Revisiting Subject-Object Asymmetry in the Production of Cantonese Relative Clauses: Evidence From Elicited Production in 3-Year-Olds.

Angel Chan,Stephen Matthews,Annie Lam,Evan Kidd,Franklin Chang,Nicole Tse

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.679008

Abstract

Emergentist approaches to language acquisition identify a core role for language-specific experience and give primacy to other factors like function and domain-general learning mechanisms in syntactic development. This directly contrasts with a nativist structurally oriented approach, which predicts that grammatical development is guided by Universal Grammar and that structural factors constrain acquisition. Cantonese relative clauses (RCs) offer a good opportunity to test these perspectives because its typologically rare properties decouple the roles of frequency and complexity in subject- and object-RCs in a way not possible in European languages. Specifically, Cantonese object RCs of the classifier type are frequently attested in children’s linguistic experience and are isomorphic to frequent and early-acquired simple SVO transitive clauses, but according to formal grammatical analyses Cantonese subject RCs are computationally less demanding to process. Thus, the two opposing theories make different predictions: the emergentist approach predicts a specific preference for object RCs of the classifier type, whereas the structurally oriented approach predicts a subject advantage. In the current study we revisited this issue. Eighty-seven monolingual Cantonese children aged between 3;2 and 3;11 (Mage: 3;6) participated in an elicited production task designed to elicit production of subject- and object- RCs. The children were very young and most of them produced only noun phrases when RCs were elicited. Those (nine children) who did produce RCs produced overwhelmingly more object RCs than subject RCs, even when animacy cues were controlled. The majority of object RCs produced were the frequent classifier-type RCs. The findings concur with our hypothesis from the emergentist perspectives that input frequency and formal and functional similarity to known structures guide acquisition.

Highlights

Theories of language acquisition differ in how children’s grammatical competence should be characterized, the mechanisms proposed by which children can reach the adult-like grammar, and how the process and the nature of language acquisition proceeds
The main effect of RC type (χ2 = 17.63, df = 1, p < 0.001) significantly improved the subject RC (SRC) and object RC (ORC) conditions were single noun phrases referring to the target referent
Utterances in SVO surface form ranked third and was the most frequent error type among all complete and well-formed clausal level non-target responses (9.2%, 64/693 in SRC condition; 7.0%, 47/676 in ORC condition). These responses were coded as nontarget because there was no ge3 marker nor classifier as a relative marker before the second NP, and could not be considered as a grammatical ORC in Cantonese in terms of the target language grammar based on their surface forms

Summary

Introduction

Theories of language acquisition differ in how children’s grammatical competence should be characterized, the mechanisms proposed by which children can reach the adult-like grammar, and how the process and the nature of language acquisition proceeds. Emergentist approaches to language acquisition advocate that children are not born with adult-like syntactic knowledge, but that abstract categories and functionally driven knowledge of constructions emerge from the usage patterns in children’s linguistic experience and/or processing routines (e.g., Tomasello, 2003; O’Grady, 2005). Children have to re-construct the grammatical dimension of language from the concrete linguistic expressions to which they are exposed with the aid of a set of cognitive, socio-cognitive and biological mechanisms. These mechanisms are domain-general, not specialized only for language learning, and involve interaction of multiple factors that are not inherently grammatical in nature, such as experience, cognition, processing, and function (O’Grady, 2011). A prominent emergentist approach to language acquisition, the usage-based or “constructivist” approach (e.g., Lieven and Tomasello, 2008) adopts a constructional view of grammatical organization in cognitive linguistics (Fillmore et al, 1988; Goldberg, 1995; Croft, 2001) that aims at a unified representational account of all grammatical knowledge.

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