both in the eye-tracking data and in the pointing task. The results are discussed in relation to the development of syntactic (re)parsing.

Exploring socioeconomic differences in syntactic development through the lens of real-time processing

Differences in caregiver input across socioeconomic status (SES) predict syntactic development, but the mechanisms are not well understood. Input effects may reflect the exposure needed to acquire syntactic representations during learning (e.g., does the child have the relevant structures for passive sentences?) or access this knowledge during communication (e.g., can she use the past participle to infer the meaning of passives?). Using an eye-tracking and act-out paradigm, the current study distinguishes these mechanisms by comparing the interpretation of actives and passives in 3- to 7-year-olds (n=129) from varying SES backgrounds. During the presentation of spoken sentences, fixations revealed robust disambiguation of constructions by children from higher-SES backgrounds, but less sensitivity by lower-SES counterparts. After sentence presentation, decreased sensitivity generated interpretive challenges and average SES-related differences for passives requiring syntactic revision ("The seal is quickly eaten by it"). Critically, no differences were found when revision was not needed ("It is quickly eaten by the seal"). These results suggest that all children shared an ability to acquire passives, but SES-related differences in real-time processing can impact the accuracy of utterance interpretation.

Structural priming in Spanish as evidence of implicit learning

This study uses a structural priming technique with young Spanish speakers to test whether exposure to a rare syntactic form in Spanish (fue-passive) would increase the production and comprehension of that form. In Study 1, 14 six-year-old Spanish speakers described pictures of transitive scenes. This baseline study revealed that fue-passives were virtually non-existent in children's spontaneous speech. Using the priming technique in Study 2, an additional 56 Spanish-speaking children were exposed to fue-passive or active picture descriptions; we varied whether children repeated the modeled form. With repetition, production of fue-passives increased past baseline usage. When not asked to repeat, comprehension and production of fue-passives was no different than chance. Results extend the existing literature by experimentally testing input effects on the production and comprehension of infrequently used constructions, further corroborating the relation between input frequency and language skill. Findings are consistent with the view that an implicit learning mechanism guides language learning.

The development of the causative construction in Persian child language

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child speech between the ages of 1;11 and 6;7, in correspondence with their caregivers' speech. We define developmental stages based on dendrograms derived from variability clustering (Gries & Stoll, 2009). These stages are further substantiated by qualitative data, including overgeneralization errors and alternating structures. We find that Persian-speaking children learn to exploit two (i.e. lexical and light verb construction causatives) of the four constructions. They go from relying on lexical causatives to forming progressively constrained templates for the more complex light verb construction. This first study of the development of Persian causatives supports a usage-based account of verb-by-verb learning in child language development.

What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?

Universal Grammar (UG) is a suspect concept. There is little agreement on what exactly is in it; and the empirical evidence for it is very weak. This paper critically examines a variety of arguments that have been put forward as evidence for UG, focussing on the three most powerful ones: universality (all human languages share a number of properties), convergence (all language learners converge on the same grammar in spite of the fact that they are exposed to different input), and poverty of the stimulus (children know things about language which they could not have learned from the input available to them). I argue that these arguments are based on premises which are either false or unsubstantiated. Languages differ from each other in profound ways, and there are very few true universals, so the fundamental crosslinguistic fact that needs explaining is diversity, not universality. A number of recent studies have demonstrated the existence of considerable differences in adult native speakers’ knowledge of the grammar of their language, including aspects of inflectional morphology, passives, quantifiers, and a variety of more complex constructions, so learners do not in fact converge on the same grammar. Finally, the poverty of the stimulus argument presupposes that children acquire linguistic representations of the kind postulated by generative grammarians; constructionist grammars such as those proposed by Tomasello, Goldberg and others can be learned from the input. We are the only species that has language, so there must be something unique about humans that makes language learning possible. The extent of crosslinguistic diversity and the considerable individual differences in the rate, style and outcome of acquisition suggest that it is more promising to think in terms of a language-making capacity, i.e., a set of domain-general abilities, rather than an innate body of knowledge about the structural properties of the target system.

