German Child Language Research Articles

Syntactic priming as implicit learning in German child language.

We investigated syntactic priming in German children to explore crosslinguistic evidence for implicit learning accounts of language production and acquisition. Adult descriptions confirmed that German speakers (N=27) preferred to spontaneously produce active versus passive transitive and DO versus PO dative forms. We tested whether German-speaking children (N=29, M age =5.3, 15 girls/14 boys) could be primed to produce these dispreferred forms and whether such priming effects would persist across a target phase. Children first heard a block of priming sentences and then described a block of target pictures. They demonstrated significant priming effects for passive and PO dative structures, and these priming effects did not differ between the first and second halves of the block of target trials. These patterns of German child language production are consistent with implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming.

The cum-sine pattern in German child language: An argument for antonym decomposition

ABSTRACT German-speaking children between ages 2 and 3 mostly use the preposition ohne (‘without’) in an adult-like way, to express the absence of something. In this article we present surprising results from a corpus study suggesting that in this age group, absence can also be expressed using the sequence mit ohne ‘with without’. We argue that this pattern becomes much less surprising if we assume that there is a conceptual representation independent of linguistic structure and that antonymic concepts such as that of absence (which we call sine in this article) are not represented as primitive concepts at this level—contrary to what might be suspected on the basis of monomorphemic prepositions such as German ohne. Instead, we argue that antonymic concepts like that of absence (sine) are composed of at least two units. Children’s non-adult-like patterns then result from difficulties in acquiring the morphological realization of this complex concept as the monomorphemic preposition ohne. To our knowledge, our results constitute the first evidence for antonym decomposition in the case of prepositions from child language.

The Plural is Unmarked: Evidence from Turkish, Hungarian and German

Quantity distinctions are morphologically indicated in the majority of languages.However, the marking of these distinctions exhibits a high degree of cross-linguistic variation with respect to the number of quantity categories, their agreement properties, and the morphemes themselves. Furthermore, number marking on numerically quantified nouns varies across languages: for instance, while German and English use plural number marking with numerals other than “one” (for example, “two books”), Turkish and Hungarian use singular number marking with all numerals. Recent work has discussed how to explain number marking with numerals. In particular, Bale and Khanjian (2014) propose that the quantity concepts of the two types of languages vary semantically. We present novel evidence from a cross-linguistic study of Hungarian, Turkish and German child language, and argue that the quantity concepts do not vary, and the variation between languages must have a morphosyntactic explanation. 

Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language

Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, as well as a movement-based approach and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar. We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided.

Semantic Theory versus Semantic “Lumping”: Reply to Bertinetto et al. (2015) The acquisition of tense and aspect in a morphology-sensitive framework: data from Italian and Austrian-German children

Abstract The crosslinguistic investigation of child language has revealed the frequent co-occurrence of certain values of Aktionsart, aspect and tense. Specifically, dynamic-atelic predicates are likely to be observed with unbounded values of aspect in the non-past tense and dynamic-telic predicates with bounded aspect and past tense morphology. This observation has motivated theories of language acquisition that incorporate the semantic structure of predicates in relation to clause structure. Pier Marco Bertinetto and colleagues have claimed that inferences regarding the role of predicate structure in the acquisition process have been erroneously derived from “lumping” together stative and activity predicates. Furthermore, without acknowledging the prior theory of “typological bootstrapping”, they present their presumably unique theory of information processing to explain their Italian and German child language data. The purpose of this reply is to show that the stative-activity “lumping” assertion is a “straw man” argument, and a theory of morphological information processing is both well-known and compatible with semantically based theories of acquisition.

The Subject–Object Asymmetry Revisited: Experimental and Computational Approaches to the Role of Information Structure in Children’s Argument Omissions

In two studies, we investigated the relation between information structure and argument omission in German child language in order to quantify to what extent the subject–object hypothesis (i.e., subjects are omitted more often than objects) is influenced by discourse pragmatics. Twenty four children took part in an elicited production study in which they produced transitive subject–verb–object and object–verb–subject sentences. Both constructions are instances of a topic-comment information structure. The results showed that 3;6 year-old children omitted subjects and objects alike when the arguments assumed topics status and were placed in utterance-initial position. In a second study, we then assessed whether a model of language learning implemented with a recency bias (resulting in learning from the end of utterances) would produce similar omission rates of initial arguments. The model was found to be sensitive to the frequency with which both word orders occurred in the input: initial objects were omitted more often than initial subjects, the pattern found in German caregiver speech. The results suggest that argument omission is heavily influenced by information structure and that a subject–object asymmetry per se does not exist.

