LX 454/754 Acquisition of Syntax Language disorders SLI Extended Optional Infinitives Other appro... more LX 454/754 Acquisition of Syntax Language disorders SLI Extended Optional Infinitives Other approaches References SLI Specific Language Impairment ("SLI") refers to a condition in which linguistic disorders are evident despite normal nonlinguistic development (and absent any problems like perceptual-motor deficits, hearing loss, etc.). This could cover a number of distinct problems, but there does seem to be an identifiable population that has trouble with inflectional morphology. There is also evidence suggesting a genetic basis, rather than an environmental basis. LX 454/754 Acquisition of Syntax Language disorders SLI Extended Optional Infinitives Other approaches References LX 454/754 Acquisition of Syntax Language disorders SLI Extended Optional Infinitives Other approaches References Approaches to SLI Broadly speaking, we can consider four approaches to SLI, though the evidence we'll examine here points to the first one.
19-Month-Olds’ Sensitivity to Negation/Tense Dependencies Melanie Soderstrom ([email protected]) Joh... more 19-Month-Olds’ Sensitivity to Negation/Tense Dependencies Melanie Soderstrom ([email protected]) Johns Hopkins University/Department of Psychology 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore MD 21218 Peter Jusczyk ([email protected]) Johns Hopkins University/Department of Psychology 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore MD 21218 Kenneth Wexler ([email protected]) Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences 77 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge MA 02139 Recent comprehension studies have shown that infants have early knowledge of adult syntactic relationships long before they are capable of demonstrating this knowledge in productive speech (e.g. Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998). The current study addresses the relationship in infant grammar between negation and tense in two related contexts - the difference between adverbs and negation in their effect on the placement of tense marking, and the connection between negation and the presence or absence of tense marking. In English, ten...
Interdisciplinary Linguistic and Psychiatric Research on Language Disorders is a collection of sc... more Interdisciplinary Linguistic and Psychiatric Research on Language Disorders is a collection of scientific papers presented at the International Scientific Workshop on Clinical Linguistics, held on 20 November 2018 at the Education Centre of the University Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče. The Erdeljac & Sekulić Sović research group in clinical linguistics, based at the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, in collaboration with psychiatrists from the Department of Biological Psychiatry and Psychogeriatrics and the Department of Diagnostics and Intensive Care, both at the University Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče, present a unique example of an academic publication designed to spotlight ongoing research on semantic processing in individuals diagnosed with psychosis spectrum disorders who are native speakers of Croatian. A further value of this book lies in the co-authors’ contributions, written by specialists in clinical linguistics and p...
Individuals with intellectual disabilities often show limitations in language functioning, common... more Individuals with intellectual disabilities often show limitations in language functioning, commonly linked to their overall poor cognitive skills. However, despite the intellectual impairments and language delays, it is well established that language is more vulnerable in some populations, e.g. Down syndrome (DS), and relatively preserved in others, e.g. Williams syndrome (WS). Individuals with DS are also known to be at increased risk of cognitive decline due to the earlier onset of Alzheimer's dementia, although little is known about how aging affects language skills in this population. Individuals with WS, though with relatively developed language, are reported to never acquire some grammatical structures that appear late in typically developing (TD) individuals, such as passives of psychological verbs. In an attempt to better understand how linguistic deficits in individuals with intellectual disabilities can be teased apart from the effects of general language delays, chronological age, and overall intellectual impairment, we compare the comprehension of passives in adults with DS (mean age: 38) and WS (mean age: 30). Passives are known to develop late in typical development and present difficulties for individuals with developmental disorders. This has been observed especially in their generally poorer performance on passives of psychological verbs than on passives of actional verbs. Our results reveal divergent patterns of performance in our participants. Adults with WS performed no different from younger TD controls on actives and passives of both actional and psychological verbs. In contrast, adults with DS showed exceptionally poor performance on all sentence types, even on actives of actional verbs, considerably poorer than observed in the TD and WS groups. While the good performance of adults with WS might be due to individual variation, rather than continuous language development, we argue that the poor performance of participants with DS is due to an age-related decline of cognitive and language abilities, possibly linked to Alzheimer's-type dementia.
