On the Acquisition of the Syntax of Romance

Autors:

Anna Gavarró (Ed.)

Títol:

On the Acquisition of the Syntax of Romance

Editorial: John Benjamins
Data de publicació: 2018
Pàgines: 287
ISBN13: 9789027201775

Més informació

This volume presents eleven papers on the acquisition of Romance, most of them presented at the Romance Turn VIII, held in Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain, in September 2016. Part I of the volume is devoted to passives and related constructions. The results unveil domains in comprehension in which children are adult-like, and other domains where there is delay. It is a challenge for current theoretical proposals to encompass such differences. Part II focuses on the TP-field, including clitics and negation. Part III deals with the CP-field, covering topics such as backward anaphora, subjects and the left periphery, and recursiveness. The volume includes studies carried out on a variety of populations: typically developing children, bilinguals, children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Specific Language Impairment, and heritage speakers, with a view to arriving at a general theory of language acquisition.

Investigating grammar in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autors:

Anna Gavarró, Stephanie Durrleman (Eds.)

Títol:

Investigating grammar in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Editorial: Frontiers in Psychology
Col·lecció: Frontiers in Psychology #19
Data de publicació: 2018

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Text complet


Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD hereafter) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by deficits in communicative and social skills. Consequently, the vast majority of research on language in ASD has focused on pragmatic difficulties, while considerably less is known about structural aspects of language in this population. Work on syntax and phonology is not only sparse, but the large heterogeneity in these grammatical domains has moreover led to conflicting reports that they are either intact or impaired. A few recent studies have thus attempted to focus instead on elucidating the different language phenotypes on the spectrum, leading to the identification of a subgroup with ASD displaying deficits reminiscent of those attested in Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Still, much more remains to be understood about variations in these grammatical profiles, as well as their relation to other abilities, such as IQ, working memory and theory of mind.


Títols de la col·lecció / Also in this series:

Merging Features

Autors:

José M. Brucart, Anna Gavarró, and Jaume Solà

Títol:

Merging Features

Editorial: Oxford University Press
Data de publicació: 2009
Pàgines: 390
ISBN13: 9780199553266

Més informació

This book presents new work on how Merge and formal features, two basic factors in the Minimalist Program, should determine the syntactic computation of natural language. Merge combines simpler objects into more complex ones. Formal features establish dependencies within objects. In this book leading scholars examine the intricate ways in which these two factors interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language. It is divided into two parts concerned with formal features and interpretable features - a subset of formal features.
The authors combine grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn from a wide range of languages, both in the adult grammar and in first language acquisition. The mechanisms at work in linguistic computation are considered in relation to a variety of linguistic phenomena, including A-binding, A'-dependencies and reconstruction, agreement, word order, adjuncts, pronouns and complementizers.

Language Acquisition and Development

Autors:

Anna Gavarró (Ed.) and M. João Freitas (Ed.)

Títol:

Language Acquisition and Development

Editorial: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Data de publicació: 2008
Pàgines: 520
ISBN13: 978-1-8471-8618-8

Més informació

This volume gathers fifty papers from the conference Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, GALA 2007, celebrated in Barcelona between the 6th and 8th of September, 2007. It covers the areas of syntax and phonology of child language from the theoretical perspective of generative grammar – the theoretical outlook which first placed language acquisition at the centre of linguistic inquiry.

Zhu & Gavarró (2019). Testing language acquisition models: null and overt topics in Mandarin

Autors:

Jingtao Zhu i Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Testing language acquisition models: null and overt topics in Mandarin

Editorial: Journal of Child Language, vol.46(4). Cambridge University Press
Data de publicació: Juliol 2019

Més informació

Parameter setting is either precipitous (Gibson & Wexler, 1994) or it is gradual in response to input frequency (Yang, 2002, 2004). In this study, we compare these models against the empirical domain of subject and (direct) object drop in Mandarin. We conducted a corpus-based study of the speech of 47 Mandarin-speaking children aged 1;2–6;5, and their caregivers, from the CHILDES database. The results show that before age 1;8 all the children used null subjects and null objects in a target-like fashion, which reveals that the parameter that governs null topics is set from very early on, even if the presence of disambiguating evidence for [+Null Topic] patterns is low. Besides, children's ba constructions, which require an overt object, reliably included this object from the first occurrence although its frequency was scarce in the input. Our results indicate that the setting of certain parameters occurred early independently of the input.