The acquisition of transitivity alternations in Greek: Does frequency count?

Fotiadou, Georgia; Tsimpli, Ianthi Maria

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2010.06.011

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 18 publications

(26 reference statements)

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“…However, low performance on passives has also been attributed to low occurrence of passives in the input children receive, especially in a language such as Greek, which employs alternative strategies, such as Clitic Left Dislocation or Clitic Doubling, to give prominence to the element that is the subject of a passive sentence. The position of Tsimpli (2006) and Fotiadou & Tsimpli (2010) on a possible late mastery of Greek passives is along these lines. 13…”

Section: Passive Verbs (With Passive Interpretation)mentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Firstly, because they constitute an additional manner of expressing reflexivity in Greek besides reflexive pronouns; hence, they provide an additional domain with which to compare our findings from reflexive pronouns, the area that was found problematic among English-speaking populations with ASD. Secondly, because reflexive verbs share the same morphology with passives, and the latter have been argued to develop late in Greek, and crosslinguistically (Borer & Wexler 1987, Wexler 2004, although not without some debate (Demuth 1989, see also Tsimpli 2006;Fotiadou & Tsimpli 2010). Finally, to our knowledge, there are no studies on the acquisition of nonactive morphology by non-TD Greek-speaking children.…”

Section: Nonactive Verbal Morphologymentioning

confidence: 97%

“…About half of them did not provide an answer on this particular condition (but the ones who did, provided the target answer). Second, in a survey of child-directed speech from the Stephany corpus, Fotiadou & Tsimpli (2010) found that the great majority of verbs with nonactive morphology were indeed reflexives (183/244), with the remaining 61 being passives and reciprocals. What is most crucial is that reflexive verbs were only used with a reflexive interpretation in the corpus, i.e., they were never used as passives.…”

Section: Reflexive Verbs With Passive Interpretation: Why Frequency Imentioning

confidence: 99%

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Grammatical Abilities of Greek-Speaking Children with Autism

Terzi

Marinis

Kotsopoulou

et al. 2014

Language Acquisition

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This study investigates pronoun reference and verbs with nonactive morphology in high-functioning Greek-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). It is motivated by problems with reflexive pronouns demonstrated by English-speaking children with ASD and the fact that reflexivity is also expressed via nonactive (reflexive) verbs in Greek. Twenty 5-to 8-year-old children with ASD and 20 vocabulary-matched typically developing controls of the same age range completed a sentence-picture matching, an elicitation, and a judgment task. Children with ASD did not differ from controls in interpreting reflexive and strong pronouns but were less accurate in the comprehension of clitics and omitted clitics in their production. The findings render clitics a vulnerable domain for autism in Greek, and potentially for other languages with clitics, and suggest that this could be a consequence of difficulties in the syntax-pragmatics or the syntax-phonology interface. The two groups did not differ in the comprehension of nonactive morphology but were less accurate in passive than reflexive verbs. We argue that this is likely to stem from the linguistic representation associated with each type of verb, rather than their input frequency.

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Section: Passive Verbs (With Passive Interpretation)mentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Nonactive Verbal Morphologymentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Reflexive Verbs With Passive Interpretation: Why Frequency Imentioning

confidence: 99%

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Grammatical Abilities of Greek-Speaking Children with Autism

Terzi

Marinis

Kotsopoulou

et al. 2014

Language Acquisition

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“…A further possibility of these differences is that English verbs might be connected to an additional combinatorial node specifying two verb-internal constituents for passive constructions (the verb to be and the past participle of the main verb); Greek verb lemmas would not include this additional syntactic specification, since the passive voice is realised through morphological marking on the Greek verb. Another factor that might affect priming of transitive structures is that the Greek passive is less preferred and more restricted in use than the active (Fotiadou & Tsimpli, 2010). It has been observed that less preferred structures exhibit a greater priming effect than more preferred structures both in within-language (e.g., Bock, 1986) and between-language priming studies (e.g., Bernolet et al, 2007).…”