A-Chains and S-Homophones in Children's Grammar: Perhaps the most famous example of such misleadi... more A-Chains and S-Homophones in Children's Grammar: Perhaps the most famous example of such misleading behavior is children's performance on the Passive, a construction that develops notoriously late in many languages. The most well-known linguistic hypothesis about why this is so is that held by Borer and Wexler (1987). They argue for the A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis, which can be stated as follows (see Borer and Wexler 1992, fn. 13, for the sketch ofa theory as to why only object to subject A-chains are affected, and not subject raising out ofVP): (1) A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH) Object-to-Subject A-Chains are ungrammatical for a child until a certain age of maturation. As Borer and Wexler (1987) argue, ACDH predicts that: • We would like to thank E. Christodoulou for carrying out the experiment for us. See her report Christodoulou (200 I). Also, thanks to S. Iatridou for comments on this work and discussion on the Greek passive.
A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that mov... more A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that movement of objects is more difficult than movement of subjects. This asymmetry has been most frequently observed with relative clauses (de Villiers et al. 1979, Correa 1995, Friedmann and Novogrodski 2004, Adani 2011, Guasti et al. 2012, a.o), but has also been reported, to a lesser extent, with wh-questions (Tyack and Ingram 1977, Stromswold 1995, Philip et al. 2000) and clefts (Bever 1979, Lempert and Kinsbourne 1980, Hirsch and Wexler 2006). This asymmetry is not straightforwardly predicted by syntactic theories of movement, according to which A-bar dependencies can be established while skipping over elements that do not have properties directly relevant to that particular A-bar operation. For instance, the NP the dog in (1) is taken to be irrelevant for the computation of the wh-dependency, since it is not a wh-phrase and cannot participate in whquestion formation to begin with (see e....
ABSTRACTAlthough pragmatic deficits are well documented in autism, little is known about the exte... more ABSTRACTAlthough pragmatic deficits are well documented in autism, little is known about the extent to which grammatical knowledge in this disorder is deficient, or merely delayed when compared to that of typically developing children functioning at similar linguistic or cognitive levels. This study examines the knowledge of constraints on the interpretation of personal and reflexive pronouns, an aspect of grammar not previously investigated in autism, and known to be subject to differential developmental schedules in unimpaired development. Fourteen children with autism (chronological age = 6–17 years, M = 11) showed some difficulties comprehending personal pronouns, no different from those observed in two groups of younger controls matched on nonverbal IQ or receptive grammar, but in line with the reported pragmatic deficits and general language delay in this population. However, their interpretation of reflexives was significantly worse than that of the control children. This pat...
Departing from Lenneberg’s biological conception of language and its de- velopment, this paper fi... more Departing from Lenneberg’s biological conception of language and its de- velopment, this paper first reviews select examples from research on lan- guage development and its interface with genetics before making some specific proposals with regard to how the genetics of grammar could be investigated. The central proposal of this paper is that an important, per- haps necessary, avenue for studying the genetics of grammar is to study the genotypes corresponding to phenotypes of child (and genetically im- paired) versions of the computational system of grammar, as opposed to strictly descriptive measures of a construction or standardized linguistic tests. In some cases, these phenotypes have wide explanatory ability, sug- gesting that they directly involve parts of the computational system of lan- guage. The primary example discussed is the phenotype of the Unique Checking Constraint (UCC). In particular, it is proposed that one could usefully start to investigate the genetic basis for ...
Biolinguistics aims to shed light on the specifically biological nature of human language, focusi... more Biolinguistics aims to shed light on the specifically biological nature of human language, focusing on five foundational questions: (1) What are the properties of the language phenotype? (2) How does language ability grow and mature in individuals? (3) How is language put to use? (4) How is language implemented in the brain? (5) What evolutionary processes led to the emergence of language? These foundational questions are used here to frame a discussion of important issues in the study of language, exploring whether our linguistic capacity is the result of direct selective pressure or due to developmental or biophysical constraints, and assessing whether the neural/computational components entering into language are unique to human language or shared with other cognitive systems, leading to a discussion of advances in theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, comparative animal behavior and psychology, genetics/genomics, disciplines that can now place these longstanding questions ...
