A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production

Varlokosta, Spyridoula; Belletti, Adriana; Costa, João; Friedmann, Naama; Gavarró, Anna; Grohmann, Kleanthes Κ.; Guasti, Maria Teresa; Tuller, Laurice; Lobo, María; Anđelković, Darinka; Argemí, Núria; Avram, Larisa; Berends, Sanne; Brunetto, Valentina; Delage, Hélène; Segurola, María José Ezeizabarrena; Fattal, Iris; Haman, Ewa; Hout, Angeliek van; López, Kristine Jensen de; Katsos, Napoleon; Kologranic, Lana; Krstić, Nadežda S.; Kraljević, Jelena Kuvač; Miękisz, Aneta; Nerantzini, Michaela; Queraltó, Clara; Radić, Željana; Ruiz, Sílvia; Sauerland, Uli; Sevcenco, Anca; Smoczyńska, Magdalena; Theodorou, Eleni; Lely, Heather van der; Veenstra, Alma; Weston, John; Yachini, Maya; Yatsushiro, Kazuko

doi:10.1080/10489223.2015.1028628

Cited by 57 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…We also know from previous research that for children acquiring EP and Polish, the acquisition of the correct distribution of null and overt objects takes much longer than in other languages and the rate of (illicit) omissions is much higher until later stages of development (cf. Lobo 2007, 2009;Sopata 2016;Varlokosta et al 2016). In this section, we will summarize the results of previous studies on monolingual acquisition of the EP and Polish pronoun systems, which used the same experiment as in the present study (Flores et al, submitted;Sopata 2016).…”

Section: Previous Research On L1 Acquisition Of Direct Objects In Ep mentioning

confidence: 85%

Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

2019

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This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.

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Section: Previous Research On L1 Acquisition Of Direct Objects In Ep mentioning

confidence: 85%

Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

2019

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“…Although (16c) is a grammatical sentence, it is infelicitous in the context above since the verb argument is a topic that should be anaphorically realized by a pronoun. Third person 3DO clitic omission have been attested crosslinguistically in acquisition studies, reporting a more robust stage of omission in a group of languages including Italian, French and Catalan, where the verb past participle in perfect tense sentences agrees with the clitic, than in a second group including Spanish, Greek and Romanian, where there is no past participle agreement (for an overview and discussion see Varlokosta et al, 2016).…”

Section: The Acquisition Of 3do Cliticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Acquisition studies report that instead of producing a 3DO clitic, young children erroneously tend to omit it or to replace it with a full nominal constituent in the canonical verbal object position (Guasti, 1993(Guasti, /1994Schaeffer, 2000;Leonini, 2006;Caprin and Guasti, 2009;Dispaldro et al, 2009;Moscati and Tedeschi, 2009). Although young children's problems with 3DO clitic production have been attested cross-linguistically, rates of omissions and substitutions differ in different languages (for an overview see Varlokosta et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agreement and Interference in Direct Object Clitic Production in Italian Monolingual Children

Arosio

Giustolisi

2019

Front. Commun.

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Italian speaking typically developing children optionally omit third person direct object clitics (3DO) until at least age 4 years. In a set of two studies, we investigated whether clitic omissions depend on intervention phenomena. We discussed a model of syntactic intervention in 3DO clitic production in which the subject of a sentence might intervene in clitic production at an intermediate stage of the sentence derivation, when the clitic moves from its initial merging position to a higher position above the subject. We argued that omissions and errors in 3DO clitic productions arise when retrieving from memory the clitic to achieve an agreement relation in a context of syntactic intervention. We argued that working memory limitations impact on the clitic retrieving operation cued by lexical and representational features. In Study 1, we elicited the production of third singular clitics in sentences with a full lexical subject. The third singular subject and the third singular clitic were matched or not in gender. Results of Study 1 showed that when there is a gender feature mismatch between the subject and the 3DO clitic children optionally make clitic gender errors or even replace the 3DO clitic with a post-verbal full DP. We argued that these results could be explained in an intervention model in which the external verb lexical argument (the lexical subject) is erroneously retrieved for achieving the agreement operation involving the movement of the clitic to its surface position. In Study 2 we investigated whether the problems in clitic production found in Study 1 depend on phonological priming or structural intervention. We elicited the production of third singular clitics in sentences with a silent pro subject. As in Study 1, the third singular subject and the third singular clitic were matched or not in gender. Results of Study 2 showed that in sentences with a mismatch in gender features between the null subject and the clitic, children tend to produce a clitic with the incorrect gender or to optionally replace it with a full lexical post-verbal DP, regardless of the gender of the target clitic. This suggests that a null subject intervenes in the same way a lexical subject does in the derivation of clitics and, consequently, that the gender features inherited by a null subject via its anaphoric link with its antecedent have the same grammatical status of gender features conveyed at a lexical level. Overall results indicate that the interference errors are not dependent on phonological attraction but rather have a structural nature and are modulated by short-term memory resources.

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“…), that is, before the experimenter started uttering the because-clause. See also the study by Varlokosta et al (2016) for more details.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This study adapted the COST Action A33 Clitics-in-Islands testing tool (Varlokosta et al, 2016) so as to elicit the production of third person singular direct object clitics. 5 The task comprises 19 items, 12 target structures preceded by two warm-ups and interspersed by 5 fillers.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring Clitic Placement in Bilectal Settings: Interactions between Social Factors

2017

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This article examines the development of object clitic placement by children acquiring Cypriot Greek. Greek-speaking Cyprus is sociolinguistically characterized by diglossia between two varieties of Greek, the local Cypriot Greek and the official Standard Modern Greek. Arguably as a result of this situation, clitics may be placed postverbally (enclisis) or preverbally (proclisis) in the same syntactic environment; while the former is a property of Cypriot Greek and the latter is typically considered an effect of the standard language. The following issues are investigated here: (a) how such bilectal speakers distinguish between the two Greek varieties with respect to clitic placement; (b) how the acquisition of clitics develops over time; (c) how, and which, sociolinguistic factors determine clitic placement; and (d) how schooling may affect clitic placement. To address (a)-(d), a sentence completion task was used to elicit clitic productions, administered to 431 children around Cyprus ranging from 2 years 8 months to 8 years 11 months. The C5.0 machine-learning algorithm was employed to model the interaction of (socio-)linguistic factors on the development of clitic placement. The model shows that speakers acquire the relevant features very early, yet compartmentalization of form and function according to style emerges only as they engage in the larger speech community. In addition, the effects of sociolinguistic factors on clitic placement appear gradually.

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A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production

Cited by 57 publications

References 51 publications

Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

Agreement and Interference in Direct Object Clitic Production in Italian Monolingual Children

Acquiring Clitic Placement in Bilectal Settings: Interactions between Social Factors

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