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.

Few studies have assessed children’s comprehension of the null infinitival subject (PRO) in Obligatory Control complements when the matrix object is implicit. A study on European Portuguese showed that children have poor comprehension of control complements of dizer “tell” with an implicit object controller, displaying high rates of subject control with this verb (Gamas, 2016). Moreover, Mateu (2016) found that both Spanish and English-speaking children performed at adult level with subject control complements of promise-type verbs when the matrix object is implicit. Our experiment tested children’s comprehension of control with prometer “promise” and dizer “tell” with overt and implicit objects. The results show that, in the case of sentences with implicit objects, children obtained significantly higher rates of object control with dizer than with prometer, despite high rates of (non-adult) subject control with dizer. Furthermore, children obeyed the locality of Obligatory Control and were sensitive to the properties of the main verb.

This study aims at exploring the omission/expression of subjects in L2 Spanish and L2 Greek. The distribution of subjects is examined in the context of the Interface Hypothesis (IH), which locates the difficulty of acquisition at the syntax-pragmatics interface (Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Tsimpli & Sorace 2006) and the language combination examined is a case in point as both languages share the null subject property and yet the IH predicts delay in L2 acquisition. We also examine the predictions of Lozano’s (2016) Pragmatic Principles Violation Hypothesis. We designed two multiple-choice tasks, one in Spanish and one in Greek, testing subjects in various pragmatic contexts. The tasks were administered to L2 intermediate and advanced learners and native speakers of Spanish and Greek. The results obtained indicate that the L2 learners were able to select the felicitous type of subjects in the appropriate contexts, although they did not always achieve native-like patterns. An asymmetry arose between L2 Greek and L2 Spanish, as L2 Greek was native-like, an asymmetry that failed to be predicted by any of the hypotheses entertained. Even though the involvement of the interface levels might have affected L2 performance, the syntax-pragmatics interface was not consistently having a detrimental effect on the results. Furthermore, our results with the control group indicated that the subject distribution in adult Greek is more nuanced than reported in the literature, especially in unambiguous referent-shift contexts.

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.