The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition

This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses. (i) There exist different types of frequency effect, from effects at the level of concrete lexical strings to effects at the level of abstract cues to thematic-role assignment, as well as effects of both token and type, and absolute and relative, frequency. High-frequency forms are (ii) early acquired and (iii) prevent errors in contexts where they are the target, but also (iv) cause errors in contexts in which a competing lower-frequency form is the target. (v) Frequency effects interact with other factors (e.g. serial position, utterance length), and the patterning of these interactions is generally informative with regard to the nature of the learning mechanism. We conclude by arguing that any successful account of language acquisition, from whatever theoretical standpoint, must be frequency sensitive to the extent that it can explain the effects documented in this review, and outline some types of account that do and do not meet this criterion.

Cross-linguistic comparisons in child language research

Major large-scale research projects in the early years of developmental psycholinguistics were English-based, yet even then numerous studies were available or under way in a range of different languages (Ferguson & Slobin, 1973). Since then, the field of cross-linguistic child language research has burgeoned in several directions. First, rich information is now available on the acquisition of dozens of languages from around the world in numerous language families, spearheaded by the five-volume series edited by Slobin (1985-1997) and complemented by in-depth examination of specific constructions - e.g. causative alternation, motion verbs, passive voice, subject elision, noun compounding - in various languages, culminating in an in-depth examination of the acquisition of ergativity in over a dozen languages (Bavin & Stoll, 2013). A second fruitful direction is the application of carefully comparable designs targeting a range of issues among children acquiring different languages, including: production of early lexico-grammatical constructions (Slobin, 1982), sentence processing comprehension (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), expression of spatial relations (Bowerman, 2011), discourse construction of oral narratives based on short picture series (Hickmann, 2003) and longer storybooks (Berman & Slobin, 1994), and extended texts in different genres (Berman, 2008). Taken together, research motivated by the question of what is particular and what universal in child language highlights the marked, and early, impact of ambient language typology on processes of language acquisition. The challenge remains to operationalize such insights by means of psychologically sound and linguistically well-motivated measures for evaluating the interplay between the variables of developmental level, linguistic domain, and ambient language typology.

Children's assignment of grammatical roles in the online processing of Mandarin passive sentences

Children's difficulty understanding passives in English has been attributed to the syntactic complexity, overall frequency, cue reliability, and/or incremental processing of this construction. To understand the role of these factors, we used the visual-world paradigm to examine comprehension in Mandarin Chinese where passives are infrequent but signaled by a highly valid marker (BEI). Eye-movements during sentences indicated that these markers triggered incremental role assignments in adults and 5-year-olds. Actions after sentences indicated that passives were often misinterpreted as actives when markers appeared after the referential noun ("Seal BEI it eat" → The seal is eaten by it). However, they were more likely to be interpreted correctly when markers appeared before ("It BEI seal eat" → It is eaten by the seal). The actions and the eye-movements suggest that for both adults and children, interpretations of passive are easier when they do not require revision of an earlier role assignment.

Early production of the passive in two Eastern Bantu languages

The passive construction is acquired relatively late by children learning to speak many languages, with verbal passives not fully acquired until age 6 in English. In other languages it appears earlier, around age 3 or before. Use of passive construction in young children was examined in two Eastern Bantu languages spoken in Kenya (Kiswahili and Kigiriama), both with frequent use of passive. The passive was used productively very early (2;1) in these languages, regardless of the method used to measure productivity. In addition, non-actional passives, particularly rare in English and some other European languages, were seen at these early ages. The proportion of verbs that were passive varied between individuals, both in children's speech and in the input to children. Pragmatic and grammatical features of the passive in some languages have previously been suggested to drive early passive acquisition, but these features are not found consistently in the two languages studied here. Findings suggest that the relatively high frequency of input found in these languages is the most plausible reason for early productive use of the passive.

