Beyond the Two-Clause Sentence: Acquisition of Clause Chaining in Six Languages

Sarvasy, Hannah S.; Choi, Soonja

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01586

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Another indication of verbal sophistication for children acquiring a clause chaining language like Nungon is the production of two-clause, and three-or-more-clause sentences, or ‘clause chains’ (Sarvasy, 2020; Sarvasy & Choi, 2020). For instance, the sentence in (23) is a clause chain comprising three clauses, each with its own simple or complex verbal predicate.…”

Section: Results: Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both TO and NN use clause chains much more than other complex sentence types, such as subordinate or coordinate structures (Sarvasy, 2020); clause chain use can be taken as partially representative of multi-clause sentence use. Rumsey et al (2020), Sarvasy (2020), and Sarvasy and Choi (2020) showed that in clause chaining languages, children’s earliest clause chain productions comprise just two clauses, with chains of three or more clauses developing later. Thus, production of chains with three or more clauses can also be taken as a milestone in verbal development for these children.…”

Section: Results: Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the Papuan language Ku Waru and Australian language Pitjantjatjara, the distinction has been reported to be morphologically indeterminate (Defina, 2020; Rumsey et al, 2020); but see Aikhenvald (2019) on further tests and criteria that could still be applied in such situations to distinguish between multi-verb predicates and biclausal constructions. Acquisition of Nungon clause chains is the focus of Sarvasy (2020) and is compared with acquisition of clause chaining in other languages by Sarvasy and Choi (2020). The topic of this article is multi-verb predicates in single clauses, not on multi-clause complex sentences (or chains), so clause chains will only be mentioned here for purposes of comparing acquisition ages, for instance, of multi-verb predicates and multi-clause sentences.…”

Section: Overview Of Nungon Complex Predicatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquisition of multi-verb predicates in Nungon

Sarvasy

2020

First Language

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Studies of the acquisition of verbs tend to focus on one-verb predicates of the prevalent English type. But in hundreds of languages around the world, multi-verb predicates like serial verb constructions are widely used. It could be reasoned that children should begin producing simple, single-verb predicates before they are able to produce multi-verb predicates. But alternatively, many multi-verb predicates are idiomatic and could, as chunks, lend themselves to holophrastic acquisition by small children. This article examines early productions of multi-verb predicates in the speech of three children (aged 1;1–2;4, 2;1–3;3, and 2;10–3;3) acquiring the Papuan language Nungon, comparing patterns there with productions in the child-directed speech of their parents, and with the children’s productions of simple, one-verb predicates. The study’s youngest child never produces multi-verb predicates in the study period, but the child studied for the widest age range produces them from age 2;4, when she has still not acquired productive use of all verbal inflections, and both older children show proportionally increasing trends in multi-verb predicate use. Semantically, the earliest multi-verb predicates can be analyzed as describing multidimensional unitary events, with this expanding to events that can be divided into multiple distinct components at later ages. Delays in production of certain other multi-verb predicate types that are robustly present in parental input at all ages cannot be linked to a single factor, but likely relate to a combination of increased phonological or morphological complexity and increased conceptual difficulty.

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Section: Results: Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Results: Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Overview Of Nungon Complex Predicatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquisition of multi-verb predicates in Nungon

Sarvasy

2020

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“…These include: definite and indefinite articles, relative clauses with relative pronouns, the 'have'-perfect, nominative experiencers, participial passives, negative pronouns and a lack of verbal negation, and verb fronting in polar interrogatives (for full list of 'Standard Average European' see Haspelmath, 2001, on the exceptionality of northwestern European languages, see Cysouw, 2011). This skew means that we know much less about features more common outside of European sprachbund, such as tone (Singh & Fu, 2016), polysynthesis (Kelly, Nordlinger, Wigglesworth, & Blythe, 2014;Mithun, 1989), obviation (Henke, 2021), ergativity (Bavin & Stoll, 2013), and clause chaining (Sarvasy & Choi, 2020), to name but a few. It also limits our understanding of how children might acquire typologically rarer phenomena (e.g., symmetrical 'Philippine-style' voice, see Garcia & Kidd, 2020), which are existence proofs of what is possible in natural language and may be particularly challenging to theories built primarily on very different languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How diverse is child language acquisition?

Kidd¹,

Garcia²

2021

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A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7,000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in approximately half of them. In the current paper we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition, and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for the following variables: (i) language(s), (ii) topic(s), and (iii) country of author affiliation, from each journal’s inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing only around 1.5% of the world’s languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority published on non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. There was a more even distribution of topics across language categories, but a vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to a truly representative account of child language acquisition.

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“…Clause chains are frequent in Japanese, Korean, and Turkish, but until very recently (namely, the contributions to Sarvasy & Choi, 2020a), there were few studies devoted to acquisition of clause chains, possibly because researchers into acquisition of these languages had oriented themselves toward existing acquisition literature – itself oriented toward features found in English. In fact, new research into clause chaining in these and other languages points to a potentially universal ‘two-clause stage’ in children’s clause combining (Sarvasy & Choi, 2020b). If researchers had not stepped outside the canon of English-like features studied by acquisition scholars, this stage would have remained unrecognized.…”

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confidence: 99%