Age of acquisition and proficiency as factors in language production: Agreement in bilinguals

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
REBECCA FOOTE
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Verb Number

Research on the production of subject–verb number agreement in monolinguals suggests differences between and within languages in how it proceeds as a function of morphological richness. When agreement morphology is relatively rich, the influence of conceptual number over grammatical number is less than when it is relatively poor. Within the framework of Eberhard, Cutting and Bock's (2005) marking and morphing account of agreement production, this finding is explained by how number features from the syntax and the lexicon are reconciled. This study asks: (1) Can this account of differences in agreement production as a function of morphological richness be extended to the case of bilinguals? (2) Do age of acquisition and/or proficiency modulate whether these differences surface in bilinguals? Agreement production was examined in early and late English–Spanish, and late Spanish–English bilinguals of varying proficiency. Higher-proficiency bilinguals patterned similarly to monolinguals, supporting the extension of the marking and morphing account.

scholarly journals Conceptual effects on agreement: A corpus study of mismatch in English copular constructions

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Cecily Jill Duffield
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Information ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Conceptual Relationship

Research on the production of subject-verb agreement has focused on the features of the subject rather than the larger construction in which subject-verb agreement is produced or how the conceptual relationship between subjects and predicates may interact in affecting subject-verb agreement patterns. This corpus study describes subject-verb number agreement mismatch in English copular constructions which take the frame of (SEMANTICALLY LIGHT) N + [REL] + COP + (SPECIFIC) PRED NOM, where the copula reflects the grammatical number of the predicate. Results suggest that speakers make use of conceptual information from the entire construction, and not just the subject, when formulating agreement morphology.

scholarly journals Gradience in subject–verb number agreement: Can bilinguals tune in?

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 1523-1551
Author(s):  
Anna Jessen ◽  
Lara Schwarz ◽  
Claudia Felser
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Relative Strength ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Bilingual Group ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
Verb Number

AbstractThis study investigates native German speakers’ and bilingual Turkish/German speakers’ sensitivity to constraints on verbal agreement with pseudo-partitive subjects such as eine Packung Tabletten (“a pack of pills”). Although number agreement with the first noun phrase (headed by a container noun) is considered to be the norm, agreement with the second (containee) noun phrase is also possible. We combined scalar acceptability ratings with a stochastic constraint-based grammatical framework to model the relative strength of the constraints that determine speakers’ agreement preferences and subsequently tested whether these models could correctly predict speakers’ verb choices in a production task. For both participant groups, number match between the container noun phrase and the verb was the strongest determinant of both acceptability and production choices. The relative ranking of the constraints that we identified was the same for both groups, and the lack of age-of-acquisition effects suggests that constraints on variable subject–verb agreement, and their relative strength, are acquirable by both early and later learners of German. Group differences were seen in the absolute constraint weightings, however, with the bilinguals’ agreement preferences being more strongly influenced by number match with the containee phrase, indicating a comparatively greater reliance on surface-level cues to agreement (such as noun proximity) among the bilingual group.

scholarly journals Subject–Verb Number Agreement in Bilingual Processing: (Lack of) Age of Acquisition and Proficiency Effects

Languages ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Nuria Sagarra ◽  
Nicole Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Critical Period ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Tracking Data ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Perceptual Salience ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Bilingual Processing ◽  
Verb Number

Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Spanish monolinguals and intermediate and advanced early and late bilinguals of Spanish read sentences with adjacent subject–verb number agreements and violations and chose one of four pictures. Eye-tracking data revealed that all groups were sensitive to the violations and attended more to more salient plural and preterit verbs than less obvious singular and present verbs, regardless of AoA and proficiency level. We conclude that the processing of adjacent SV agreement depends on perceptual salience and language use, rather than AoA or proficiency. These findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition.

Nominal Number and Language Pathologies

2021 ◽  
pp. 290-304
Author(s):  
Britta Biedermann ◽  
Nora Fieder ◽  
Karen Smith-Lock
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Developmental Delays ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Number Processing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Cognitive Neuropsychology ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter provides an overview of the evidence on grammatical number processing taken from cognitive neuropsychology, including developmental delays and impairments of language (e.g. developmental language disorder, and Williams syndrome) and aphasia, an acquired language impairment after brain injury. These types of language impairment can give insight into the functional architecture of nominal number processing by looking at error patterns that arise in each of the aforementioned populations. By classifying observed responses in language production tasks into non-number and number errors, we are able to reveal underlying mechanisms of syntactic rules and their representations when they develop, but also learn about processes and representation of number when this information breaks down.

scholarly journals A Self-Organizing Approach to Subject-Verb Number Agreement

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 1043-1074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrett Smith ◽  
Julie Franck ◽  
Whitney Tabor
Keyword(s):  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Self Organizing

scholarly journals Switching Between Noun and Verb Agreement Rules Comes at a Cost: Cross-Sectional and Interventional Studies in a Developmental Sample

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 226-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Van Reybroeck ◽  
Marie-Anne Schelstraete ◽  
Michel Hupet ◽  
Arnaud Szmalec
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
Sixth Grade ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Simple Treatment ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Switching Condition ◽  
Grade 3 ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Switching Treatment

ABSTRACT This study clarifies the impact of switching context between noun and verb number agreement rules in written language production. In Experiment 1, children from grade 3 to 6 were asked to fill in sentences with nouns and verbs in either a switching condition (noun followed by verb) or a repeating condition (noun followed by noun). The results showed that third- and fourth-grade children produced more erroneous agreements in the switching condition than in the repeating condition, showing that switching between rules comes at a cost, whereas fifth- and sixth-grade participants’ performance was not affected by the switching context. Based on these findings, Experiment 2 aimed to assess whether a switching treatment offers a greater opportunity to improve the acquisition of grammatical agreement production, as compared to a simple treatment. Teachers from grade 3 gave either a switching treatment (mixed noun and verb exercises) or a simple treatment (noun exercises followed by verb exercises). The results show that children learned better from the switching treatment than from the simple treatment. These findings highlight the cost of switching between noun and verb agreement rules during the acquisition of grammatical number agreement and also how grammatical spelling acquisition can be improved at school.

THE MULTIPLE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE PRONOUN ʾULĀʾIKA IN THE QURʾĀN

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Dror Yehudit
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Simple Sentence ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Demonstrative Pronoun ◽  
Anaphoric Pronouns ◽  
Left Dislocation ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
Grammatical Number

Demonstrative pronouns may function as deictic or anaphoric pronouns. The demonstrative pronoun ʾulāʾika in Arabic is the focus of this paper. It is argued that in the Qurʾān, besides being an anaphoric/resumptive pronoun, which primarily functions as the syntactic subject, it has three additional functions: (1) as a resumptive pronoun of the left-dislocation construction, helping in retrieving the predicate, which usually consists of a short clause following a ‘heavy’ subject. (2) Possibly it has the same function as ḍamīr al-faṣl, ‘separation pronoun’—namely, ʾulāʾika occurs in a simple sentence where it separates a definite subject and a definite predicate. It also occurs between subject and predicate, while both are constructed as relative clauses, and between a ‘heavy’ subject and indefinite predicate. (3) As a number marker in conditional clauses that are headed by the conditional particle man, and two kinds of number agreement are exhibited in the clause: singular and plural.ʾulāʾika in this case marks the transition from the grammatical-number feature associated with man to the notional number of man.

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