Pagliarini, Gavarró et al. (2021). Negative sentences with disjunction in child Catalan

Autors:

Elena Pagliarini, Marta Andrada Reyes, Maria Teresa Guasti, Stephen Crain & Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Negative sentences with disjunction in child Catalan, Language Acquisition 2021

Editorial: Routledge
Data de publicació: Gener del 2021
ISBN13: 1048-9223

Més informació

In English, the sentence Mary didn’t eat pizza or sushi is assigned the neither interpretation (both disjuncts must be false). In Mandarin Chinese, the equivalent sentence is assigned the at least one interpretation (at least one disjunct must be false). The cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction has been attributed to the Disjunction Parameter. On one value of this lexical parameter, disjunction is a Positive Polarity Item (+PPI). On the other value, disjunction is not a Positive Polarity Item (-PPI). According to the Semantic Subset Principle (SSP), all child language learners are predicted to initially assign the neither interpretation to negative disjunctive sentences, for reasons of language learnability. The present study investigates the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction in Catalan. The findings confirm that disjunction is +PPI for adults; children show a bimodal distribution. For some children, disjunction is -PPI, as predicted by the SSP. However, some children adopt the adult +PPI value of the Disjunction Parameter. Children’s level of linguistic maturity, as measured by a sentence repetition task, was correlated with their judgments about negative sentences with disjunction such that children with lower scores tended to adopt the -PPI value. To explain the relatively early parameter resetting by some Catalan-speaking children, as compared to children acquiring other languages where disjunction is +PPI, we discuss the possible “blocking effect” of an alternative lexical expression in Catalan, which unambiguously conveys the neither interpretation.

Nazzal, Zhu, & Gavarró (2025). Early knowledge of word order in Palestinian Arabic: An eye-tracking study

Autors:

Nazzal, Zhu, & Gavarró

Títol:

Early knowledge of word order in Palestinian Arabic: An eye-tracking study

Editorial: Language Acquisition
Data de publicació: 19-02-2025

Més informació

This paper addresses the underexplored realm of early parameter setting in language acquisition before the two-word stage, in a less researched language, Palestinian Arabic. Building on Franck et al.’s (2013) exploration of the verb–direct or indirect object/direct or indirect object–verb (VO/OV) parameter in infants exposed to French, we investigate the acquisition of the VO order (as opposed to OV) in 17-month-old native Palestinian Arabic infants using a combination of the preferential looking paradigm, the weird word order paradigm, and pseudo-verbs. The results from our study show that Palestinian Arabic infants have established VO by the age of 1;5 and ignore sequences of ungrammatical OV. This pattern is different from that of the adults, who do not ignore ungrammatical sequences. Additionally, we find no correlation between the infants’ performance and vocabulary size or age within the range tested. The infants in the study constitute, with Mandarin infants in a similar study, the youngest age group to show sensitivity to the VO/OV contrast.

Salmons, Muntané-Sanchez, & Gavarró (2024). An analysis of descriptions by Catalan-speaking individuals with aphasia

Autors:

Salmons, Muntané-Sanchez, & Gavarró

Títol:

An analysis of descriptions by Catalan-speaking individuals with aphasia

Editorial: Aphasiology
Data de publicació: 20-11-2024

Més informació

Background
Description tasks are used to evaluate and investigate the production abilities of people with language impairments such as aphasia.

Aims
The goal of the present study is to investigate the production abilities of Catalan-speaking individuals with aphasia (IWA), as well as a smaller sample of individuals with cognitive impairment (IWCI), in comparison with those of healthy controls. A second goal is to evaluate whether the scoring system of the Catalan version of the CAT (CAT-CAT) is helpful to discriminate different patterns of language impairment.

Methods and procedure
In the study, 109 control subjects, 20 IWA and 4 IWCI were asked to orally describe a picture from the CAT-CAT. The scoring method consisted in a closed-rating system that evaluates productivity, discourse efficiency, fluency, grammatical complexity and grammaticality.

Results
The results show that the overall scores of the control subjects were significantly higher than those of the experimental groups; the difference between the two experimental groups was not significant. Yet, the group of IWA showed greater intersubject variability than the group of IWCI. Also, the IWA were consistently worse in fluency, grammaticality and grammatical complexity than the IWCI, which indicated a different pattern of performance between the two groups.

Conclusions
Our findings therefore show that the oral picture description of the CAT-CAT is sensitive to the language impairment of subjects with aphasia and cognitive impairment. Moreover, the rating system put forward allows us to uncover different patterns of language impairment, since it includes variables to evaluate separately content and discourse efficiency on the one hand, and grammatical features on the other hand.

Gavarró & Keidel (2024). Subject-verb agreement: Three experiments on Catalan

Autors:

Anna Gavarró & Alejandra Keidel

Títol:

Subject-verb agreement: Three experiments on Catalan

Editorial: First Language (Sage Journals)
Data de publicació: Agost, 2024
Pàgines: 22

Text complet

This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they performed above chance in all other scenarios, including plural third-person subjects and sentences with overt full DP subjects. This is reminiscent of the results of Pérez-Leroux for Spanish. In experiment 2, with the same design but involving numeral distractors, children’s performance was above chance level across all conditions from age 3 to 4. Then, in experiment 3, we moved to a younger age range with the help of eye-tracking techniques. The findings revealed that infants at 22 months had the ability to parse subject–verb agreement in sentences with third-person null subjects, and at 19 months there was evidence of parsing for third-person plural null subjects. These findings are inconsistent with the perception of children grappling with syntactic agreement computation. We argue that instances of underperformance in subject–verb agreement parsing identified in the literature often stem from task-related and pragmatic issues rather than core syntactic delay. If so, the putative asymmetry between early production of verbal inflection and late comprehension disappears; rather, the results suggest early establishment of matching operations and mastery of language-specific agreement properties before production starts.

Agostinho, Gavarró & Santos (2024). The acquisition of the verbal passive: The role of verb type

Autors:

Celina Agostinho, Anna Gavarró i Ana Lúcia Santos

Títol:

The acquisition of the verbal passive: The role of verb type

Editorial: Language Acquisition (Routledge)
Data de publicació: Abril del 2024
Pàgines: 22

Text complet

This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children’s performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that children perform better with passives of predicates that encode a result state, either because they tend to make better adjectival passives or because they have a complex event structure. Moreover, the UPR predicts poorer performance with long passives (i.e., those with a by-phrase) than with short passives, to the extent that construing an adjectival interpretation is more difficult when a by- phrase is present; the UFH predicts no difference between the two. Portuguese-speaking children between the ages of 3 and 8 years were tested on their comprehension of verbal passives of non-actional predicates and actional predicates with or without a result state, using two sentence-picture matching tasks. The results do not entirely fulfill the predictions of the UPR and the UFH: we replicate the delay seen in English with non-actional predicates, but no effect of the result state is seen in the case of actional predicates. We propose that the relevant aspectual property of the passi-vized predicate may be affectedness rather than the availability of a result state.