While it is clear that the study of language development contributes to linguistic theory, it is ... more While it is clear that the study of language development contributes to linguistic theory, it is perhaps less widely recognized that by examining the time course of language development we can integrate the study of language into the broader study of biological development. The hope persists that this type of analysis will play a role in the genetic underpinnings of language, as it has already done in some areas of grammar. 1 One area of grammar notorious for demonstrating late development involves various kinds of long-distance dependencies. In their comparative analysis of the development of different linguistic structures, Borer and Wexler (1987) argued that structures containing A-chains develop late.2 We will base our study on more up-to-date and empirically correct versions of Borer and Wexler’s A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH), but the logic is the same: certain grammatical representations allowed by Universal Grammar (UG) are ungrammatical for young children because of cons...
A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that mov... more A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that movement of objects is more difficult than movement of subjects. This asymmetry has been most frequently observed with relative clauses (de Villiers et al. 1979, Correa 1995, Friedmann and Novogrodski 2004, Adani 2011, Guasti et al. 2012, a.o), but has also been reported, to a lesser extent, with wh-questions (Tyack and Ingram 1977, Stromswold 1995, Philip et al. 2000) and clefts (Bever 1979, Lempert and Kinsbourne 1980, Hirsch and Wexler 2006). This asymmetry is not straightforwardly predicted by syntactic theories of movement, according to which A-bar dependencies can be established while skipping over elements that do not have properties directly relevant to that particular A-bar operation. For instance, the NP the dog in (1) is taken to be irrelevant for the computation of the wh-dependency, since it is not a wh-phrase and cannot participate in whquestion formation to begin with (see e....
This study investigates the knowledge of binding in 21 English-speaking children with SLI, aged 6... more This study investigates the knowledge of binding in 21 English-speaking children with SLI, aged 6;08-16;05, compared to 21 children with WS, language-and age-matched, and 21 language-matched control children, aged 4-7;10. Our results demonstrate no difficulties in the interpretation of reflexive or personal pronouns in SLI, revealing an intact knowledge of reflexive binding, as well as spared pragmatic functioning. Children with WS however show difficulties with their interpretation of pronouns, accepting the local binding of a pronoun, indicating impaired pragmatics. Not surprisingly, our language-matched typical controls, aged between 4-7;08 (M=5;03), showed a classic pattern of the Apparent Delay of Principle B Effect (ADPBE). In view of reported pragmatic but not memory deficits in WS, we interpret our results as consistent with the pragmatic deficit explanation but not the memory deficit explanation of the ADPBE.
A straightforward derivation of the effective quark Lagrangian is presented for the topologically... more A straightforward derivation of the effective quark Lagrangian is presented for the topologically neutral chiral broken phase of the dilute instanton gas. The resulting quark Lagrangian is a nonlocal NJL-type and contains 4q, 6q,... vertices for any number of flavours.
Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2007
While it is clear that the study of language development contributes to linguistic theory, it is ... more While it is clear that the study of language development contributes to linguistic theory, it is perhaps less widely recognized that by examining the time course of language development we can integrate the study of language into the broader study of biological development. The hope persists that this type of analysis will play a role in the genetic underpinnings of language, as it has already done in some areas of grammar. 1 One area of grammar notorious for demonstrating late development involves various kinds of long-distance dependencies. In their comparative analysis of the development of different linguistic structures, Borer and Wexler (1987) argued that structures containing A-chains develop late. 2 We will base our study on more up-to-date and empirically correct versions of Borer and Wexler's A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH), but the logic is the same: certain grammatical representations allowed by Universal Grammar (UG) are ungrammatical for young children because of constraints imposed by their particular biology as opposed to adult biology. The basic argument for such maturation is Borer and Wexler's (1987) "Triggering Problem" (Babyonyshev, Ganger, Pesetsky and Wexler's (2001) "Argument from the Abundance of the Stimulus" (AOS)) that parallels Chomsky's argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus (POS; following Descartes). Since evidence for a particular structure is abundant in the input, why should it take so long for the structure to develop? Both the AOS and the POS provide evidence for biological (genetic) underpinnings of linguistic representations. In this paper, we present evidence for the late development of one structure in particular: subject-to-subject raising, thus providing evidence for the role of biology in the development of linguistic structure. At the same time, developmental evidence can play a role in helping to determine the correct linguistic analysis of structures. Given good evidence for the developmental delay of a certain grammatical process G, then if a structure S is found not to be delayed, this provides evidence that S in fact does not make use of G. In this regard, subject-tosubject raising provides an important test case. According to the theory of development * We would like to thank
This study investigated knowledge of binding and raising in two groups of children with Williams ... more This study investigated knowledge of binding and raising in two groups of children with Williams syndrome (WS), 6-12 and 12-16 years old, compared to typically developing (TD) controls matched on non-verbal MA, verbal MA, and grammar. In typical development, difficulties interpreting pronouns, but not reflexives, persist until the age of around 6, while raising is not mastered until about the age of 8 or 9. If grammar in WS is delayed, but develops in a fashion parallel to TD population, similar patterns of difficulties may be expected, although it has not been established whether the grammatical development is ever complete in the individuals with this disorder. Knowledge of the principle of binding which states that a reflexive must have a c-commanding antecedent, was found to be intact in all the participants, in line with previous reports in the literature. In contrast, children with WS younger than 12 showed a poorer performance on personal pronouns, like two groups of younger ...
