The development of language and its interaction with other aspects of cognition: the case of medial wh-questions in English and in Brazilian Portuguese

Preschool children acquiring English and Brazilian Portuguese display a peculiar behavior when prompted to produce multi-clause wh-questions. In elicited production tasks, structures with an extra wh-element in medial position are sometimes produced. Such medial questions are impossible in the adult languages being acquired. Following a hypothesis put forth by Grolla & Lidz (2018), we propose that children’s productions are not generated by children’s grammar, but reflect difficulties of their developing cognitive system. More specifically, we propose that children’s more limited inhibition control capacity leads them to pronounce elements with high activation levels in wrong places of the structure. Experimental data on both languages are provided which corroborate this claim. These data show that children with more limited inhibition control capacity are more likely to produce medial wh-questions.

Teaching Children Foreign-Language Grammar: Are Authentic Materials Appropriate?

The paper discusses authentic materials as a resource for teaching grammar to young learners. Difficulties in foreign-language grammar learning for Russian pupils are presented, and typical challenges are described. The paper provides a pre-/post-intervention study of the development of children’s grammar skills. The research question is, “How does one use authentic materials for teaching grammar in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom?” A qualitative method is used to assess the learning outcomes of using authentic materials in teaching grammar to eight–nine-year-old pupils (the second year of studying English).

Children’s Grammar of Null Subjects: Evidence from Comprehension

The null subject (NS) stage is one of the best-described hallmarks of first language development. We present a series of experiments assessing children’s interpretation of NS sentences, as a way of testing the two main competing analyses of the phenomenon: grammatical accounts, under which young children’s grammars license NSs in declarative sentences; and performance accounts, which hold that children have an adult grammar, but omit subjects in production for extrasyntactic reasons. Overall, we find evidence of an NS stage in comprehension, just as in production. This suggests that child and adult grammars differ, in line with grammatical accounts.

Children's knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure: quantifier floating in Japanese

The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not obvious in the input or do they employ a sentence comprehension strategy based on the available input? Two experiments examined four- to six-year-old Japanese-speaking children for their interpretations of floating quantifiers in SOV and OSV sentences. The results revealed that no child employed a comprehension strategy in terms of the linear ordering of constituents, and most five- and six-year-olds correctly interpreted floating quantifiers when word-order difficulty was reduced. These facts indicate that children's interpretation of floating quantifiers is structurally dependent on hierarchical phrase structure, suggesting that this knowledge is a part of children's grammar despite the insufficient input available to them.

Grammaire et pouvoir global de computation: deux sources de difficultés possibles dans la production des relatives chez les enfants francophones

The present study compares relative clause production in French learners and in mature speakers. Previous studies on French postulate deficiencies in children’s grammar of relatives in order to explain their defective production (Labelle 1990; Guasti and Shlonsky 1995). However, these studies do not strictly compare child and adult data. A new production task was administered to 25 French learners ages 4 to 7, and to 25 adults. Three types of stimuli were presented in order to elicit subject, direct object and indirect object relatives. Results show that children’s performance varies according to the type of stimuli presented, and that the performance of adults is qualitatively similar. These patterns undermine the notion that a given component of UG is either inoperative or unspecified in the developing grammar. Such unsteady lacunae point more naturally to peripheral processing limitations in learners rather than core deficiencies within their grammar proper (cf. Goodluck and Tavakolian 1982).