Image effects and long distance dependencies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2019/10/0013/000375Keywords:
relatrve clauses, sentence comprehension, featural interventionAbstract
This study aimed to distinguish the syntactic effect of syntactic movement/featural intervention from the post-syntactic effect of image complexity in children’s comprehension of object relative clauses and WH-questions in a picture-identification task. Data from Brazilian Portuguese-speaking seven-year-olds are analysed. The results indicate that image complexity amplifies the number of errors that might be ascribed to an intervention effect. Similar results on WH-questions suggest that the effect of syntactic movement at the interfaces suffices to account for the subject-object asymmetry. Implications for the identification of language impairment in the syntactic domain are considered.
References
Adani, F. 2011. Rethinking the acquisition of relative clauses in Italian: Towards a grammatically based account. Journal of Child Language, 38(1), 141–165.
Corrêa, L.M.S. 1995. The relative difficulty of children’s comprehension of relative clauses: A procedural account. In Nelson, K.E., Réger, Z. (Ed.), Children’s Language (vol.8) (pp. 225–244). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
de Villiers, J.G., Hakuta, K., Cohen, M. 1979. Children’s comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 8(5), 499–518.
Diessel, H., Tomasello, M. 2000. The development of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech. Cognitive Linguistics, 11(1/2), 131–151.
Friedmann, N., Belletti, A., Rizzi, L. 2009. Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua, 119(1), 67–88.
Gibson, E., Desmet, T., Grodner, D., Watson, D., Ko, K. 2005. Reading relative clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics, 16(2). 313–353.
Grillo, N. 2009. Generalized Minimality: Feature impoverishment and comprehension deficits in agrammatism. Lingua, 119(10), 1426–1443.
Wanner, E., Maratsos, M. 1978. An ATN approach to comprehension. In Halle, M, Bresnan, J., Miller, G.A. (Ed.), Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality (pp. 119–161). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