There were some boys and some girls, and suddenly one of them laughed out loud. Can you tell me w... more There were some boys and some girls, and suddenly one of them laughed out loud. Can you tell me who?" says the experimenter. "The girl!" retorts a 4-year-old child. This paper readdresses the issue of young English children's misinterpretation and misuse of the definite determiner 'the' as 'one of', especially in such partitive contexts, where neither the speaker nor the listener know the identity of the referent and where an adult would use the indefinite article. Are children unaware of states of other's minds and are Egocentric or do they not know what 'the', the most common word of English, means? Previously, the former was invoked as an explanation for children's errors (Maratsos 1974, based on Piaget 1955), however given a recently proposed alternative, that children have problems with Uniqueness, a key component of the semantic definition of 'the' (Wexler 2005, based on Heim 1991), there are now two views that can be explicitly contrasted. The goal of this paper is to begin distinguishing the possible pragmatic and/or cognitive deficits on the children's part, from the possible computational deficits of children's as-yet-undeveloped linguistic semantic system. 2. Children's overuse of 'the'
Not only do (English-speaking) children have difficulty with passives, but they have much greater... more Not only do (English-speaking) children have difficulty with passives, but they have much greater difficulty with passives involving “psychological ” verbs (1)
LX 454/754 Acquisition of Syntax Language disorders SLI Extended Optional Infinitives Other appro... more LX 454/754 Acquisition of Syntax Language disorders SLI Extended Optional Infinitives Other approaches References SLI Specific Language Impairment ("SLI") refers to a condition in which linguistic disorders are evident despite normal nonlinguistic development (and absent any problems like perceptual-motor deficits, hearing loss, etc.). This could cover a number of distinct problems, but there does seem to be an identifiable population that has trouble with inflectional morphology. There is also evidence suggesting a genetic basis, rather than an environmental basis. LX 454/754 Acquisition of Syntax Language disorders SLI Extended Optional Infinitives Other approaches References LX 454/754 Acquisition of Syntax Language disorders SLI Extended Optional Infinitives Other approaches References Approaches to SLI Broadly speaking, we can consider four approaches to SLI, though the evidence we'll examine here points to the first one.
19-Month-Olds’ Sensitivity to Negation/Tense Dependencies Melanie Soderstrom ([email protected]) Joh... more 19-Month-Olds’ Sensitivity to Negation/Tense Dependencies Melanie Soderstrom ([email protected]) Johns Hopkins University/Department of Psychology 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore MD 21218 Peter Jusczyk ([email protected]) Johns Hopkins University/Department of Psychology 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore MD 21218 Kenneth Wexler ([email protected]) Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences 77 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge MA 02139 Recent comprehension studies have shown that infants have early knowledge of adult syntactic relationships long before they are capable of demonstrating this knowledge in productive speech (e.g. Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998). The current study addresses the relationship in infant grammar between negation and tense in two related contexts - the difference between adverbs and negation in their effect on the placement of tense marking, and the connection between negation and the presence or absence of tense marking. In English, ten...
Interdisciplinary Linguistic and Psychiatric Research on Language Disorders is a collection of sc... more Interdisciplinary Linguistic and Psychiatric Research on Language Disorders is a collection of scientific papers presented at the International Scientific Workshop on Clinical Linguistics, held on 20 November 2018 at the Education Centre of the University Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče. The Erdeljac & Sekulić Sović research group in clinical linguistics, based at the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, in collaboration with psychiatrists from the Department of Biological Psychiatry and Psychogeriatrics and the Department of Diagnostics and Intensive Care, both at the University Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče, present a unique example of an academic publication designed to spotlight ongoing research on semantic processing in individuals diagnosed with psychosis spectrum disorders who are native speakers of Croatian. A further value of this book lies in the co-authors’ contributions, written by specialists in clinical linguistics and p...
