OLA3 word order

OLA3 Early acquisition of word order properties

Responsible: Judit Gervain & Carla Soares-Jesel;

Members: Judit Gervain, Thierry Nazzi, Nawal Abboub, Carline Bernard & Carla Soares-Jesel

Description

The acquisition of basic word order phenomena is a major milestone in language development. However, few studies have investigated how the foundations of this knowledge are established in the youngest infant populations. The aim of this work package is to elucidate how the most important aspects of word order develop during early language acquisition. Specifically, the project investigates (i) the basic word order of declarative sentences (i.e. the relative order of the V(erb) and the O(bject)) and (ii) the order of wh-words and Vs in questions, during the first two years of life. As both of these grammatical properties show systematic variation across the world’s languages, a cross-linguistic perspective is taken, exploring the developmental trajectory and the mechanisms underlying these early acquisitions across typologically diverse languages.

The acquisition of basic word order is investigated comparing French- and Japanese-learning 8-month-olds’ behavioral (perceptual) and electrophysiological responses to the basic word order characterizing their native language (VO for French and OV for Japanese) and their discrimination of this order from the opposite, ‘ungrammatical’ order. We test the frequency-based bootstrapping hypothesis (Gervain et al. 2008), according to which the sentential position of frequent function words (phrase-initial in French: sur la table ‘on the table’; phrase-final in Japanese: Tokyo kara ‘Tokyo from’), which correlates with basic word order, cues infants about this fundamental aspect of their native grammar very early on, before a substantial lexicon is acquired.

Once basic word order in declarative sentences is established, infants can build on this knowledge to acquire non-neutral sentences, among which the most important ones are questions. French matrix wh-questions use one of three different structures: (i) questions presenting a moved wh-word in a fronting position and no inversion (Où tu vas?), (ii) questions presenting a fronted wh-word and subject-auxiliary/verb inversion (Où vas-tu?), (iii) in situ questions that show the wh-word and the verb in their canonical position (Tu vas où?). By contrast, matrix German wh-questions necessarily present a moved wh-element in a fronted position and a VS order (Wohin gehst du?). We test the derivational complexity hypothesis (Jakubowicz 2004, 2005) according to which infants master less complex structures first. A crucial assumption is that movement is a costly operation and a complexity metric in terms of derivational steps can predict the acquisition order of matrix and long distance wh-questions. We are conducting a behavioral perception study testing 20-22-month-old French and German monolinguals’ sensitivity to verb movement and wh-fronting and their ability to discriminate grammatical and ungrammatical questions. The studies on clefts seek to test the same hypothesis, determining the constraints underlying the development of clefts. To this effect, we are running elicited production as well as comprehension (image selection) tasks with French and Portuguese children aged 3-6 years.

Publications

(1) Bernard, C. & Gervain, J. 2012. “7-month-old Infants Expect Converging Cues to Word Order: The Joint Use of Word Frequency and Phrasal Prosody”. Frontiers in Psychology 3:451.

(2) Lobo, M., Santos, A. L. & Soares-Jesel, C. (submitted). Syntactic structure and information structure: the acquisition of Portuguese clefts and be-fragments.

Other Productions

(1) Gervain, J. 2012. “Frequency & Prosody Boorstrap Word Order”. Biolinguistics Workshop, 1-3 October 2012, Barcelona, Spain.

(2) Gervain, J. 2012. “Frequency & Prosody Boorstrap Word Order”. In Search of New Ways to Understand Language Variation, Change and Acquisition Workshop. June 25-26, 2012, San Sebastian, Spain.

(3) Abboub, N., Nazzi, T., Gervain, J. 2013. “Perception of Rhythmic Grouping: an Optical Imaging Study”. Poster presented at SRCD 2013, 18-20 April 2013, Seattle, USA.

Bernard, C. & Gervain, J. 2013. “Prosodic Bootstrapping of Word Order in 8-Month-Old French Infants: What Level of Representation?”. Poster presented at SRCD 2013, 18-20 April 2013, Seattle, USA.

(4) Bernard, C. & Gervain, J. 2012. “8-month-old French Infants’ Acquisition of the Word Order of their Native Language.” Talk presented at 37^th BUCLD, 2-4 November 2012, Boston, USA.

(5) Abboub, N., Nazzi, T., Gervain, J. 2012. “Perception of rhythmic grouping: An optical imaging study”. Poster presented at the Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy Conference, 26-28 October 2012, London, UK.

(6) Abboub, N., Nazzi, T., Gervain, J. 2012. “Perception of rhythmic grouping: An optical imaging study”. Poster presented at the Cognitive Modules and Interfaces Workshop, 18-19 September 2012, Trieste, Italy.

(7) Bernard, C. & Gervain, J. 2012. “8-Month-old French Infants’ Acquisition of the Word Order of Their Native Language”. Poster presented at the Cognitive Modules and Interfaces Workshop, 18-19 September 2012, Trieste, Italy.

(8) Bernard, C. & Gervain, J. 2012. “8-month-old French Infants’ Acquisition of the Word Order of their Native Language.” Talk presented at 18^th ICIS, Jun 7-9, 2012, Minneapolis, USA.

(9) Lobo, M., Santos, A. L. & Soares-Jesel, C. (2012). Some remarks on the acquisition of clefts: spontaneous and elicited production. Talk presented at the Romance Turn V, 2-4 July 2012, Lisbon, Portugal.

(10) Santos, A. L., Lobo, M. & Soares-Jesel, C. (2012). Spontaneous and elicited production of European Portuguese clefts. Talk presented at 37^th BUCLD, 2-4 November 2012, Boston, USA.

(11) Lobo, M., Santos, A. L. & Soares-Jesel, C. (2012). European Portuguese Clefts: evidence from acquisition data and adult production. Talk presented at Going Romance, 6-8 December 2012, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.