Word order in German child language and child-directed speech: A corpus analysis on the ordering of double objects in the German middlefield

We report two corpus analyses to examine the impact of animacy, definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression on the ordering of double objects in the spontaneous speech of German-speaking two- to four-year-old children and the child-directed speech of their mothers. The first corpus analysis revealed that definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression influenced word order variation in child language and child-directed speech when the type of referring expression distinguished between pronouns and lexical noun phrases. These results correspond to previous child language studies in English (e.g., de Marneffe et al. 2012). Extending the scope of previous studies, our second corpus analysis examined the role of different pronoun types on word order. It revealed that word order in child language and child-directed speech was predictable from the types of pronouns used. Different types of pronouns were associated with different sentence positions but also showed a strong correlation to givenness and definiteness. Yet, the distinction between pronoun types diminished the effects of givenness so that givenness had an independent impact on word order only in child-directed speech but not in child language. Our results support a multi-factorial approach to word order in German. Moreover, they underline the strong impact of the type of referring expression on word order and suggest that it plays a crucial role in the acquisition of the factors influencing word order variation.

Lexically driven or early structure building? Constructing an early grammar in German child language

This study examines the role of the lexicon and grammatical structure building in early grammar. Parent-report data in CDI format from a sample of 1151 German-speaking children between 1;6 and 2;6 and longitudinal spontaneous speech data from 22 children between 1;8 and 2;5 were used. Regression analysis of the parent-report data indicates that grammatical words have a stronger influence on concurrent syntactic complexity than lexical words. Time-lagged correlations using the spontaneous speech data showed that lexical words at 1;8 predict subsequent MLU at 2;1 significantly; grammatical words do not. MLU at 2;5 is significantly predicted by grammatical words and no longer by lexical words. The influence of different grammatical subcategories on subsequent MLU varies. Use of articles and the copula at 2;1 most strongly predicts MLU at 2;5. Children use both types of articles and multiple determiners before a noun to the same extent as adults. The present results are suggestive of early grammatical structure building.

Early Articles in English Child Language: Impostors or Overt Instantiations of a Nominal Functional Category?

ABSTRACTChildren’s development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children’s early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss’s (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a study of German child language, this article examines the data of six English-speaking children available through CHILDES, focusing on MLUs up to 2.5, to ascertain the status of articles in early English child language. Although Eisenbeiss argued that the determiners in early German child language are impostors, the following results of our study indicate that in English-speaking children’s early use, the articles are in fact overt instantiations of a nominal functional category: (i) there is no stage in which overt articles do not occur, and (ii) early articles do not appear in a restricted set of syntactic contexts.

