Acquisition Of Word Order Research Articles

L1 Transfer in the Acquisition of Word Order in the Adjective-Added Korean Classifier Phrases by L1-Chinese and L1-Russian Children

This study explored first language (L1) transfer in child second language (L2) acquisition, testing whether L1-Chinese children learning L2 Korean show an advantage over L1-Russian children in the acquisition of adjective-added Korean classifier phrases. Chinese, like Korean, has classifier phrases with similar word orders, while Russian does not. L1-Chinese (n = 18) and L1-Russian (n = 27) children (age = 11-12 years) with L2 Korean completed an acceptability judgment task (AJT) designed to explore grammaticality in the orderings of Korean classifier phrases. The L1-Chinese children also completed a Chinese-version AJT, a translation equivalent to the Korean AJT. The study resulted in two main findings. First, in the Korean AJT, the L1-Chinese children showed more target-like performance than proficiency-matching L1-Russian children. Second, the L1-Chinese children showed comparable ratings between the Korean AJT and the Chinese AJT. The results suggest that L1 transfer takes place during child L2 acquisition, countering claims of a limited role of L1 transfer in child L2 acquisition.

The Exploration of Language Transfer in the Perspective of Third Language Acquisition: An Investigation of Chinese Word Order Acquisition as a Third Language and Related Transfer Phenomena among Thai Learners

The Exploration of Language Transfer in the Perspective of Third Language Acquisition: An Investigation of Chinese Word Order Acquisition as a Third Language and Related Transfer Phenomena among Thai Learners

Input and competing grammars in L2 syntax

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is extended to second language acquisition (L2A) to explore verb-second word order optionality in L2 English. Patterns of L1-German–L2-English word order acquisition are reviewed in light of a study of classroom discourse as input to first language (L1) German speakers. A variational model of word order patterns in the input identifies differences in patterns of word order optionality, which may contribute to the trajectory of acquisition identified for L2 English.

The Acquisition of Basic Word Order by Children with Autism Spectrum Syndrome

Purpose. This paper reports on an investigation of Arabic word order acquisition by twelve Jordanian children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and the reasons for this order of acquisition. This study researched the following questions: (1). Which word order do Jordanian Arabic speaking children with ASD prefer? (2). Why do children with ASD prefer this word order?
 Methods and Procedure. The study sample consisted of 12 autistic children (mean age of nine, two females, ten males) attending Tawasul Center for Autism, Amman, Jordan. Such a ratio is logical since there are more male than female autistic children, as concluded in multiple studies. In the present study, the participants’ native language is JA, which facilitated communication between the children and researchers since the latter are also JA native speakers. The sample’s ASD severity level was moderate with a nonverbal IQ of around 45. These 12 children were selected because their L1 proficiency was approximately the same and their mental age was around 6, based on an annual test conducted by the center. In addition, none of these children had any specific language impairments, suggesting that the sample was homogenous and heterogeneous regarding language skills. Concerning ethical approval, consent was obtained from the center and the children’s parents to conduct the tests on the children in the center. Participants from the Tawasul Center for Autism in Amman, Jordan, were asked to describe what they saw in ten different pictures and their responses were recorded. These responses can be divided into two types: SV word order and VS word order.
 Results. The results indicate that SV word order structures were used more often than VS structures. The results of the t-test revealed a statistically significant difference between the two in favor of subject-verb-object (SVO) order. We argue that the SVO word order is used more frequently by children with ASD due to the noun bias principle. 
 Conclusions. Based on the analysis, SVO sentences were used more than VSO sentences for many reasons; namely, the basic word order of the linguistic input in the surrounding community, the noun bias principle, and the type of message being conveyed, i.e., entity-oriented messages. After administering a t-test, statistically significant differences were found between the results of the two word orders in favor of SVO word order.

Early Word Order Usage in Preschool Mandarin-Speaking Typical Children and Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Influences of Caregiver Input?

This study explores the emergence and productivity of word order usage in Mandarin-speaking typically-developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and examines how this emergence relates to frequency of use in caregiver input. Forty-two caregiver-child dyads participated in video-recorded 30-min semi-structured play sessions. Eleven children with ASD were matched with 10 20-month-old TD children and another 11 children with ASD were matched with 10 26-month-old TD children, on expressive language. We report four major findings: (1) Preschool Mandarin-speaking children with ASD produced word order structures with pervasive ellipsis at similar rates to language-matched TD children, but also displayed differences from TD children in their usage of SVt and VtO frames; (2) Grammatical productivity was observed in both TD children and children with ASD; moreover, children with ASD with higher expressive language produced less stereotyped language; (3) Both TD children and children with ASD heard a range of word orders in their caregivers’ input, with TD children’s input greater in amount and complexity; however, caregivers of both groups also showed no age/language-related changes in word order usage; (4) Few word-order-specific correlations emerged between caregivers and their children; however, strong correlations were observed for mean length of utterances (MLU) for both groups: Caregivers who produced longer/more complex utterances had children who did the same. Taken together, it seems that despite their pragmatic deficits, the early grammatical knowledge of word order in Mandarin-exposed children with ASD is well preserved and in general follows the typical developmental pattern. Moreover, caregiver input is broadly rather than finely tuned to the linguistic development of TD children and children with ASD, and plays a more important role in children’s general syntactic development than in specific word order acquisition. Thus, early word order usage in preschool Mandarin-speaking TD children and children with ASD may be influenced by both caregiver input and child abilities.

