Frequency and economy in the acquisition of variable word order

Anderssen, Merete; Westergaard, Marit

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2010.06.006

Cited by 33 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(36 reference statements)

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“…In the Tromsø acquisition corpus (Anderssen 2006), the high subject position is attested 81% (1351/1667) in relevant utterances in the adult data. The three children in the corpus are sensitive to this distinction from early on (Westergaard 2008a, Anderssen & Westergaard 2010, Westergaard 2011, typically producing DP subjects in the low position (following negation) and pronominal subjects high (preceding negation), as illustrated in (5) To conclude this section, the data from children's spontaneous production of word order variation, both at the clausal and the phrasal level, show that they produce both options from early on. Furthermore, they generally produce the two word orders in appropriate contexts.…”

Section: Westergaard Vangsnes and Lohndal 2012mentioning

confidence: 98%

Linguistic variation and micro-cues in first language acquisition

Westergaard

2014

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Children are often exposed to considerable variation in the input. Nevertheless, there is very little overgeneralization in child language data and children are typically found to make errors of omission, not errors of commission, a fact which is often referred to as conservative learning. In this paper, these findings are accounted for by a model of micro-cues, a generative approach to language acquisition arguing that children are sensitive to fine syntactic distinctions from early on. The micro-cues are small pieces of abstract syntactic structure resulting from parsing the input. This means that UG provides children with principles, features, and the ability to parse, but not the micro-cues themselves, which are considered to be part of the knowledge of a specific language. The model also considers children's errors to generally be due to economy and the language acquisition process to be development in small steps, from specific to more general knowledge.

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Section: Westergaard Vangsnes and Lohndal 2012mentioning

confidence: 98%

Linguistic variation and micro-cues in first language acquisition

Westergaard

2014

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“…The children’s overuse of the low subject position could of course simply be due to the children at an early stage producing a higher number of examples with pronominal subjects that happen to be focused than they do at later stages. However, in Anderssen & Westergaard (2010), a detailed investigation of the relevant examples in context shows that the children’s early production is in fact non‐target‐consistent. Thus, their production at period 2 (as well as period 3 for Ina) corresponds to a real preference for low subjects at an early stage 4 .…”

Section: Subject Positions In Norwegian Child Language Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper I first review some child language data on the different subject positions in , from Westergaard (2008a) and Anderssen & Westergaard (2010). As the findings deviate somewhat from the expected distribution in the target language as expressed in (8), it is pertinent to find out exactly what input children are typically exposed to in the acquisition process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subject positions and information structure: the effect of frequency on acquisition and change

Westergaard¹

2011

Studia Linguistica

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Two subject positions are identified in main and embedded clauses in Norwegian, appearing above or below negation and certain adverbs, and a similar situation is attested in the history of English. This paper investigates the distribution of subject types across several corpora of spoken Norwegian, produced by both adults and children. The frequencies attested are discussed in terms of a cue-based approach to acquisition, according to which children are sensitive to fine distinctions in syntax and information structure (micro-cues). Nevertheless, micro-cues with an extremely low frequency are argued to be vulnerable, and possible language change is discussed with reference to some actual changes which have either taken place in the history of English or which are argued to be in progress in present-day Norwegian. These changes are considered to reflect ''syntactic freezing'' of information structure patterns.

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“…These data are especially significant, in light of a wealth of work on acquisition of V2 languages which views [XP Non-Subject [V Fin ]] as a defining characteristic of the linguistic output of speakers with a V2 grammar and a crucial cue for V2 acquisition (Poeppel and Wexler, 1993:14;Lightfoot, 1995Lightfoot, :40, 1999Yang, 2000:113;Westergaard, 2008:72;Anderssen andWestergaard, 2010:2575;Van Kampen, 2010:273). 6 The data are worth further scrutiny in light of observations by Sitaridou (2011:164) for Old Spanish and Kaiser (2002:134) and Rinke and Meisel (2009) for Old French that XP-V-S orders are insufficiently attested in the textual record to motivate a V2 analysis.…”

Section: The Matrix Left Peripherymentioning

confidence: 99%

The nature of Old Spanish verb second reconsidered

Wolfe

2015

Lingua

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Frequency and economy in the acquisition of variable word order

Cited by 33 publications

References 23 publications

Linguistic variation and micro-cues in first language acquisition

Linguistic variation and micro-cues in first language acquisition

Subject positions and information structure: the effect of frequency on acquisition and change

The nature of Old Spanish verb second reconsidered

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