<i>The expression of possession</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The expression of possession Engin Arik William B. McGregor , ed. 2009. The expression of possession. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 435. US$137.00 (hardcover). New investigations continue to provide insights into the linguistic realization of possession. Stassen (2009) is one of the new typologically motivated studies of predicative possession. The current book is yet another which offers a variety of analyses to contribute to our knowledge of possession from typologically diverse language families. This book consists of an introduction, nine additional articles, a list of contributors, and indices of subjects, languages, and persons. In the introductory chapter (pp. 1-12), William B. McGregor overviews the concept of possessives and defines possessives as conceptual relations between entities, between people and their body parts and products, between people and their kin, between people and their representations (such as photographs), between people and their belongings, between people and things that they have control over (such as usership rights), between persons and cultural/intellectual products (such as copyrights), and so on. McGregor then summarizes the articles in the volume. In "English possessives as reference-point constructions and their function in the discourse" (pp. 13-50), Peter Willemse, Kristin Davidse, and Liesbert Heyvaert focus on possessive noun phrases such as his car and argue against the claims that they are definite NPs and/or new information in discourse. Their data come from the COBUILD Bank of English and the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen corpus and consist of 400 instances of possessive noun phrases. The analysis shows that, in addition to a subsequent mention (coreferential, 11.86% of the data) and the first mention (new, 28.03% of the data), they function in three more ways: text reference (a subsequent mention of a text referent, 8.62% of the data), inferable (inferable from an associated referent or scenario in the preceding context, 26.95%of the data), and anchored (anchored to an element in the preceding context, 24.52% of the data). Thus, they propose that these five categories form a continuum from discourse-given (coreferential) to discourse-new (new). In "On the co-variation between form and function of adnominal possessive modifiers in Dutch and English" (pp. 51-106), Jan Rijkhoff investigates possessive modification with of in English and its Dutch counterpart with van which can modify a common noun such as car, dog, or tree. The data are mostly constructed, but in [End Page 423] some cases the author consults search engines on the internet and examples from other languages. Rijkhoff argues that, with respect to the functions modification, predication, and reference, three out of the four possible types of adnominal possessives occur in English and Dutch, i.e., classifying, qualifying, and localizing, but not quantifying. The author pays considerable attention to the functions of the adnominal possessives with of/van which are functions of natural classes such as adjective, verb, and noun. In "Is possession mere location? Contrary evidence from Maa" (pp. 107-142), Doris Payne reports on a study of how Maa, an Eastern Nilotic, Nilo-Saharan language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania, encodes location, possession, and existence. The author focuses on two lexemes: tii and ata. Tii occurs in both transitive and intransitive constructions with locative and existential meanings, whereas ata occurs in both transitive and intransitive constructions with possessive and existential meanings. The author reports an analysis of the first 130 tokens of tii and ata that are found in a corpus consisting of 20,000 clauses (mostly spoken and some written materials). The data show that tii and ata in Maa are in complementary distribution suggesting that possessive ata may not be derived from locative tii, contrary to what one might expect from a localist perspective. In "Learning to encode possession" (pp. 143-212), Sonja Eisenbeiss, Ayumi Matsudo, and Ingrid Sonnenstuhl explore how possessive relationships (adnominal as in my chickens, predicative as in I have chickens, and external possessive constructions as in I tapped him on the shoulder) are encoded in German child language. The authors also provide some child language data available from other languages such as English, Japanese, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as adult German. Their German data come from 64 recordings...

Early Finiteness in German and Dutch Child Language

The present paper deals with the acquisition of finiteness in German and Dutch child language. More specifically, it discusses the assumption of fundamental similarities in the development of the finiteness category in German and Dutch L1 as postulated by Dimroth et al. (2003). A comparison of German and Dutch child corpus data will show that Dimroth et al.'s assumption can be maintained as far as the overall development of the finiteness category is concerned. At a more fine-grained level, however, German and Dutch children exhibit different linguistic behaviour. This concerns in particular the means for the expression of early finiteness and the status of the auxiliary hebben/haben 'to have'. The observed differences can be explained as the result of target language specific properties of the input.

Roots and Rogues in German Child Language

This article is concerned with the proper characterization of subject omission at a particular stage in German child language. It focuses on post-verbal null subjects in finite clauses, here termed Rogues. It is argued that the statistically significant presence of Rogues, in conjunction with their distinct developmental profile, speaks against a Strong Continuity approach to the acquisition of null subject knowledge in German, and urges a reconsideration of the notion of Optionality in early grammars. The significance of the Rogues stage is considered in the context of specific theoretical proposals about argument omission: those of Rizzi (1992; 1994; 2000), and of Wexler (1994; 1998), are contrasted with the Weak Continuity approach proposed by Clahsen and his associates (e.g., Clahsen (1990/1991), Clahsen and Penke (1992), Clahsen, Eisenbeiß, and Penke (1996)). The data presented here, which complement related work by Hamann (1996), provide additional empirical support for these latter hypotheses.