Individuals with intellectual disabilities often show limitations in language functioning, common... more Individuals with intellectual disabilities often show limitations in language functioning, commonly linked to their overall poor cognitive skills. However, despite the intellectual impairments and language delays, it is well established that language is more vulnerable in some populations, e.g. Down syndrome (DS), and relatively preserved in others, e.g. Williams syndrome (WS). Individuals with DS are also known to be at increased risk of cognitive decline due to the earlier onset of Alzheimer's dementia, although little is known about how aging affects language skills in this population. Individuals with WS, though with relatively developed language, are reported to never acquire some grammatical structures that appear late in typically developing (TD) individuals, such as passives of psychological verbs. In an attempt to better understand how linguistic deficits in individuals with intellectual disabilities can be teased apart from the effects of general language delays, chronological age, and overall intellectual impairment, we compare the comprehension of passives in adults with DS (mean age: 38) and WS (mean age: 30). Passives are known to develop late in typical development and present difficulties for individuals with developmental disorders. This has been observed especially in their generally poorer performance on passives of psychological verbs than on passives of actional verbs. Our results reveal divergent patterns of performance in our participants. Adults with WS performed no different from younger TD controls on actives and passives of both actional and psychological verbs. In contrast, adults with DS showed exceptionally poor performance on all sentence types, even on actives of actional verbs, considerably poorer than observed in the TD and WS groups. While the good performance of adults with WS might be due to individual variation, rather than continuous language development, we argue that the poor performance of participants with DS is due to an age-related decline of cognitive and language abilities, possibly linked to Alzheimer's-type dementia.
A-Chains and S-Homophones in Children's Grammar: Perhaps the most famous example of such misleadi... more A-Chains and S-Homophones in Children's Grammar: Perhaps the most famous example of such misleading behavior is children's performance on the Passive, a construction that develops notoriously late in many languages. The most well-known linguistic hypothesis about why this is so is that held by Borer and Wexler (1987). They argue for the A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis, which can be stated as follows (see Borer and Wexler 1992, fn. 13, for the sketch ofa theory as to why only object to subject A-chains are affected, and not subject raising out ofVP): (1) A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH) Object-to-Subject A-Chains are ungrammatical for a child until a certain age of maturation. As Borer and Wexler (1987) argue, ACDH predicts that: • We would like to thank E. Christodoulou for carrying out the experiment for us. See her report Christodoulou (200 I). Also, thanks to S. Iatridou for comments on this work and discussion on the Greek passive.
A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that mov... more A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that movement of objects is more difficult than movement of subjects. This asymmetry has been most frequently observed with relative clauses (de Villiers et al. 1979, Correa 1995, Friedmann and Novogrodski 2004, Adani 2011, Guasti et al. 2012, a.o), but has also been reported, to a lesser extent, with wh-questions (Tyack and Ingram 1977, Stromswold 1995, Philip et al. 2000) and clefts (Bever 1979, Lempert and Kinsbourne 1980, Hirsch and Wexler 2006). This asymmetry is not straightforwardly predicted by syntactic theories of movement, according to which A-bar dependencies can be established while skipping over elements that do not have properties directly relevant to that particular A-bar operation. For instance, the NP the dog in (1) is taken to be irrelevant for the computation of the wh-dependency, since it is not a wh-phrase and cannot participate in whquestion formation to begin with (see e....
ABSTRACTAlthough pragmatic deficits are well documented in autism, little is known about the exte... more ABSTRACTAlthough pragmatic deficits are well documented in autism, little is known about the extent to which grammatical knowledge in this disorder is deficient, or merely delayed when compared to that of typically developing children functioning at similar linguistic or cognitive levels. This study examines the knowledge of constraints on the interpretation of personal and reflexive pronouns, an aspect of grammar not previously investigated in autism, and known to be subject to differential developmental schedules in unimpaired development. Fourteen children with autism (chronological age = 6–17 years, M = 11) showed some difficulties comprehending personal pronouns, no different from those observed in two groups of younger controls matched on nonverbal IQ or receptive grammar, but in line with the reported pragmatic deficits and general language delay in this population. However, their interpretation of reflexives was significantly worse than that of the control children. This pat...
