Annual Review of Language Acquisition - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2002

The dissertation summarized here provides an account of the fact that young children acquiring English (around age 2) often produce utterances like (1), in which they omit a form of the copula, be. (1)I in the kitchen.Children’s production of forms like (1) is interesting for two main reasons: firstly, utterances like these do not occur in the input (adult English); secondly, children’s omission of the copula conforms to a systematic pattern (it is neither across the board, nor haphazard). In particular, children omit the copula far less frequently in utterances like (2). (2)He’s a dog.The difference between the constructions in (1) and (2) can be characterized in terms of the well-known semantic stage-level/individual-level contrast. That is, a location such as ‘in the kitchen’ denotes a stage-level property of the subject; a predicate such as ‘a dog’ denotes an individual-level property of the subject. I argue for a syntactic difference between stage- and individual-level predicates: stage-level predicates contain additional functional structure (AspP) that individual-level predicates lack. Cross-linguistic support for this proposal is provided. As for why children acquiring English omit the copula in main clauses, I link this to the fact that non-finite main clauses are permitted in child English. I define finiteness in terms of a binding relation between an abstract Tense Operator (TOP) (located in CP) and Infl. In certain grammars (among them child English) TOP may bind Asp instead of Infl, if Asp is projected in the particular clause. However, this binding relation does not result in the clause being finite. Since Asp is projected in clauses with stage-level predicates, but not in those with individual-level predicates, it follows that stage-level predicates may occur in non-finite clauses while individual-level predicates occur with a finite clause. Coupled with the hypothesis that an overt copula is finite (in the sample studied here it is inflected over 99% of the time) and an omitted copula indicates non-finiteness, the pattern of copula omission and production in child English is accounted for.

The present work is an attempt to explain how the structure of derived words influences the order of acquisition of word formation rules. Three main types of derivatives — transpositions, modifications and mutations — are investigated in Polish child language. The differences among the three categories (analyzed in nouns, verbs and adjectives) are discussed, regarding semantic and formal changes undergone in the process of forming complex words. It is claimed that semantic-formal correspondence is an essential factor influencing the order of acquisition of word formation rules. Modifications in which the correspondence is both preserved and has a simple character emerge earlier than the other types of derivatives — transpositions (the correspondence is broken) and mutations (the correspondence is complex). The proposal is said to be complementary to Clark’s principles of acquisition of complex words (Clark, 1993). Polish has a very rich word formation system (compared e.g. with English), thus the analysis of word formation acquisition in such a language seems to be especially important for developmental psycholinguistic research. The proposal is tested on four Polish children’s speech diaries available in CHILDES (Smoczynska, 1998). All data available from ages two to seven were analyzed. The analyses revealed that indeed modifications are acquired earlier than transpositions and mutations. The consequences of the finding for psycholinguistic theory are discussed.

Speech rhythm has long been claimed to be a useful bootstrapping cue in the very first steps of language acquisition. Previous studies have suggested that newborn infants do categorize varieties of speech rhythm, as demonstrated by their ability to discriminate between certain languages. However, the existing evidence is not unequivocal: in previous studies, stimuli discriminated by newborns always contained additional speech cues on top of rhythm. Here, we conducted a series of experiments assessing discrimination between Dutch and Japanese by newborn infants, using a speech resynthesis technique to progressively degrade non-rhythmical properties of the sentences. When the stimuli are resynthesized using identical phonemes and artificial intonation contours for the two languages, thereby preserving only their rhythmic and broad phonotactic structure, newborns still seem to be able to discriminate between the two languages, but the effect is weaker than when intonation is present. This leaves open the possibility that the temporal correlation between intonational and rhythmic cues might actually facilitate the processing of speech rhythm.

In this paper, I discuss a number of relations that take place between melodic content and higher prosodic structure in first language phonological development. I explore acquisition patterns found in data on the acquisition of Québec French. Starting with the observation that prosodic structure and, more specifically, stressed syllables, play a central role in phonological acquisition, I hypothesize that the inter-relations between prosodic and segmental structure posited by formal models of phonological organisation should be witnessed within and across developmental stages. I support this hypothesis through two findings from the French data. First, complex onsets emerge in stressed syllables before unstressed ones. Second, different types of consonants (placeless versus place-specified) emerge in word-final position at different stages. From these observations, I argue that the phenomena observed in these data are best captured in an analysis based on constituent structure and relationships between feature specification and prosodic constituency, which are governed by universal markedness.