The input–output relationship in first language acquisition

This study provides an account of the distributional information and the production rates in a particularly rich corpus of German child and adult language. Three structural domains are analysed: the parts-of-speech distribution for a coded corpus of circa one million words as well as the internal constituency of 300,000 noun phrases and almost 200,000 verb phrases. In all three domains, the distribution over time in the adult input is extremely homogenous. The child shows a steady approximation towards the adult distribution. It is argues that two notions of acquisition have to be distinguished: acquisition in terms of the availability of a given structure, for example in terms of first occurrence of a structure or according to various criteria of productivity, and acquisition in terms of full communicative competence, i.e., using structures in the way adults use them (cf. Slobin, 1991, 1997). The data presented here show that the child acquires not only the structural options of German but also highly conventionalised ways of encoding concepts. The amount of information about the structure and conventions of German that is available in the input has the potential of making innate stipulations unnecessary. Instead, the data support usage-based and probabilistic theories of language and language processing.

Verbal prefixation in German child and adult language

Previous research has demonstrated that children pick up even small differences in the lexicalization patterns of closely related languages quickly and successfully. This study examines verbal prefixation in German child and adult language, using a particularly detailed case study. The data show that the child starts to produce prefixed verbs and prepositional phrases within a few months. More crucially, the child's speech gets attuned to the precise frequency distribution of these constructions in the input. These findings support theories of linguistic relativity whichemphasize the importance of the conventionality in language use for language processing and acquisition. A look at the input language reveals that the adults use hundreds of lexical items per hour which provide information about the use of verbal prefixation. Also, input frequencies did not change over time. This suggests that the structural properties of a given language are very stable, and help the child to become a proficient speaker.

Controversies about CP: A Comparison of Language Acquisition and Language Impairments in Broca's Aphasia

In both language acquisition research and the study of language impairments in Broca's aphasia there is an ongoing debate whether or not phrase-structure representations contain the Complementizer Phrase (CP) layer. To shed some light on this debate, I will provide data on German child language and on German agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Analyses of subordinate clauses, wh-questions, and verb placement indicate that early child grammars do not generate the CP layer yet, whereas the ability to project the CP layer is retained in agrammatism.

Null Arguments in German Child Language

Acquisition research has shown that, in German, the use of null subjects does not drop from about 50% to 5% in a very short space of time, but there is a drop from about 45% to between 10% and 20%. In the present article, I investigate this 10% to 20% Null Subject stage in 3-year-olds and show that this stage, though surprisingly long, is not final. Moreover, the children under investigation use structures in this phase that are found neither in the state of Early Null Subjects nor in adult German, namely postverbal referential null subjects. The latter result, the fact that this stage is not final, and differences to object-drop at the same time strongly suggest that the phenomenon cannot only be topic-drop. An analysis is proposed admitting competing strategies for a certain time, a topic-drop strategy (i.e., a strategy of identification via discourse), and a strategy of licensing and identifying null subjects through feature transfer under Government.

Constraints on Parameter Setting: A Grammatical Analysis of Some Acquisition in Stages in German Child Language

In the first part of this article, it is argued that in order to improve the parameter model as a theory of acquisition it has to be constrained in several ways. Three constraints are discussed that restrict the class of possible parameters and the way they are fixed in development. In the second part, empirical results on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement, verb placement, empty subjects, and negation in German child language are presented. I suggest a grammatical analysis for these data (in terms of the Split-Infl Hypothesis) that allows us to maintain the learnability constraints from the beginning.

Verb inflections in German child language: acquisition of agreement markings and the functions they encode

Verb inflections in German child language: acquisition of agreement markings and the functions they encode

Summaries

The present paper deals with the acquisition of finiteness in German and Dutch child language. More specifically, it discusses the assumption of fundamental similarities in the development of the finiteness category in German and Dutch L1 as postulated by Dimroth et al. (2003). A comparison of German and Dutch child corpus data will show that Dimroth et al.'s assumption can be maintained as far as the overall development of the finiteness category is concerned. At a more fine-grained level, however, German and Dutch children exhibit different linguistic behaviour. This concerns in particular the means for the expression of early finiteness and the status of the auxiliary hebben/haben 'to have'. The observed differences can be explained as the result of target language specific properties of the input.