Table Of ContentFirst Language Acquisition of Morphology and Syntax
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Language Acquisition and Language Disorders
(LALD)
Volumes in this series provide a forum for research contributing to theories of
language acquisition (first and second, child and adult), language learnability,
language attrition and language disorders.
Editor
Harald Clahsen Lydia White
University of Essex McGill University
Editorial Board
Melissa F. Bowerman Luigi Rizzi
Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, University of Siena
Nijmegen
Bonnie D. Schwartz
Katherine Demuth University of Hawaii at Manoa
Brown University
Antonella Sorace
Wolfgang U. Dressler University of Edinburgh
Universität Wien
Karin Stromswold
Nina Hyams Rutgers University
University of California at Los Angeles
Jürgen Weissenborn
Jürgen M. Meisel Universität Potsdam
Universität Hamburg
Frank Wijnen
William O’Grady Utrecht University
University of Hawaii
Mabel Rice
University of Kansas
Volume 45
First Language Acquisition of Morphology and Syntax. Perspectives across
languages and learners
Edited by Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes, María Pilar Larrañaga and John Clibbens
First Language Acquisition of
Morphology and Syntax
Perspectives across languages and learners
Edited by
Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes
University of Plymouth
María Pilar Larrañaga
John Clibbens
University of Plymouth
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
First language acquisition of morphology and syntax : perspectives across languages and
learners / edited by Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes, María Pilar Larrañaga and John
Clibbens.
p. cm. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, issn 0925-0123 ; v. 45)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Language acquisition. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general--Morphology. 3.
Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax. I. Guijarro Fuentes, Pedro. II.
Larrañaga, María Pilar. III. Clibbens, John. IV. Title: 1st language acquisition of
morphology and syntax.
P118.F549 2008
401'.93--dc22 2008004824
isbn 978 90 272 5306 4 (Hb; alk. paper)
© 2008 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Introduction: First language, first language bilingualism and language
impairment competence 1
1. Left-dislocated subjects: A construction typical of young
French-speaking children? 13
Christophe Parisse
2. The development and interaction of Case and Number in early Russian 31
Galina Gordishevsky & Jeannette Schaeffer
3. Verb movement and subject placement in the acquisition of
word order: Pragmatics or structural economy? 61
Marit R. Westergaard
4. Three acquisition puzzles and the relation between input and output 87
Manuela Schönenberger
5. The acquisition of universal quantifiers in Spanish 119
Linda Escobar & Vicenç Torrens
6. Subject-object asymmetry in children’s comprehension of sentences
containing logical words 137
Sharon Armon-Lotem
7. On the “vulnerability” of the left periphery in French/German balanced
bilingual language acquisition 161
Matthias Bonnesen
8. The subjects of unaccusative verbs in bilingual Basque/Spanish children 183
Pilar Larrañaga
9. Dominance, mixing and cross-linguistic influence: On their
relation in bilingual development 209
Tanja Kupisch
10. A cross-linguistic analysis of binding in Down syndrome 235
Alexandra Perovic
First language acquisition of Morphology and Syntax
11. Balanced bilingual children with two weak languages: A
French/German case study 269
Natascha Müller & Antje Pillunat
Afterword 295
Neil Smith
Index of subjects 299
Introduction
First language, first language bilingualism and
language impairment competence
Language acquisition is a well established discipline in the linguistic field, with the begin-
nings of research in this area going back at least to Ronjat (1916). Research conducted
since Ronjat’s seminal work on bilingualism has led to a high degree of specialisa-
tion and to the birth of different schools. The three main schools, i.e., generative,
constructivist and functionalist, all collect empirical data, but often give diverging
interpretations to one and the same database. The field is divided into three main domains
according to type of participants studied: monolingual and bilingual (or multilin-
gual) acquisition and impaired language (SLI, Down syndrome and others). Not
surprisingly the first case studies were conducted on monolingual children speaking
European languages such as English, French or German. More exotic languages are
becoming increasingly popular subjects of study, however, and have a representa-
tion in this volume as well. It is in monolingual acquisition that the three theoretical
approaches are most at odds. Whilst the interpretation of data in the constructivist
approach relies very much on input, the generative approach bases its conclusions on
theoretical constructs, as can be seen in two of the chapters in the present volume:
Parisse and Müller & Pillunat, which focus on the topic of subject realization. Re-
searchers became interested in the question as to whether monolingual and bilingual
acquisition was qualitatively comparable in the nineteen-eighties. Much subsequent
research that has compared bilingual and monolingual language acquisition has been
able to show that both types of language acquisition are driven by the same principles.
Only relatively recently have scholars working on theoretical approaches to language
acquisition become interested in the field of language impairment. The general con-
sensus amongst researchers is that children with SLI or Down syndrome go through
the same stages as their monolingual or bilingual peers. If a difference is found, it is
largely quantitative; the language of children with impairment is primarily delayed.
This remains a debatable point, however, and some authors have claimed that the de-
velopment of, for example, children with Down syndrome differs in some respects
from that of typically developing children: particularly in the areas of morphology and
syntax (Fowler 1990). This is the background against which the research described
in this book is set. The book primarily seeks to address the generative approach to
language acquisition in the three main domains: monolingual, bilingual acquisition
and impaired language. As noted above, constructivists and generativists do not agree
on the interpretation of data. This volume includes one chapter that is written in the
Introduction
constructivist tradition in order to suggest that a dialogue between these two ap-
proaches is worth pursuing. Such a dialogue will contribute to our better understand-
ing of the fascinating world of language acquisition.