Sözdizim-Edimbilim Arakesitinde: Türkçe-İngilizce, Türkçe-Almanca ve Türkçe-Rusça İki Dilli Çocukların Türkçenin Sözcük Dizilimini Edinimi

The aim of this study is to investigate how syntactic and pragmatic features of Turkish word order are acquired by Turkish-English, Turkish-German and Turkish-Russian bilingual children. The data were collected from Turkish monolingual and bilingual children who were born in England, Germany and Russia and acquired Turkish as their heritage language. The findings of the study reveal that the Turkish monolingual children adopt the use of SOV order as canonical, but they also show sensitivity to the pragmatics of Turkish and use other orders from an early age. Turkish-German, Turkish-English and Turkish-Russian simultaneous bilingual children, on the other hand, showed different patterns of word order acquisition than their Turkish monolingual counterparts.

Constructivist Approaches to First Language Acquisition

Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which types of information leads to the induction of (lexical) categories, and to paradigm building. Regarding the acquisition of word order, it is shown how languages with fixed or variable word order profit from stable syntactic hyperschemas, but require a more detailed analyses of the form-function contingencies to identify the underlying, more specific semantic, syntactic and morphological patterns. At a theoretical level, it is shown how findings from acquisition and processing converge into new linguistic theories that aim to account for regular as well as irregular phenomena in language.

French as a third language in Norway: The influence of the prior languages in the acquisition of word order

The present study investigated the acquisition of verb movement in L3 French by L1 speakers of Norwegian with English as their L2. To investigate the impact of previously learned languages in L3 acquisition, we looked at two sentence types with lexical verbs where Norwegian, English, and French differ in systematic ways: a) non-subject initial declarative main clauses and b) subject-initial declarative main clauses with a short sentence-medial adverbial. Students completed acceptability judgment tasks in both the L2 and
 the L3. Results did not indicate a privileged status for either language as a source of transfer. Rather, there were indications that both prior languages may influence L3 French. We argue that the partially overlapping surface word order with French in each prior language may cause non-target transfer into the L3. Furthermore, higher L2 proficiency was associated with less evidence of L2 transfer in the L3.

"중국인 한국어 학습자의 어순 습득에 대한 종적 연구 - 통사 및 담화 층위의 발달 양상을 중심으로 -"

"중국인 한국어 학습자의 어순 습득에 대한 종적 연구 - 통사 및 담화 층위의 발달 양상을 중심으로 -"

The Development of Subject Position in Dutch-Dominant Heritage Speakers of Spanish: From Age 9 to Adulthood

This exploratory study investigates the knowledge of word order in intransitive sentences by heritage speakers of Spanish of different age groups: 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds and adults. In doing so, we aim to fill a gap in the heritage language literature, which, to date, has mainly focused on adult heritage speakers and preschool bilingual children. The results from a judgment task reveal that child- and adolescent heritage speakers do not entirely resemble monolingual age-matched children in the acquisition of subjects in Spanish, nor do they assimilate adult heritage speakers. The data suggest that several different processes can occur simultaneously in the acquisition of word order in heritage speakers: monolingual-like acquisition, delayed acquisition, and attrition. An analysis of the influence of extraneous variables suggests that most of these effects are likely to be the consequence of quantitatively reduced input in the heritage language and increased input in the majority language.

A Typological Investigation into L2 Chinese “Prepositional Phrase-verb” Word Order Acquisition

A Typological Investigation into L2 Chinese “Prepositional Phrase-verb” Word Order Acquisition

The acquisition of word order in L2 Norwegian: The case of subject and object shift

This article reports on a syntactic acceptability judgement study of 59 adult L2/Ln learners of Norwegian and a group of native controls, studying subject and object shift. These constructions involve movement of (mainly) pronominal subjects or objects across negation/adverbs. Both subject shift and object shift display considerable micro-variation in terms of syntax and information structure, dependent on factors such as nominal type (pronoun vs. full DP), function (subject vs. object), and information status (given vs. new/focused). Previous studies have shown that Norwegian children have an early preference for the unshifted position in both constructions, but that they acquire subject shift relatively early (before age 3). Object shift, on the other hand, is typically not in place until after age 6–7. Importantly, children are conservative learners, and never shift elements that should not move in the adult language. The results of the current study show that L2/Ln learners do not make all the fine distinctions that children make, in that they have a clear preference for all subjects in shifted position and all objects in unshifted position, although some distinctions fall into place with increased proficiency. Importantly, unlike children, the L2/Ln learners are not conservative learners; rather, they over-accept syntactic movement in several cases. The equivalent to this in language production would be to apply syntactic movement where it is not attested in the target language, which would be the opposite behaviour to that observed in L1 children.

