The acquisition of control in European Portuguese

Agostinho, Celina; Santos, Ana Lúcia; Duarte, Inés

doi:10.1075/ihll.17.09ago

Cited by 9 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“… [[ ec Rowing the boat clumsily] made Luna seasick]. Specifically, 72% of responses from a total of eighty-four trials (14 TD children each undertaking six trials) were internal-referent responses. A very similar result was found by Agostinho, Santos, and Duarte (forthcoming). Employing an elicited reference judgement task, they tested sixty-four children aged three to five years on obligatory and non-obligatory control contexts in Portuguese.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Who is the agent? The influence of pragmatic leads on children's reference assignment in non-obligatory control

Janke

2017

J. Child Lang.

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Non-obligatory control constructions (NOC) are sentences which contain a non-finite clause with a null subject whose reference is determined pragmatically. Little is known about how children assign reference to these subjects, yet this is important as our current understanding of reference-resolution development is limited to less complex sentences with overt elements, such as pronouns. This study explores how seventy-six children (aged six to eleven) consult pragmatic leads when assigning reference in two examples of NOC. Children undertook three picture-selection tasks, containing no lead, a weak lead, and a strong lead, and their reference choices in the critical sentences were monitored. The novel results pinpoint children's baseline interpretations of the ambiguous sentences and expose an age trend in the degree to which they consult strong pragmatic leads when resolving reference. These trends illustrate how reference assignment in more complex discourse-governed contexts progresses, thereby contributing an important dimension to the pragmatics acquisition literature.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Who is the agent? The influence of pragmatic leads on children's reference assignment in non-obligatory control

Janke

2017

J. Child Lang.

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“…In addition, acquisition studies reveal a robust asymmetry, parallel to that of relative clauses, with SC mastered later in development than OC (e.g., Chomsky, 1969;Mateu Martin, 2016;Agostinho et al, 2018), which could justify the hypothesis that the same complexity constraints are operative in SC and OR. This comparison was directly explored by Martins et al (2018), who compared the performance of typically developing children between 3 and 11 years of age, as well as two groups of atypically developing children between 8 and 11 years [children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI) and with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)] in two comprehension tasks testing subject and object relatives and subject and object control.…”

Section: Grammar and Processing Of Obligatory Control Structuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Intervention Effects in Sentence Processing: Object Relatives vs. Subject Control

2021

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Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. Under Grillo’s (2009) Generalized Minimality framework, complexity effects of object relatives are construed as intervention effects, which result from an interaction between locality constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality) and the sentence processing system. Specifically, intervention of the subject DP in the movement dependency is expected to generate a minimality violation whenever processing limitations render the moved object underspecified, resulting in compromised comprehension. In the present study, assuming Generalized Minimality, we compared the processing of object relatives with the processing of subject control in ditransitives, which, like object relatives, instantiates a syntactic dependency across an intervening DP. This comparison is justified by the current debate on whether Control should be analyzed as movement: if control involves movement of the controller DP, as proposed by Hornstein (1999), a parallel between the processing of object relatives and subject control in ditransitives may be anticipated on the basis of intervention. In addition, we explored whether general cognitive factors contribute to complexity effects ascribed to movement across a DP. Sixty-nine adult speakers of European Portuguese read sentences and answered comprehension probes in a self-paced reading task with moving-window display, comprising four experimental conditions: Subject Relatives; Object Relatives; Subject Control; Object Control. Furthermore, participants performed four supplementary tasks, serving as measures of resistance to interference, lexical knowledge, working memory capacity and lexical access ability. The results from the reading task showed that whereas object relatives were harder to process than subject relatives, subject control was not harder to process than object control, arguing against recent movement accounts of control. Furthermore, we found that whereas object relative complexity effects assessed by response times to comprehension probes interacted with Reading Span, object relative complexity effects assessed by comprehension accuracy and reading times did not interact with any of the supplementary tasks. We discuss these results in light of Generalized Minimality and the hypothesis of modularity in syntactic processing (Caplan and Waters, 1999).

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“…Não existem, até ao presente, estudos sobre a aquisição do infinitivo flexionado controlado em PE L2. Relativamente a L1, sabemos que, de modo geral, as construções de controlo (de sujeito e de objeto) são adquiridas cedo, embora as crianças apresentem atrasos na interpretação de verbos de controlo de sujeito com um argumento interno OI como prometer (Agostinho, 2014). Dados de produção induzida (Santos, Gonçalves & Hyams, 2016) mostram que, por volta dos 5 anos, as crianças produzem InfFlex com verbos de controlo de objeto como ensinar a; nesta idade, as crianças também produzem InfFlex com verbos de controlo de sujeito como querer e conseguir, com sujeito realizado não-controlado.…”

Section: Dados De Aquisiçãounclassified

“…No que toca a aquisição, vimos que, embora as propriedades morfossintáticas do InfFlex não sejam, em geral, problemáticas, alguns aspetos da sua interpretação desenvolvem-se tardiamente quer em L1 (Pires, Rothman & Santos, 2011) quer em L2 (Madeira, 2018). Da escassa investigação realizada até ao presente sobre a aquisição de construções de controlo e, em particular, do InfFlex em contextos de controlo de sujeito, sabemos que as crianças adquirem cedo as propriedades dos verbos de controlo de sujeito em PE L1 (com exceção de prometer; Agostinho, 2014); contudo, tanto a distribuição do InfFlex com estes verbos como as restrições à sua ocorrência são adquiridas mais tarde. Este é um fenómeno que não foi ainda estudado no PE L2.…”

Section: Questões De Investigaçãounclassified

“…Sabemos que, na aquisição de PE L1, o controlo de sujeito é adquirido cedo, embora as crianças apresentem atrasos com verbos com um argumento interno objeto indireto (OI) como prometer (Agostinho, 2014). No que diz respeito a InfFlex, embora as suas propriedades morfossintáticas não sejam, em geral, problemáticas, alguns aspetos da sua interpretação desenvolvem-se tardiamente quer na aquisição de L1 (Pires, Rothman & Santos, 2011) quer na de L2 (Madeira, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

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Controlo e infinitivos flexionados em português L2

Fiéis

Madeira

2020

RAPL

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It is known that knowledge of the interpretative properties of the standard inflected infinitive develops late both in L1 and L2 acquisition, and that subject control with most verbs is acquired early in L1. In this study we focus on a context which has not been addressed so far, and investigate how the interpretation of the null subjects of inflected infinitival complements of subject control verbs develops in the interlanguage of Englishand Spanish-speaking learners of L2 European Portuguese. We applied a selection task to intermediate and advanced learners in order to understand whether they differentiate between inflected and uninflected infinitives in these contexts and whether they assign control properties to the inflected infinitive. Our findings show that, although learners accept the occurrence of inflected infinitives with subject control verbs and assign a controlled reading to the infinitival null subject, knowledge of some of the properties of these constructions is delayed, namely, which verbs allow inflected infinitives and what are the interpretative properties of inflected infinitival subjects under different control verbs.

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The acquisition of control in European Portuguese

Cited by 9 publications

References 28 publications

Who is the agent? The influence of pragmatic leads on children's reference assignment in non-obligatory control

Who is the agent? The influence of pragmatic leads on children's reference assignment in non-obligatory control

Assessing Intervention Effects in Sentence Processing: Object Relatives vs. Subject Control

Controlo e infinitivos flexionados em português L2

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