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The comprehension of 3rd person singular -s by NYC English-speaking preschoolers

  • Isabelle Barrière , Sarah Kresh , Katsiaryna Aharodnik , Géraldine Legendre and Thierry Nazzi
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Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research
This chapter is in the book Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research

Abstract

Monolingual English 4-year-olds were administered a Subject-Verb agreement comprehension task that included stimuli such as the boysspinø versus the boyøspins(…/freely/in the hall). They were categorized as users of Mainstream American English (MAE) (N = 8), Some Variation (N = 9) and Strong Variation (N = 9) based on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (Seymour et al., 2005). Only MAE users performed significantly above chance across conditions (final versus medial with adverb versus medial with prepositional phrase) while comprehension in learners of other varieties was sensitive to syntactic context. Corpus analyses revealed that input frequency cannot explain our comprehension results and confirmed the plausibility of the hypothesis that 3rd person -s competes with other structures to express generic tense in non-mainstream varieties of English.

Abstract

Monolingual English 4-year-olds were administered a Subject-Verb agreement comprehension task that included stimuli such as the boysspinø versus the boyøspins(…/freely/in the hall). They were categorized as users of Mainstream American English (MAE) (N = 8), Some Variation (N = 9) and Strong Variation (N = 9) based on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (Seymour et al., 2005). Only MAE users performed significantly above chance across conditions (final versus medial with adverb versus medial with prepositional phrase) while comprehension in learners of other varieties was sensitive to syntactic context. Corpus analyses revealed that input frequency cannot explain our comprehension results and confirmed the plausibility of the hypothesis that 3rd person -s competes with other structures to express generic tense in non-mainstream varieties of English.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Three streams of generative language acquisition research 1
  4. Part I. Variation in input
  5. The comprehension of 3rd person singular -s by NYC English-speaking preschoolers 7
  6. Children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation 35
  7. Variability within varieties of English 59
  8. Part II. First language acquisition
  9. Parsing, pragmatics, and representation 85
  10. The interpretation of disjunction in VP ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese 107
  11. When OR is conjunctive in child Mandarin 125
  12. The acquisition of V-V compounds in Japanese 143
  13. Differentiating universal quantification from completive aspect in child Cantonese 159
  14. On the learnability of implicit arguments 185
  15. Red train, big train, broken train 203
  16. Part III. Second language acquisition
  17. The acquisition of Mandarin reflexives by heritage speakers and second language learners 225
  18. Interpretation of count and mass NPs by L2-learners from generalized classifier L1s 253
  19. Acquisition of word order in L2 Spanish 271
  20. Argument omission in SignL2 acquisition by deaf learners 297
  21. The Bottleneck Hypothesis updated 319
  22. Author index 347
  23. Subject index 355
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.02bar

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Three streams of generative language acquisition research 1
  4. Part I. Variation in input
  5. The comprehension of 3rd person singular -s by NYC English-speaking preschoolers 7
  6. Children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation 35
  7. Variability within varieties of English 59
  8. Part II. First language acquisition
  9. Parsing, pragmatics, and representation 85
  10. The interpretation of disjunction in VP ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese 107
  11. When OR is conjunctive in child Mandarin 125
  12. The acquisition of V-V compounds in Japanese 143
  13. Differentiating universal quantification from completive aspect in child Cantonese 159
  14. On the learnability of implicit arguments 185
  15. Red train, big train, broken train 203
  16. Part III. Second language acquisition
  17. The acquisition of Mandarin reflexives by heritage speakers and second language learners 225
  18. Interpretation of count and mass NPs by L2-learners from generalized classifier L1s 253
  19. Acquisition of word order in L2 Spanish 271
  20. Argument omission in SignL2 acquisition by deaf learners 297
  21. The Bottleneck Hypothesis updated 319
  22. Author index 347
  23. Subject index 355
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