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Chapter 10. On-line grammaticality judgments

A comparative study of French and Portuguese
  • Michèle Kail , Armanda Costa and Isabel Hub Faria
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Language Acquisition across Linguistic and Cognitive Systems
This chapter is in the book Language Acquisition across Linguistic and Cognitive Systems

Abstract

Online sentence processing in children is still an emerging field. This crosslinguistic study examined the on-line sentence processing in a grammaticality judgment experiment. In each language (French, Portuguese) three age groups of children (6–7 year-olds, 8–9 year-olds and 10–11 year-olds) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation position (early vs. late in the sentence), the violation span (intraphrasal vs. interphrasal), and the violation type (agreement vs. word-order). The main developmental results were as follows. Not surprisingly, children of both languages were always slower than adults at detecting grammatical violations. No matter how old they were or which language they spoke, subjects were faster at judging sentences with violations that occurred later and the effect was especially strong in the younger groups. As predicted, intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones in French, but Portuguese subjects presented the opposite pattern. This paradoxical result seems linked to the low perceptibility of phonological violations in oral sentence processing. Finally, agreement violations were more rapidly detected than word-order ones at every age in French, whereas, such differences did not reach significance in Portuguese. Crosslinguistic comparisons between these two romance languages are discussed in the light of cue validity and cue cost interactions during online sentence processing.

Abstract

Online sentence processing in children is still an emerging field. This crosslinguistic study examined the on-line sentence processing in a grammaticality judgment experiment. In each language (French, Portuguese) three age groups of children (6–7 year-olds, 8–9 year-olds and 10–11 year-olds) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation position (early vs. late in the sentence), the violation span (intraphrasal vs. interphrasal), and the violation type (agreement vs. word-order). The main developmental results were as follows. Not surprisingly, children of both languages were always slower than adults at detecting grammatical violations. No matter how old they were or which language they spoke, subjects were faster at judging sentences with violations that occurred later and the effect was especially strong in the younger groups. As predicted, intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones in French, but Portuguese subjects presented the opposite pattern. This paradoxical result seems linked to the low perceptibility of phonological violations in oral sentence processing. Finally, agreement violations were more rapidly detected than word-order ones at every age in French, whereas, such differences did not reach significance in Portuguese. Crosslinguistic comparisons between these two romance languages are discussed in the light of cue validity and cue cost interactions during online sentence processing.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction. New perspectives in the study of first and second language acquisition 1
  4. Part I. Emergence and dynamics of language acquisition and disorders
  5. Chapter 1. A tale of two paradigms 17
  6. Chapter 2. Dynamic systems methods in the study of language acquisition 33
  7. Chapter 3. Early bootstrapping of syntactic acquisition 53
  8. Chapter 4. Language acquisition in developmental disorders 67
  9. Part II. First language acquisition
  10. Chapter 5. Language development in a cross-linguistic context 91
  11. Chapter 6. A typological approach to first language acquisition 109
  12. Chapter 7. Linguistic relativity in first language acquisition 125
  13. Chapter 8. On the importance of goals in child language 147
  14. Chapter 9. Promoting patients in narrative discourse 161
  15. Chapter 10. On-line grammaticality judgments 179
  16. Chapter 11. The expression of finiteness by L1 and L2 learners of Dutch, French, and German 205
  17. Part III. Bilingualism and second language acquisition
  18. Chapter 12. Age of onset in successive acquisition of bilingualism 225
  19. Chapter 13. The development of person-number verbal morphology in different types of learners 249
  20. Chapter 14. Re-thinking the bilingual interactive-activation model from a developmental perspective (BIA-d) 267
  21. Chapter 15. Foreign language vocabulary learning 285
  22. Chapter 16. Cerebral imaging and individual differences in language learning 299
  23. Chapter 17. The cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition and bilingualism 307
  24. Index of languages 323
  25. Index of subjects 325
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.52.13kai

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction. New perspectives in the study of first and second language acquisition 1
  4. Part I. Emergence and dynamics of language acquisition and disorders
  5. Chapter 1. A tale of two paradigms 17
  6. Chapter 2. Dynamic systems methods in the study of language acquisition 33
  7. Chapter 3. Early bootstrapping of syntactic acquisition 53
  8. Chapter 4. Language acquisition in developmental disorders 67
  9. Part II. First language acquisition
  10. Chapter 5. Language development in a cross-linguistic context 91
  11. Chapter 6. A typological approach to first language acquisition 109
  12. Chapter 7. Linguistic relativity in first language acquisition 125
  13. Chapter 8. On the importance of goals in child language 147
  14. Chapter 9. Promoting patients in narrative discourse 161
  15. Chapter 10. On-line grammaticality judgments 179
  16. Chapter 11. The expression of finiteness by L1 and L2 learners of Dutch, French, and German 205
  17. Part III. Bilingualism and second language acquisition
  18. Chapter 12. Age of onset in successive acquisition of bilingualism 225
  19. Chapter 13. The development of person-number verbal morphology in different types of learners 249
  20. Chapter 14. Re-thinking the bilingual interactive-activation model from a developmental perspective (BIA-d) 267
  21. Chapter 15. Foreign language vocabulary learning 285
  22. Chapter 16. Cerebral imaging and individual differences in language learning 299
  23. Chapter 17. The cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition and bilingualism 307
  24. Index of languages 323
  25. Index of subjects 325
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