2018 Sat Session C 1630

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Session C, Terrace Lounge | 4:30pm

Intervention and Animacy Effects in the Acquisition of Sluicing and Relative Clauses
V. Mateu, N. Hyams

A consistent finding for the acquisition of A’-dependencies is that children find headed object dependencies harder to comprehend than subject dependencies (e.g., Friedmann et al., 2009; Yoshinaga, 1996). Various studies have also shown that performance on object relatives (OR) improves significantly when the object is inanimate and the subject is animate (e.g., Bentea et al. 2016; Brandt et al., 2009).

Grammatical accounts such as Relativized Minimality (Rizzi, 1990) capture this behavior in terms of intervention effects –for children, moving an object past the subject is harder when the two share certain morphosyntactic features (Friedmann et al., 2009). A mismatch in animacy features should therefore improve their performance in object-extracted structures, provided that [animacy] is part of the computation for intervention.

This study tests children’s comprehension of two constructions: relative clauses (e.g., Point to the boy that the girl is pushing _) and sluiced wh-questions (e.g., The girl is pushing someone, can you see who <the girl is pushing _>?). The purpose is two-fold: (i) to further examine the role of animacy in the comprehension of these constructions, and (ii) to provide additional experimental evidence for theoretical analyses that posit that the ellipsis site has a fully articulated (but unpronounced) TP structure from which the wh-phrase has been extracted (Merchant, 2001), and which consequently predict a subject>object asymmetry.

Sixty children aged 3-6 were tested using a character-selection task in a 2×2×2 design (subject/object extraction × animate/inanimate subject × animate/inanimate object) for both relative clauses (1) and sluiced wh-questions (2).

Our relative clause results replicated previous findings that showed a subject>object asymmetry, F(1,224) = 42.746, p <.001 (Table 1). We also found that OR comprehension improves significantly when the subject and object mismatch in animacy features, p =.01, but not in the case of SR, p =.387.

Results from the sluicing task confirm that children show a subject>object asymmetry with this construction as well, F(1,224) = 25.82, p <.001 (Table 2) (see Mateu et al. 2017), consistent with analyses that posit structure at the ellipsis site (Merchant, 2001). Additionally, we again find that children do better with object sluices when subject and object are mismatched in animacy features, p =.001 –but they do not show this disparity with subject sluices, p =.905.

Notably, children performed better with object-extracted constructions containing an animate subject and inanimate object/head than in sentences with an inanimate subject and animate object/head, a result that may be explained in terms of higher frequency in the input (e.g. Brandt et al., 2009) or the Animacy Hierarchy (Silverstein, 1976). However, we also found that children performed equally poorly on animate subject–animate object/head sentences, the second most frequent combination, as on inanimate subject–inanimate object/head sentences, a very infrequent combination (Diessel, 2009), and at ceiling in all the subject-extracted sentences, irrespective of animacy. Neither frequency nor the Animacy Hierarchy alone can explain our results. Rather, we show that animacy mismatches aid the comprehension of crossing dependencies, and specifically, we propose that [animacy] should be included in the computation of intervention.

Selected References:

Bentea, A., Durrleman, S., & Rizzi, L. (2016). Refining intervention: the acquisition of featural relations in object A-bar dependencies. Lingua, 169, 21-41.

Brandt, S., Kidd, E., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2009). The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of  young   German   and   English-speaking   children’s   comprehension   of   relative clauses. Cognitive Linguistics, 20(3), 539-570.

Friedmann, N., Belletti, A. & Rizzi, L. (2009). Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua 119:67-88.

Mateu, V., Winans, L, & Hyams, N. (2017). Intervention effects in early grammar: Evidence from sluicing. Talk presented at BUCLD 42. Boston, MA. November 2017.

Merchant, J. (2001). The Syntax of Sluicing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.