Grammatical constructions in typical developing children: effects of explicit reinforcement, automatic reinforcement and parity

This study replicated and extended Wright (2006) and Whitehurst, Ironsmith, and Goldfein (1974) by examining whether preschool aged children would increase their use of passive grammatical voice rather than using the more age-appropriate active grammatical construction when the former was modeled by an adult. Results showed that 5 of the 6 participants began using the passive voice after this verbal behavior had been modeled. For 3 of the participants, this change was large. The change occurred even though the adult model explicitly rewarded the participant with praise and stickers for using the active voice, while providing no praise or stickers for using the passive form that was modeled. For 1 participant, the modeling procedure had no effect on use of the passive voice. These results indicate a strong automatic reinforcement effect of achieving parity with the grammatical structures used by adults, compared to the effects of explicit reinforcement by the adult. This might help to explain why children acquire grammatical structures prevalent in their language community apparently without explicit instruction.

The passive in 3- and 4-year-olds

This paper argues that analyzing the patterns of individual subject performance in tests of comprehension of passives might give insight into how little children interpret passives: 3 and 4 year-olds seem to go through a range of passive interpretation, that varies from actual comprehension to total non-comprehension. The fact that some small children understand long and short passives in Portuguese could be seen as evidence that the concept of universal delay for passives is too stringent. We also argue that below chance results and chance results may reflect a relevant difference in children's behavior in interpreting the passive: below chance results seem to suggest that children interpret the passive as an active sentence.

How the parts relate to the whole: frequency effects on children's interpretations of novel compounds

This study explores different frequency effects on children's interpretations of novel noun-noun compounds (e.g. egg bag as 'bag FOR eggs'). We investigated whether four- to five-year-olds and adults use their knowledge of related compounds and their modifier-head relations (e.g. sandwich bag (FOR) or egg white (PART-OF)) when explaining the meaning of novel compounds and/or whether they are affected by overall frequency of modifier-head relations in their vocabulary. Children's interpretations were affected by their experience with relations in compounds with the same head, but not by overall relation frequency. Adults' interpretations were affected by their experience with relations in compounds with the same modifier, suggesting that children and adults use similar but different knowledge to interpret compounds. Furthermore, only children's interpretations revealed an overuse of visually perceivable relations.

Language and communicative development in Williams syndrome

Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by a microdeletion of approximately 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23, is associated with mild to moderate intellectual disability or learning difficulties. Most individuals with Williams syndrome evidence a cognitive profile including relative strengths in verbal short-term memory and language, and considerable weakness in visuospatial construction. The syndrome has often been argued to provide strong evidence for the independence of language from other aspects of cognition. We provide a brief history of early research on the language abilities of individuals with Williams syndrome and then review contemporary studies of language and cognition in Williams syndrome, beginning with a consideration of performance on standardized assessments. In the remainder of the article, we first consider early language acquisition, with a focus on speech production and perception, vocabulary acquisition, and communicative/pragmatic development and then consider the language abilities of school-age children and adolescents, focusing on semantics, grammar, and pragmatics. We argue that rather than being the paradigm case for the independence of language from cognition, Williams syndrome provides strong evidence of the interdependence of many aspects of language and cognition.

Language-specific and universal influences in children's syntactic packaging of Manner and Path: a comparison of English, Japanese, and Turkish

Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the semantic elements of Manner and Path onto syntactic units when both the Manner and the Path of the moving Figure occur simultaneously and are salient in the event depicted. Both universal and language-specific patterns were evident in our data. Children used the semantic-syntactic mappings preferred by adult speakers of their own languages, and even expressed subtle syntactic differences that encode different relations between Manner and Path in the same way as their adult counterparts (i.e., Manner causing vs. incidental to Path). However, not all types of semantics-syntax mappings were easy for children to learn (e.g., expressing Manner and Path elements in two verbal clauses). In such cases, Turkish- and Japanese-speaking children frequently used syntactic patterns that were not typical in the target language but were similar to patterns used by English-speaking children, suggesting some universal influence. Thus, both language-specific and universal tendencies guide the development of complex spatial expressions.

Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers

Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice sentences. Following 10 story sessions, children's production and comprehension of passives were assessed. Intervention type affected performance--children who heard stories with passive sentences produced more passive constructions (and with fewer mistakes) and showed higher comprehension scores than children who heard stories with active sentences. Theoretical implications of these results for the understanding of the nature of syntactic skills and practical implications for the development of preschool materials are discussed.