The main purpose of this volume is to present original research from two differ-
ent perspectives and to provide a basis for dialogue between researchers working in
these diverging theoretical frameworks. The volume includes state-of-the-art research
conducted mostly within the generative framework and reflects the diversity of meth-
odological approaches and research interests that can be found in contemporary re-
search work in the field. Many chapters in this volume address issues linked to the left
periphery in various languages; some chapters are devoted to syntactic or morphologi-
cal issues. We strongly believe that the result makes a contribution to our theoretical
understanding of morpho-syntax, as well as contributing to the developing body of
knowledge about language acquisition in different groups of learners.
1. Monolingual acquisition
The four following chapters are devoted to monolingual first language acquisition in
different languages (i.e., French, Norwegian, Spanish and Swiss German). The chapter
by Parisse studies subject dislocations by young French-speaking children in the con-
structivist tradition, more specifically in the usage-based theory of language acquisition
(UTB) by Tomasello (2000, 2003). In Parisse’s approach, French is a non pro-drop
language where the use of a cliticized subject personal pronoun is mandatory if there is
no lexical subject. In the presence of the subject in the form of a noun phrase or lexical
subject, the cliticized personal pronoun is compulsory. This is what is called disloca-
tion, which can be left or right dislocation. Hence, it is possible to move the dislocated
subject anywhere, in front of or after the verb, and to insert elements between subject
and verb. It is well known that the use of optional strong personal pronouns is often
found in oral language and to a lesser extent in written texts. This is very common
in children’s language and Parisse raises the following questions: (1) does children’s
production merely reflect the distributional patterns of oral adult language?; (2) does
children’s production reflect a specific developmental path in early French? In order to
test hypothesis (1), a corpus of conversation transcripts between a child and an adult
in a standardized situation was used by Parisse: the Bath Corpus. Parisse argues that
children’s use of subject dislocations does not fully reflect their input. A second corpus,
the House corpus, was used to test whether the use of subject dislocations follows a
developmental pattern (hypothesis 2). The performance changes according to increas-
ing age in that older children use more dislocated subjects. One possible explanation
offered by Parisse is that this development pattern is the result of a growing systematic
use of subject pronouns in front of a verb. In order to test this claim, the proportion of
verbs preceded by a pronoun was computed for both corpora. This proportion tends
to increase with age, and it correlates significantly with the use of constructions with
Introduction
pronouns in the children represented in both corpora. As opposed to this, there is no
similar significant correlation in the adults’ production. Parisse argues that the pro-
duction of optional pronouns is more likely to be a consequence of an automatic pro-
duction of pronouns in front of a verb and that the optional character of the pronoun
is learned at later age. He also claims that children build these constructions differently
from adults. His interpretation of the data differs substantially from the approach used
in the following chapters.
The remaining chapters in this section are written in the generative tradition.
In fact, the chapter by Gordishevski and Schaeffer reports the results of a longitudi-
nal study with naturalistic settings. In particular, they investigated structural (NOM,
ACC, GEN), inherent (DAT, INSTR), and lexical (ACC/DAT/GEN/INSTR/PREP
assigned by prepositions) Case in the spontaneous speech of three Russian children
raised monolingually. Inspired by Hoekstra & Hyams (1995), the researchers argue
that their finding can be explained assuming the underspecification of the Number
head. The results show that in the singular the children score very high, around 90%
correct uses on NOM, on structural ACC, and on structural GEN as well as singular
inherent DAT. Inherent INSTR was used only twice by two of the children. Similarly,
the singular lexical Cases in total are produced correctly in 90% of the required con-
texts. In contrast, plural nouns show much lower success rates: 0% for structural ACC
and for structural GEN but 14% for the lexical Cases. Plural inherent INSTR was used
a few times by two children. Errors are found in around 40% of the cases and consist of
substitution by NOM forms. The performance improves in all cases in the subsequent
stage. Close examination of the children’s plural forms suggests that plural is not pro-
ductive: (a) numbers of plural forms are extremely low; (b) most of the words used in
plural represent pair-wise (‘hands’) or plural (‘fingers’) body parts, types of footwear
and plural non-count nouns; (c) almost none of the plurals occur in their singular
forms in the same transcripts. On the basis of these observations, Gordishevski and
Schaeffer propose that the nominal Num head is initially underspecified, namely, it
represents [-plural] only (cf. Müller 1994). They assume that in order to check Case
features on N and D a “Case-chain” needs to be established. Following Hoekstra and
Hyams (1995), Gordishevski and Schaeffer propose that in case of a plural N, an un-
derspecified Num ([-plural]) breaks the Case-chain, because the N’s plural feature
cannot be checked. This blocks Case feature checking, yielding default NOM forms
in early Russian. When the noun is singular, underspecified Num does not break the
Case-chain as it is [-plural], thus yielding forms correctly marked for Case.
Chapter three by Westergaard argues for an analysis of verb-second (V2) word
order which involves a split CP as suggested by (Rizzi 1997) on acquisition data from a
dialect of Norwegian (Tromsø). Investigating three children, it is shown that, although
verb movement (i.e., verb-second (V2) word order in non-subject-initial) is generally
acquired early in declaratives, the children make certain errors in topicalisations and
questions with respect to the position of pronominal subjects in negated utterances.
More specifically, in the early files the children predominantly produce the Neg-S word
