Information structural constraints on children’s early language production: The acquisition of the focus particle auch (‘also’) in German-learning 12- to 36-month-olds

Abstract

This article presents new findings for the acquisition of the focus particle auch ('also') in German-learning children. In a longitudinal study with 11 children between 1;00 and 3;00 years of age complemented by two experi ments with children aged 2;4 and 2;8, the authors investigated children's production of the accented and unaccented auch. The results confirm earlier findings of a temporal delay between the first occurrences of both auch-variants. Based on the empirical findings, an account for this asymmetry is proposed that relates it to a more general developmental tendency that is characterized by a growing linguistic explicitness in embedding a given utterance in its discourse context. It is suggested that the observed delay is caused by the type of relation between the particle and its related constituent: in contrast to the accented auch the unaccented auch is anaphorically related to the sentence topic. It is proposed that the initial omission reflects a general tendency in early child language to drop topic material.

Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds

“…There are other studies reporting deficient competence with respect to givenness marking in children (e.g., De Cat, 2009; Schaeffer & Matthewson, 2005). 3 Using a method similar to Chen's (2010), Müller, Höhle, Schmitz, and Weissenborn (2009) provided evidence that German four- to five-year-olds marked focus with a high pitch independently of the grammatical role and the sentence position of the constituent, further supporting our interpretation that the production of focus competence is in place by this age. We conclude then that Chen's production findings are thus consistent with the possibility that children are in fact fully competent with prosodic focus marking.…”

Asymmetries in the acquisition of subject–verb agreement in Dutch: Evidence from comprehension and production

“…Comprehension–production asymmetries have also been found for other areas of language acquisition, such as the production and comprehension of the German particle auch ‘also’ (Höhle, Berger, Müller, Schmitz, & Weissenborn, 2009; Hüttner, Drenhaus, Van de Vijver, & Weissenborn, 2004; Müller, Höhle, Schmitz, & Weissenborn, 2009) and pronouns in English, Dutch, French and German (Hendriks & Spenader, 2006 for English; Weissenborn, Kail, & Friederici, 1990 for Dutch, French and German). This raises important issues about the origin of such asymmetries.…”

Finiteness in early but-clauses in German L1-acquisition

“…This comes to light by the fact that the additive particle auch emerges before the negation particle nicht in children's speech production, while emergence of finiteness with these particles shows the reversed order (Dimroth, 2009;Penner et al, 2000;Winkler, 2006Winkler, , 2009. Also, stressed auch is produced prior to unstressed auch (Müller, Höhle, Schmitz, & Weissenborn, 2009;Nederstigt, 2003) but realization of finiteness is less hampered with unstressed auch (Dimroth, 2009).…”