Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model using an elicited imitation paradigm

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 879-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
BEN AMBRIDGE ◽  
JULIAN M. PINE
Keyword(s):  
Error Rate ◽  
Acceptable Level ◽  
Screening Procedure ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Chance Error ◽  
Feminine Pronoun

The present study used an elicited imitation paradigm to test the prediction of Schutze & Wexler's (1996) AGREEMENT/TENSE OMISSION MODEL (ATOM) that the rate of non-nominative subjects with agreement-marked verb forms will be sufficiently low that such errors can reasonably be disregarded as noise in the data. A screening procedure identified five children who produced non-nominative subject errors (all her for she) who were then asked to repeat 24 sentences with 3sg feminine pronoun subjects (she) and agreeing main verbs or auxiliaries. All five children produced at least one non-nominative subject (her) with an agreement-marked verb form, and for none of these five children was the non-NOM+AGR rate significantly different to the rate that would be expected by chance, given the independent frequencies of non-nominative subjects and agreement-marked verb forms in their data. The three children for whom this expected (by chance) error rate was significantly greater than 10% (representing an acceptable level of noise in the data) produced non-NOM+AGR errors at a rate significantly greater than 10%, counter to the prediction of the ATOM. These results replicate and extend the naturalistic-data findings of Pine et al. using a different method. They also provide support for the use of elicited imitation as a methodology for assessing children's early grammatical knowledge.

Elicited Imitation: Toward Valid Procedures to Measure Implicit Second Language Grammatical Knowledge

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICIA A. DUFF ◽  
YASUYO TOMITA ◽  
WATARU SUZUKI ◽  
LORENA JESSOP
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge

scholarly journals Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model: why the data on children's use of non-nominative 3psg subjects count against the ATOM

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIAN M. PINE ◽  
CAROLINE F. ROWLAND ◽  
ELENA V. M. LIEVEN ◽  
ANNA L. THEAKSTON
Keyword(s):  
Error Rate ◽  
Actual Rate ◽  
Expected Frequency ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Children's Speech ◽  
Model Atom ◽  
Reasonable Test

One of the most influential recent accounts of pronoun case-marking errors in young children's speech is Schütze & Wexler's (1996) Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). The ATOM predicts that the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects will be so low that such errors can be reasonably disregarded as noise in the data. The present study tests this prediction on data from 12 children between the ages of 1;8.22 and 3;0.10. This is done, first, by identifying children who produced a reasonably large number of non-nominative 3psg subjects; second, by estimating the expected rate of agreeing verbs with masculine and feminine non-nominative subjects in these children's speech; and, third, by examining the actual rate at which agreeing verb forms occurred with non-nominative subjects in those areas of the data in which the expected error rate was significantly greater than 10%. The results show, first, that only three of the children produced enough non-nominative subjects to allow a reasonable test of the ATOM to be made; second, that for all three of these children, the only area of the data in which the expected frequency of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects was significantly greater than 10% was their use of feminine case-marked subjects; and third, that for all three of these children, the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative feminine subjects was over 30%. These results raise serious doubts about the claim that children's use of non-nominative subjects can be explained in terms of AGR optionality, and suggest the need for a model of pronoun case-marking error that can explain why some children produce agreeing verb forms with non-nominative subjects as often as they do.

INCIDENTAL ACQUISITION OF GRAMMATICAL FEATURES DURING READING IN L1 AND L2

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denisa Bordag ◽  
Amit Kirschenbaum ◽  
Andreas Opitz ◽  
Maria Rogahn ◽  
Erwin Tschirner
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge ◽  
New Words ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
L1 And L2 ◽  
Morphological Markedness

The present study explores the initial stages of incidental acquisition of two grammatical properties of verbs (subcategorization and [ir]regularity) during reading in first language (L1) and second language (L2) German using an adjusted self-paced reading paradigm. The results indicate that L1 speakers are superior to L2 speakers in the incidental acquisition of grammatical knowledge (experiments on subcategorization), except when the new knowledge interferes with previously acquired knowledge and mechanisms (experiments on [ir]regularity): Although both populations performed equally well regarding the acquisition of the subcategorization of verbs from the input (i.e., whether the verbs are transitive or intransitive), they differed with respect to the regularity status of new verbs. L1 speakers (in contrast to L2 learners) seem to disprefer irregularly conjugated verb forms in general, irrespective of their conjugation in the previous input. The results further show that the syntactic complexity of the context and morphological markedness positively affect the incidental acquisition of new words in the L2, triggering learners’ shift of attention from the text level to the word level.