Section: Transitive Structures In Greek and Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another factor that might affect priming of transitive structures is that the Greek passive is less preferred and more restricted in use than the active (Fotiadou & Tsimpli, 2010). It has been observed that less preferred structures exhibit a greater priming effect than more preferred structures both in within-language (e.g., Bock, 1986) and between-language priming studies (e.g., Bernolet et al, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How similar are shared syntactic representations? Evidence from priming of passives in Greek–English bilinguals

Kotzochampou

Chondrogianni

2022

Bilingualism

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The shared-syntax account of bilingual syntactic representations suggests that similar structures from different languages are represented as one in the bilingual mind. In this study, we examined the degree of morpho-syntactic similarity needed for representations to be shared in the bilingual mind by comparing passive structures in Greek and English. Contrary to English, non-active morphology in Greek is not restricted to passives and the “by phrase” is considered marked. In two structural priming experiments, we examined whether passives can be primed in L1-Greek and, subsequently, whether there is a single representation for passives in Greek–English bilinguals despite distributional and morpho-syntactic differences. Results showed that passive structures were primed in L1-Greek (Experiment 1) and from L1-Greek to L2-English (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that morpho-syntactic and distributional differences inherent to passives do not prevent priming, and that structural representations can be shared even when featural structure is not identical.

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Early, late or very late?

Tsimpli¹

2014

LAB

130

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Research on child bilingualism accounts for differences in the course and the outcomes of monolingual and different types of bilingual language acquisition primarily from two perspectives: age of onset of exposure to the language(s) and the role of the input (Genesee, Paradis, & Crago, 2004; Meisel, 2009; Unsworth et al., 2014). Some findings suggest that early successive bilingual children may pattern similarly to simultaneous bilingual children, passing through different trajectories from child L2 learners due to a later age of onset in the latter group. Studies on bilingual development have also shown that input quantity in bilingual acquisition is considerably reduced, i.e., in each of their two languages, bilingual children are likely exposed to much less input than their monolingual peers (Paradis & Genesee, 1996; Unsworth, 2013b). At the same time, simultaneous bilingual children develop and attain competence in the two languages, sometimes without even an attested age delay compared to monolingual children (Paradis, Genesee & Crago, 2011). The implication is that even half of the input suffices for early language development, at least with respect to ‘core’ aspects of language, in whatever way ‘core’ is defined.My aim in this article is to consider how an additional, linguistic variable interacts with age of onset and input in bilingual development, namely, the timing in L1 development of the phenomena examined in bilingual children’s performance. Specifically, I will consider timing differences attested in the monolingual development of features and structures, distinguishing between early, late or ‘very late’ acquired phenomena. I will then argue that this three-way distinction reflects differences in the role of narrow syntax: early phenomena are core, parametric and narrowly syntactic, in contrast to late and very late phenomena, which involve syntax-external or even language-external resources too. I explore the consequences of these timing differences in monolingual development for bilingual development. I will review some findings from early (V2 in Germanic, grammatical gender in Greek), late (passives) and very late (grammatical gender in Dutch) phenomena in the bilingual literature and argue that early phenomena can differentiate between simultaneous and (early) successive bilingualism with an advantage for the former group, while the other two reveal similarly (high or low) performance across bilingual groups, differentiating them from monolinguals. The paper proposes that questions about the role of age of onset and language input in early bilingual development can only be meaningfully addressed when the properties and timing of the phenomena under investigation are taken into account.

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The acquisition of transitivity alternations in Greek: Does frequency count?

Cited by 9 publications

References 18 publications

Grammatical Abilities of Greek-Speaking Children with Autism

Grammatical Abilities of Greek-Speaking Children with Autism

How similar are shared syntactic representations? Evidence from priming of passives in Greek–English bilinguals

Early, late or very late?

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