Gavarró (2020). Child Relativised Minimality and Grammaticality Judgement

Child Relativized Minimality and Grammaticality Judgement

Autors:

Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Child Relativised Minimality and Grammaticality Judgement

Editorial: Frontiers in Psychology, section Language Sciences
Col·lecció:
Data de publicació: 7 de febrer del 2020

Més informació

Grammaticality judgements are the fundamental experimental source of generative linguistic theory. They may be difficult to elicit, especially in some populations, but generally they inform us neatly about what the grammar licenses or, on the contrary, bans. On the other hand, acceptability is multifactorial and therefore, unlike grammaticality judgement, can be quantified. In this paper I consider a particular empirical domain, that of Relativized Minimality (RM) in acquisition, and its relation to the dichotomy between grammaticality and acceptability. Friedmann et al. (2009) argued that children hold a stricter version of RM than adults. In particular, children would require a disjoint feature specification, not just a distinct feature specification, between target and intervener. The literature shows asymmetries in comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in various languages which fulfill the predictions of child RM. Variation between adults and children might be expected not only in production and comprehension, but also in grammaticality judgement. If so, children would be predicted to reject object relatives as well as the classic RM violations. Alternatively, if child RM is a processing effect, the prediction is that children would be able to tease apart object relative clauses from RM violations under favorable processing conditions. The question I address is: do children assimilate RM violations and object relative clauses? Grammaticality judgement should provide an answer to this question. In this paper I present an experiment targeting grammaticality judgement for object relatives and RM violations and report preliminary results for a group of 6-year-old Catalan-speaking children showing that object relatives and RM violations are not judged in a parallel fashion, since RM violations are rejected more often than object relatives.

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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.

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.

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.

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

Més informació
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.


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