The emergence of grammar: early verbs and beyond

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-877 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHARON ARMON-LOTEM ◽  
RUTH A. BERMAN
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Clear Pattern ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge ◽  
Semantic Roles ◽  
Strong Basis ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Emergent Grammar ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Word Forms

The paper examines the first twenty verb-forms recorded for six Hebrew-speaking children aged between 1;2 and 2;1, and how they evolve into fully inflected verbs for three of these children. Discussion focuses first on what word-forms children initially select for the verbs they produce, what role these forms play in children's emergent grammar, and how emergent grammar is reflected in the acquisition of fully inflected forms of verbs. Children's early verb repertoire indicates that they possess a strong basis for moving into the expression of a variety of semantic roles and the syntax of a range of different verb–argument structures. On the other hand, children's initial use of verbs demonstrates that they still need to acquire considerable language-particular grammatical knowledge in order to encode such relations explicitly. This language-particular knowledge demonstrates a clear pattern of acquisition, in which aspect precedes inflectional marking for gender, followed by tense, and then by person.

scholarly journals Verb placement in second language acquisition: Experimental evidence for the different behavior of auxiliary and lexical verbs

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 821-858 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSJE VERHAGEN
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Production Data ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge ◽  
Verb Placement ◽  
Sentence Matching

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the acquisition of verb placement by Moroccan and Turkish second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Elicited production data corroborate earlier findings from L2 German that learners who do not produce auxiliaries do not raise lexical verbs over negation, whereas learners who produce auxiliaries do. Data from elicited imitation and sentence matching support this pattern and show that learners can have grammatical knowledge of auxiliary placement before they can produce auxiliaries. With lexical verbs, they do not show such knowledge. These results present further evidence for the different behavior of auxiliary and lexical verbs in early stages of L2 acquisition.

The role of grammar in spelling homophonous regular verbs

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-80
Author(s):  
Robert J. P. M. Chamalaun ◽  
Anna M. T. Bosman ◽  
Mirjam T. C. Ernestus
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge ◽  
Spelling Errors ◽  
Target Form ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Secondary School Pupils ◽  
Grammatical Functions

Abstract Can a lack of grammatical knowledge alone be held accountable for the spelling errors that are made for homophonous verb forms and do these errors occur because spellers do not apply their grammatical knowledge? Three experiments with secondary school pupils were conducted on Dutch weak prefix verbs. The results confirmed that pupils made many spelling errors and also have great problems identifying the verb forms’ functions. Moreover, a direct correlation was revealed between a pupil’s identification of the form’s grammatical function and its spelling. These results indicate that many errors result from pupils’ inability to determine the grammatical functions of the forms. If pupils know the form’s function, they are more likely to also spell the form correctly. If they do not, they often choose the form’s homophone, especially if the homophone is more frequent than the target form. Spelling education thus needs a strong grammatical basis.

Sentence imitations in monolingual and early second language learners and the implications for grammar teaching

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-183
Author(s):  
Valentina Cristante
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Reliable Data ◽  
The Other ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge ◽  
Grammar Teaching ◽  
Case Marking

Abstract In the present article I investigated whether data obtained from 7-year-old German L1 and German-Turkish eL2 children by means of an elicited imitation task including grammatical and ungrammatical sentences mirrored current findings in acquisition research concerning case marking, adjective inflection, V2 position and finiteness. The results show that L1 children have full mastery of all four phenomena, as they revealed a greater tendency to correct ungrammatical sentences than to introduce errors into grammatical sentences. On the other hand, eL2 children differed from L1 children in terms of how they dealt with the noun-related phenomena, as they did not reveal a clear preference for either changing grammatical items or correcting ungrammatical items. In the discussion, I propose how to minimise the likelihood that participants simply repeat ungrammatical items verbatim in further imitation studies and be thus able to collect more reliable data on their grammatical knowledge. The article ends with a proposal for a primary school exercise on case marking that involves correcting errors on case marking. The suggestion is that ungrammatical sentences can be used in grammar teaching to assess pupils’ linguistic knowledge and also to guide their attention to specific regularities of the language, thus stimulating language reflection.

The Elicited Language Analysis Procedure

1982 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Larry J. Mattes
Keyword(s):  
Diagnostic Tool ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Quality Measures ◽  
Analysis Procedure ◽  
Elicited Imitation ◽  
Response Quality ◽  
Semantic Relationships ◽  
Language Analysis

Elicited imitation tasks are frequently used as a diagnostic tool in evaluating children with communication handicaps. This article presents a scoring procedure that can be used to obtain an in-depth descriptive analysis of responses produced on elicited imitation tasks. The Elicited Language Analysis Procedure makes it possible to systematically evaluate responses in terms of both their syntactic and semantic relationships to the stimulus sentences presented by the examiner. Response quality measures are also included in the analysis procedure.

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