Processing Differences Between Person and Number: A Theoretical Interpretation

Ackema, Peter; Neeleman, Ad

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00211

Cited by 13 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…The fact that the model using 2 nd person pronouns as the default showed no difference between 2 nd and 3 rd person intercepts or trajectories replicates the patterns found by Girouard et al (1997) regarding the primacy of 1 st person pronouns, and the similarity of 2 nd and 3 rd person pronouns, during development. The differences between 1 st person and 2 nd person trajectories are consistent with the predictions of Kerstens (1993) and Ackema and Neeleman (2019), supporting the relevance of the +/-speaker (or proximal/distal) feature for children's acquisition of pronouns. Moreover, the similarity of the 2 nd and 3 rd person pronoun developmental trajectories suggests that during acquisition, learning to refer to addressees and others is a similar task; we will return to this point when we consider the effects of RJA and the naming bias.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

“…Generative linguistic theorists have also provided proposals concerning pronoun acquisition; for example, Kerstens (1993; see also Ackema & Neeleman, 2019) has proposed that the features associated with the three pronoun persons are organized such that 1 st person includes (+utterance/+speaker (or proximal)), 3 rd person includes (-utterance/-speaker (or distal)), and 2 nd person features overlap with each of 1 st and 3 rd person (i.e., +utterance/speaker (distal)). In terms of acquisition, these proposals predict that 1 st person and 3 rd person pronouns would not pattern together developmentally, because they do not share features, while 2 nd person pronouns could pattern with 1 st person because of shared +utterance features, or with 3 rd person because of -speaker/distal features.…”

Section: Linguistic Factors In Pronoun Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Children with ASD use joint attention and linguistic skill in pronoun development

Kelty-Stephen

Fein

Naigles

2020

Language Acquisition

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Research on typical children's early lexical development has provided compelling evidence for the influence of both social-pragmatic and linguistic cues (Clark, 2015;Graham et al., 2015), and is beginning to create an integrative framework to explain how these various sources of knowledge converge and diverge in different contexts and across development to guide word learning (Graham et al., 2015;Hoff & Naigles, 2002;Hollich et al., 2000). Researchers of language learning in special populations have also recently called for investigations of the concurrent and predictive relations between linguistic and nonlinguistic development for these children (Abbeduto, McDuffie, Thurman, & Kover, 2016). We take up this task in the current study and extend the investigation of the combined roles of linguistic and social-pragmatic cues to the acquisition of personal pronouns in both typically developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).Personal pronouns pose a particularly challenging problem for young language learners. Unlike object nouns, the referents of personal pronouns change depending on the role of the speaker in a conversation, and more than one person can be referred to by the same pronoun even within the same conversation (e.g. multiple instances of her in a group of girls). An English-exposed child must learn to identify a pronoun's person (I vs. you), case (me vs. my), and number (me vs. us) to correctly use the pronoun system (Charney, 1980;Chiat,

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Section: Linguistic Factors In Pronoun Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children with ASD use joint attention and linguistic skill in pronoun development

Kelty-Stephen

Fein

Naigles

2020

Language Acquisition

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“…Lyons (1999) goes further and proposes that Person and Definiteness can be unified under the same category, namely Person‐Definiteness . When it comes to nouns, Person reduces to 3rd person (see Baker 2003; Ackema & Neeleman 2019a, 2019b) on number features in R‐expressions) and the rest is achieved by number and/or gender and case. If number and gender and definiteness can be correlated, this means that just as Kartvelian genitives can agree for number, gender, and case, so genitives in other languages can agree for definiteness.…”

Section: Why D? D Definiteness and Definiteness Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Romance Genitives: Agreement, Definiteness, and Phases*

Massaro

2022

Trans of the Philol Soc

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In this paper, which discusses data from Gargano Apulian Italo-Romance, I propose that prepositional and non-prepositional genitives are fundamentally two different types of phrases, and that the interpretation of a non-prepositional noun as the possessor is not due to a silent preposition or headmodifier inversion, but rather to an agreement mechanism taking place between the modifier and its head. We propose that, just as a genitive can agree with its head for gender and number features so it can for definiteness, and that agreement for definiteness yields a genitival interpretation of the nonprepositional noun. I.e., definiteness can externalize the syntactic relation between head and modifier.We also propose that in this Apulian variety, non-prepositional genitives are syntactic phases (Chomsky 2001), and that the same holds for non-prepositional 'qualitative' predicative phrases in the same language. This would explain the impossibility of accessing the phrase through syntactic operations such as extraction.

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“…Concerning the latter, different responses to agreement violations in person as opposed to number are generally taken to suggest the separate encoding of the two (see e.g. Carminati 2005;Mancini et al 2011;Mancini et al 2014;Ackema & Neeleman 2019).…”

Section: Number Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…by Boas 1911: 35;Benveniste 1966: 232 (Panagiotidis 2002: 24) The dissociation between person and number seems to be further confirmed by neurolinguistic research, which uncovered different responses to agreement violations in person as opposed to number, and different repair strategies therefor. Specifically, person violations have been shown to be detected faster than number ones, to be processed in different areas of the brain, and to be more costly to repair (Carminati 2005;Mancini et al 2011;Mancini et al 2014;Ackema & Neeleman 2019;and references therein). This is generally taken to support the person and number dissociation hypothesis.…”

Section: D21 Number Is Higher Than Personmentioning

confidence: 99%

Missing Person

Terenghi¹

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Languages encode deictic information in their demonstrative systems, but exactly which information is encoded is a matter of variation. The present dissertation explores this variation, with special attention to Romance demonstrative systems, and does so from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. Synchronically, the focus is on how the attested cross-linguistic differences can be formalised in featural and, more broadly, syntactic terms. This line of investigation results in the proposal of a novel internal structure for demonstrative elements that ties together a lower person-based component and a higher spatial-based one, overcoming the classic dichotomy between the two and affording the system a larger empirical coverage. Diachronically, the focus is on how the inventory of contrastive demonstrative forms changes in the different (micro-)diachronic stages of a given language, and more concretely on how it shrinks and why. Interestingly, this change only involves demonstrative forms, but not other deictic categories (personal pronouns, possessive forms, etc.). Based on novel generalisations concerning the patterns of change attested across Romance demonstratives and on the conclusions drawn from the synchronic investigations, this work proposes that larger demonstrative systems are unstable because of their featural complexity. The latter hinges on a bias towards monotonic derivations, which triggers feature loss and results in a smaller inventory of demonstrative forms. Additionally, a structural condition on feature loss is identified (as formalised in the Last in–First out principle), which accounts for the concrete patterns of reduction and for the asymmetry between demonstrative systems (unstable) and other indexical systems (stable).

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Processing Differences Between Person and Number: A Theoretical Interpretation

Cited by 13 publications

References 48 publications

Children with ASD use joint attention and linguistic skill in pronoun development

Children with ASD use joint attention and linguistic skill in pronoun development

Romance Genitives: Agreement, Definiteness, and Phases*

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