Departing from Lenneberg’s biological conception of language and its de- velopment, this paper fi... more Departing from Lenneberg’s biological conception of language and its de- velopment, this paper first reviews select examples from research on lan- guage development and its interface with genetics before making some specific proposals with regard to how the genetics of grammar could be investigated. The central proposal of this paper is that an important, per- haps necessary, avenue for studying the genetics of grammar is to study the genotypes corresponding to phenotypes of child (and genetically im- paired) versions of the computational system of grammar, as opposed to strictly descriptive measures of a construction or standardized linguistic tests. In some cases, these phenotypes have wide explanatory ability, sug- gesting that they directly involve parts of the computational system of lan- guage. The primary example discussed is the phenotype of the Unique Checking Constraint (UCC). In particular, it is proposed that one could usefully start to investigate the genetic basis for ...
Biolinguistics aims to shed light on the specifically biological nature of human language, focusi... more Biolinguistics aims to shed light on the specifically biological nature of human language, focusing on five foundational questions: (1) What are the properties of the language phenotype? (2) How does language ability grow and mature in individuals? (3) How is language put to use? (4) How is language implemented in the brain? (5) What evolutionary processes led to the emergence of language? These foundational questions are used here to frame a discussion of important issues in the study of language, exploring whether our linguistic capacity is the result of direct selective pressure or due to developmental or biophysical constraints, and assessing whether the neural/computational components entering into language are unique to human language or shared with other cognitive systems, leading to a discussion of advances in theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, comparative animal behavior and psychology, genetics/genomics, disciplines that can now place these longstanding questions ...
While it is clear that the study of language development contributes to linguistic theory, it is ... more While it is clear that the study of language development contributes to linguistic theory, it is perhaps less widely recognized that by examining the time course of language development we can integrate the study of language into the broader study of biological development. The hope persists that this type of analysis will play a role in the genetic underpinnings of language, as it has already done in some areas of grammar. 1 One area of grammar notorious for demonstrating late development involves various kinds of long-distance dependencies. In their comparative analysis of the development of different linguistic structures, Borer and Wexler (1987) argued that structures containing A-chains develop late.2 We will base our study on more up-to-date and empirically correct versions of Borer and Wexler’s A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH), but the logic is the same: certain grammatical representations allowed by Universal Grammar (UG) are ungrammatical for young children because of cons...
A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that mov... more A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that movement of objects is more difficult than movement of subjects. This asymmetry has been most frequently observed with relative clauses (de Villiers et al. 1979, Correa 1995, Friedmann and Novogrodski 2004, Adani 2011, Guasti et al. 2012, a.o), but has also been reported, to a lesser extent, with wh-questions (Tyack and Ingram 1977, Stromswold 1995, Philip et al. 2000) and clefts (Bever 1979, Lempert and Kinsbourne 1980, Hirsch and Wexler 2006). This asymmetry is not straightforwardly predicted by syntactic theories of movement, according to which A-bar dependencies can be established while skipping over elements that do not have properties directly relevant to that particular A-bar operation. For instance, the NP the dog in (1) is taken to be irrelevant for the computation of the wh-dependency, since it is not a wh-phrase and cannot participate in whquestion formation to begin with (see e....
This study investigates the knowledge of binding in 21 English-speaking children with SLI, aged 6... more This study investigates the knowledge of binding in 21 English-speaking children with SLI, aged 6;08-16;05, compared to 21 children with WS, language-and age-matched, and 21 language-matched control children, aged 4-7;10. Our results demonstrate no difficulties in the interpretation of reflexive or personal pronouns in SLI, revealing an intact knowledge of reflexive binding, as well as spared pragmatic functioning. Children with WS however show difficulties with their interpretation of pronouns, accepting the local binding of a pronoun, indicating impaired pragmatics. Not surprisingly, our language-matched typical controls, aged between 4-7;08 (M=5;03), showed a classic pattern of the Apparent Delay of Principle B Effect (ADPBE). In view of reported pragmatic but not memory deficits in WS, we interpret our results as consistent with the pragmatic deficit explanation but not the memory deficit explanation of the ADPBE.
