OLA4 Agreement

OLA4. Early evidence of French-learning infants’ sensitivity to subject-verb agreement

Responsible: Thierry Nazzi

Members: Angelica Buerkin-Selgado

Other Members: Geraldine Legendre (Johns Hopkins U.), Isabelle Barrière (Brooklyn College), Jennifer Culbertson (George Mason U.), Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez (Oxford Brookes U.)

Description

One of the most important debate in the domain of (morpho)syntactic acquisition concerns the nature of linguistic representations in infants aged 1 to 2 years, and bears on the issue of whether early acquisition proceeds via item-based schema or abstract representations. In particular, constructivist and generativist theories differ in the type of knowledge they attribute to young infants, including lexical sub-categories or inflexional morphology, as explored here.

According to constructivist theories, syntactic knowledge is acquired according to a lexical or item-based mode (Lieven et al., 1997; Theakston & Lieven, 2005; Tomasello, 2000). For inflexional morphology (morphemes expressing syntactic categories such as number, tense …), this knowledge should be linked to specific (that is, familiar) lexical items, and we should observe important effects of the frequency of the forms in the input on infants’ knowledge. By contrast, generativist theories (e.g., Legendre et al., 2002) hypothesize that infants have abstract syntactic categories that are not linked to specific items. Familiarity and frequency of specific lexical items should not have a marked impact on speed and ease of the acquisition of morphosyntax. In the past, these theories have essentially relied on early spontaneous production data. In our project, we use the headturn Preference Procedure (HPP), and the Intermodal Preferential Looking Procedure (IPLP) to explore early sensitivity to and comprehension by French-learning infants of various morphophonological marks that are subtle and rare in the input, such as those marking subject-verb number (singular versus plural) agreement.

Publications

- Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hsin, L., Culbertson, J., Barrière, I., Nazzi, T., & Legendre, G. (in press). Revealing Early Comprehension of Subject-Verb Agreement in Spanish. In Proceedings of the 38^th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. xx-xx), Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Conference Presentations

- Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hsin, L., Culbertson, J., Barriere, I., Nazzi, T. & Legendre, G. (2013). Revealing early comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Spanish. Poster presented at The 38th Annual Boston University Conference On Language Development, 1-3 Novembre 2013, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

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