Comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition: a test for Relativized Minimality

Varlokosta, Spyridoula; Nerantzini, Michaela; Papadopoulou, Despina

doi:10.1017/s0305000914000257

Cited by 13 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 45 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Any effect of relativized minimality therefore must be visible as an interaction with argument type: for example, a difference between the two object questions, but no corresponding difference between the subject questions. The features that have been implicated in relativized minimality in other studies are NP (Friedmann et al, 2009), case (Arosio, Guasti, & Stucchi, 2011; Arosio, Yatsushiro, et al, 2011; Guasti, Stavrakaki, & Arosio, 2012; Varlokosta et al, 2015), number (Adani et al, 2010), and gender (Adani et al, 2010). In our study, gender was not tested, 7 but the features NP, case, and (indirectly) number were relevant.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Serbian differs in two ways from English: Case marking on the initial interrogative pronoun (and also on the other noun phrase in the sentence) distinguishes between the subject and object questions, while the word order of the verb and the other argument does not. Some work has already shown that different disambiguating factors affect children's performance differently (Adani et al, 2010;Arosio, Yatsushiro, Forgiarini, & Guasti, 2011;Guasti, Stavrakaki, & Arosio, 2012;Varlokosta et al, 2015), but no study has yet compared more than two languages. Our study is also of practical importance for the diagnosis of atypical child language in Europe.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Relativized Minimality account predicts that the difficulty of object extraction as in (1) should depend on properties of the moved object phrase, as we discuss below. The proposal is controversial (Goodluck, 2010; Varlokosta, Nerantzini, & Papadopoulou, 2015), and some of the original studies claiming to support it worked with very small sample sizes (15 and 22 participants in Avrutin, 2000; Friedmann et al, 2009 respectively), so it is important to have new, stronger evidence to evaluate the proposal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

et al. 2016

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like 'who' or a complex one like 'which princess', and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children's performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children's understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both 'who' and 'which', and the use of synthetic verbal forms.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

et al. 2016

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Non-referential object wh-questions with ti ("what") are productively used by children before age 2 (Stephany 1997;Tsimpli 2005). A comprehension study with children aged 4;0 to 5;4 found adult-like comprehension of these wh-questions (97% accuracy, Varlokosta et al 2015); we take the ceiling performance to suggest that mastery occurs already by age 4. Referential object wh-questions, i.e., which-questions, are unattested in early production (Stephany 1997;Tsimpli 2005) and are still difficult in comprehension for four-to five-year-old children (76% accuracy, Varlokosta et al 2015).…”

mentioning

confidence: 88%

Does Timing in Acquisition Modulate Heritage Children’s Language Abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task

Makrodimitris

Schulz

2021

Languages

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures.

show abstract

“…, Varlokosta et al . ). These difficulties have been linked to the immaturity of the developing processing system e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Pronoun comprehension in individuals with Down syndrome: the role of age

Sanoudaki

Varlokosta

2014

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background: A number of studies have suggested that language in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may not be simply delayed compared to language in typically developing (TD) children, but deviant. The deviance has been detected in the comprehension of pronouns, and it has triggered proposals for the existence of a specific syntactic deficit in individuals with DS. However, the developmental path of pronoun comprehension in individuals with DS is unknown, as there are no studies examining individuals of different ages.Aims: A pilot study examining pronoun comprehension in adolescents and adults with DS in comparison with TD children. Research questions include: 1. Are some pronoun types more difficult than others for each of the two groups (DS and TD)? 2. Is there a difference in performance between the two groups? 3. Does performance correlate with chronological age in the DS group?Methods and Procedures: Using a manual picture selection task, we examined the comprehension of different types of pronouns in fourteen Greek-speaking individuals with DS, ranging from ten to thirty-four years of age. We also tested a control group of TD children as well as a typical adult group. The TD and DS groups were recruited and tested in pre-schools and schools/centres for individuals with learning disabilities, respectively. Within-and between-group comparisons were performed for all conditions. For the DS group, correlations between chronological age and performance in each condition were also explored. Outcomes and Results:Results reveal a significant positive correlation of age with performance in the DS group, but only in structures that also presented difficulties to TD children. Structures that presented difficulties only to individuals with DS do not appear to be less problematic for older participants. 3Conclusions and Implications: These findings provide support to the deviance hypothesis, by suggesting that the syntactic deficit in the comprehension of pronouns in individuals with DS is present in individuals of a wide age range. At the same time, our results, if corroborated by large scale studies, suggest that some aspects of grammatical development in individuals with DS may continue even after adolescence, well into adulthood. We argue that these findings can contribute towards more targeted intervention practices by increasing our knowledge of the behavioural phenotype of DS.

show abstract

Comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition: a test for Relativized Minimality

Cited by 13 publications

References 45 publications

How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

Does Timing in Acquisition Modulate Heritage Children’s Language Abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task

Pronoun comprehension in individuals with Down syndrome: the role of age

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About