Structural diversity does not affect the acquisition of recursion: The case of possession in German

Abstract

ABSTRACT Languages vary according to which morphosyntactic forms of embedding are present in the grammar as well as to which of these forms allow recursive embedding. The present study examines how German-speaking children discover which forms of embedding are recursive. In German, possessive modifiers are expressed by several structural options (i.e., genitive case, possessive -s, relative clauses, and von-prepositional phrases, placed to the left or the right of the possessum), of which only some are recursive. In contrast, other forms of phrasal noun modification are more homogeneously realized as two basic structures (right branching PPs or relative clauses), both recursive. We examine whether recursive possessives are delayed in German L1 acquisition compared to other forms of recursive modification. A referential elicitation task tested 5-year-olds’ (n = 21) and adults’ (n = 22) production of recursive modification of possessives, comitatives, locatives, and relational structures. Overall, production of recursive possessives is not inhibited by structural diversity, relative to the other conditions. Children’s target responses to the possessive condition differed from adults’ in that children reduced the inventory of structural types and relied more commonly on certain forms that adults used less frequently. These results indicate that structural diversity does not delay children’s mastery of recursive expressions in a given domain and that structural complexity can determine the overall timing of the onset of recursive modification, but this fails to help explain performance across domains or the actual options children select.