A straightforward derivation of the effective quark Lagrangian is presented for the topologically... more A straightforward derivation of the effective quark Lagrangian is presented for the topologically neutral chiral broken phase of the dilute instanton gas. The resulting quark Lagrangian is a nonlocal NJL-type and contains 4q, 6q,... vertices for any number of flavours.
Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2007
While it is clear that the study of language development contributes to linguistic theory, it is ... more While it is clear that the study of language development contributes to linguistic theory, it is perhaps less widely recognized that by examining the time course of language development we can integrate the study of language into the broader study of biological development. The hope persists that this type of analysis will play a role in the genetic underpinnings of language, as it has already done in some areas of grammar. 1 One area of grammar notorious for demonstrating late development involves various kinds of long-distance dependencies. In their comparative analysis of the development of different linguistic structures, Borer and Wexler (1987) argued that structures containing A-chains develop late. 2 We will base our study on more up-to-date and empirically correct versions of Borer and Wexler's A-Chain Deficit Hypothesis (ACDH), but the logic is the same: certain grammatical representations allowed by Universal Grammar (UG) are ungrammatical for young children because of constraints imposed by their particular biology as opposed to adult biology. The basic argument for such maturation is Borer and Wexler's (1987) "Triggering Problem" (Babyonyshev, Ganger, Pesetsky and Wexler's (2001) "Argument from the Abundance of the Stimulus" (AOS)) that parallels Chomsky's argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus (POS; following Descartes). Since evidence for a particular structure is abundant in the input, why should it take so long for the structure to develop? Both the AOS and the POS provide evidence for biological (genetic) underpinnings of linguistic representations. In this paper, we present evidence for the late development of one structure in particular: subject-to-subject raising, thus providing evidence for the role of biology in the development of linguistic structure. At the same time, developmental evidence can play a role in helping to determine the correct linguistic analysis of structures. Given good evidence for the developmental delay of a certain grammatical process G, then if a structure S is found not to be delayed, this provides evidence that S in fact does not make use of G. In this regard, subject-tosubject raising provides an important test case. According to the theory of development * We would like to thank
This study investigated knowledge of binding and raising in two groups of children with Williams ... more This study investigated knowledge of binding and raising in two groups of children with Williams syndrome (WS), 6-12 and 12-16 years old, compared to typically developing (TD) controls matched on non-verbal MA, verbal MA, and grammar. In typical development, difficulties interpreting pronouns, but not reflexives, persist until the age of around 6, while raising is not mastered until about the age of 8 or 9. If grammar in WS is delayed, but develops in a fashion parallel to TD population, similar patterns of difficulties may be expected, although it has not been established whether the grammatical development is ever complete in the individuals with this disorder. Knowledge of the principle of binding which states that a reflexive must have a c-commanding antecedent, was found to be intact in all the participants, in line with previous reports in the literature. In contrast, children with WS younger than 12 showed a poorer performance on personal pronouns, like two groups of younger ...
There were some boys and some girls, and suddenly one of them laughed out loud. Can you tell me w... more There were some boys and some girls, and suddenly one of them laughed out loud. Can you tell me who?" says the experimenter. "The girl!" retorts a 4-year-old child. This paper readdresses the issue of young English children's misinterpretation and misuse of the definite determiner 'the' as 'one of', especially in such partitive contexts, where neither the speaker nor the listener know the identity of the referent and where an adult would use the indefinite article. Are children unaware of states of other's minds and are Egocentric or do they not know what 'the', the most common word of English, means? Previously, the former was invoked as an explanation for children's errors (Maratsos 1974, based on Piaget 1955), however given a recently proposed alternative, that children have problems with Uniqueness, a key component of the semantic definition of 'the' (Wexler 2005, based on Heim 1991), there are now two views that can be explicitly contrasted. The goal of this paper is to begin distinguishing the possible pragmatic and/or cognitive deficits on the children's part, from the possible computational deficits of children's as-yet-undeveloped linguistic semantic system. 2. Children's overuse of 'the'
Not only do (English-speaking) children have difficulty with passives, but they have much greater... more Not only do (English-speaking) children have difficulty with passives, but they have much greater difficulty with passives involving “psychological ” verbs (1)
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Papers by Kenneth Wexler