Early Syntactic Bootstrapping in an Incremental Memory-Limited Word Learner

It has been suggested that early human word learning occurs across learning situations and is bootstrapped by syntactic regularities such as word order. Simulation results from ideal learners and models assuming prior access to structured syn-tactic and semantic representations suggest that it is possible to jointly acquire word order and meanings and that learning is improved as each language capability bootstraps the other.We first present a probabilistic framework for early syntactic bootstrapping in the absence of advanced structured representations, then we use our framework to study the utility of joint acquisition of word order and word referent and its onset, in a memory-limited incremental model. Comparing learning results in the presence and absence of joint acquisition of word order in different ambiguous contexts, improvement in word order results showed an immediate onset, starting in early trials while being affected by context ambiguity. Improvement in word learning results on the other hand, was hindered in early trials where the acquired word order was imperfect,while being facilitated by word order learning in future trials as the acquired word order improved. Furthermore, our results showed that joint acquisition of word order and word referent facilitates one-shot learning of new words as well as inferring intentions of the speaker in ambiguous contexts.

Word Order Acquisition in Persian Speaking Children

Word Order Acquisition in Persian Speaking Children

Acquisition of Word Order in the Adjective-Added Korean Classifier Phrases

Acquisition of Word Order in the Adjective-Added Korean Classifier Phrases

Interference of English L2 in the acquisition of Tagalog L1 word order

This paper discusses how the second language (L2) of a child could interfere with the first language (L1) acquisition of word order and case,...

Peut-on expliquer l’acquisition de l’alternance de l’adjectif en français à partir de l’input ?

This article proposes to study the acquisition of the placement of attributive adjectives by French-speaking children between the ages of 3;9 and 4;6. It examines the possibility to account for children’s uses and evolution on the basis of the model provided by the input, considering that there is a mismatch between speakers’ abstract knowledge of alternation and their behaviour in usage. The study consists of a comparison between the productions of three children at two points in their development, and the uses of their interlocutors, in situations of games. Results show that alternation appears late and develops slowly in children’s productions, suggesting a very long process of acquisition. They also indicate that children heavily rely on the input in their choices of placement, which influences how they come to master alternation. This supports a usage-based approach to the acquisition of word order and of the Adjective category.

The influence of prosodic input in the second language classroom: does it stimulate child acquisition of word order and function words?

This paper reports on an intervention study with young Polish beginners (mean age: 8 years, 3 months) learning English at school. It seeks to identify whether exposure to rhythmic input improves knowledge of word order and function words. The ‘prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis’, relevant in developmental psycholinguistics, provided the theoretical framework for the study. Eighty-seven children were randomly assigned to a treatment group exposed to rhythm-salient input in the form of nursery rhymes, a comparison group exposed to prose input, or a control group with no extra input. Results established that prosody can be an important factor in second language acquisition, as in first language acquisition. Children in the treatment group showed improvement in metalinguistic knowledge of English word order but not of function words. This has implications for teaching methods and classroom materials.

Book review: Anderssen Merete, Kristine Bentzen and Marit Westergaard (Eds), Variation in the input: Studies in the acquisition of word order

Book review: Anderssen Merete, Kristine Bentzen and Marit Westergaard (Eds), <i>Variation in the input: Studies in the acquisition of word order</i>

Adult Second Language Learners' Acquisition of Word Order and Case Markers in Korean

ABSTRACT This study examined the comprehension of English-speaking learners' word order with case markers in Korean using a "matching sentences to movies" method. Specifically, we tested how learners with different proficiencies identify agent/patient roles in various types of Korean sentences: 1) SOV word order with subject and object markers, 2) SOV word order with subject markers, 3) OSV word order with subject and object markers, and 4) OSV word order with subject markers. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that intermediate-level learners (but not beginning-level learners) would use case markers as cues to identify grammatical relations in sentence comprehension regardless of L1 similarity (i.e., word order and presence/absence of case markers). Ten beginning-level learners, and ten intermediate-level learners as well as ten native speakers of Korean participated in the study. The results indicate that native-like comprehension of OSV with case markers is attainable with intermediate proficiency regardless of L1 similarity.