Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T02:05:53.921Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reduced auxiliaries in early child language: Converging observational and experimental evidence from French1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2010

CRISTINA D. DYE
CRISTINA D. DYE*
Affiliation:
University of Salford & Georgetown University
*
Author's address: Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, University of Salford, Greater Manchester M5 4WT, UK & Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Since early studies in language development, scholars have noticed that function words, in particular auxiliaries, often appear to be missing in early speech, with the result that child utterances sometimes exhibit verbs with non-finite morphology in seemingly matrix clauses. This has led to the idea of a ‘deficit’ in the child's syntactic representations. In contrast with previous studies, this article explores the possibility that the child's phonology may considerably impact her overt realization of auxiliaries. Specifically, it examines the hypothesis that non-finite verbs in early speech are in fact attempted periphrastics (i.e. auxiliary/modal+non-finite verb) in which the auxiliaries are just reduced phonetically, often to the point where they remain unpronounced. We studied 28 normally developing French-speaking children aged between 23 and 37 months. New observational data uncovered a continuum in a given child's phonetic realizations of auxiliaries. Children showed various levels of auxiliary reduction, suggesting that their non-finite verbs are best analyzed as being part of periphrastics involving an auxiliary form that represents the endpoint on this continuum, i.e. is (completely) deleted. Further examination of these verbs revealed that their semantics corresponds to the semantics of adult periphrastics. Additionally, the results of an experiment where children imitated sentences with either periphrastic or synthetic verbs showed that responses with non-finite verbs were predominantly produced when the target sentence involved a periphrastic, rather than a synthetic verb.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , July 2011 , pp. 301 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[1]

I am deeply indebted to Barbara Lust, Yasuhiro Shirai, and especially John Whitman for significant contributions. My gratitude also goes to the following: Marc Brunelle, Allan Dye, Claire Foley, Ewa Jaworska, Yumiko Nishi, Carol Rosen, Nick Sobin, Michael Ullman, Lisa Zsiga, an anonymous JL referee, as well as the children, parents, and daycare staff. This research is based on data collected for my 2005 doctoral dissertation, which was supported by a Sicca Research Grant and a Cognitive Studies Fellowship from Cornell University. The speech samples are available through the Virtual Center for Language Acquisition (VCLA, http://vcla.clal.cornell.edu).

References

REFERENCES

Bassano, Dominique, Laaha, Sabine, Maillochon, Isabelle & Dressler, Wolfgang. 2004. Early acquisition of verb grammar and lexical development: Evidence from periphrastic constructions in French and Austrian German. First Language 24, 33–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bassano, Dominique, Maillochon, Isabelle & Mottet, Sylvain. 2008. Noun grammaticalization and determiner use in French children's speech: A gradual development with prosodic and lexical influences. Journal of Child Language 35.2, 403–438.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, Elizabeth, Dale, Philip & Thal, Donna. 1995. Individual differences and their implications for theories of language development. In Fletcher, Paul & MacWhinney, Brian (eds.), The handbook of child language, 96–151. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bavin, Edith (ed.). 2009. The Cambridge handbook of child language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Allan, Brenier, Jason, Gregory, Michelle, Girand, Cynthia & Jurafsky, Dan. 2009. Predictability effects on durations of content and function words in conversational English. Journal of Memory and Language 60.1, 92–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Alan, Jurafsky, Daniel, Lussier, Eric Fosler, Girand, Cynthia & Gildea, Daniel. 1999. Forms of English function words: Effects of disfluencies, turn position, age and sex, and predictability. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) 14, 395–398.Google Scholar
Bernal, Savita, Lidz, Jeffrey, Millotte, Severine & Christophe, Anne. 2007. Syntax constrains the acquisition of verb meaning. Language Learning and Development 3, 325–342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloom, Lois. 1970. Language development: Form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Borer, Hagit & Rohrbacher, Bernhard. 2002. Minding the absent: Arguments for the full competence hypothesis. Language Acquisition 10, 123–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boser, Katerina. 1997. The acquisition of word order knowledge in early child German: Interactions between syntax and pragmatics. Ph.D dissertation, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Boser, Katerina, Lust, Barbara, Santelmann, Lynn & Whitman, John. 1992. The syntax of CP and V-2 in early child German: The strong continuity hypothesis. The North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 22, 51–66.Google Scholar
Bowerman, Melissa. 1973. Early syntactic development: A cross-linguistic study with special reference to Finnish. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Braine, Martin. 1963. The ontogeny of English phrase structure: The first phase. Language 39, 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Browman, Catherine & Goldstein, Louis. 1992. Articulatory phonology: An overview. Phonetica 49, 155–180.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, Roger. 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, Allyson & Gerken, LouAnn. 2004. Do children's omissions leave traces? Journal of Child Language 31, 561–586.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin and use. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Clark, Eve. 2009. First language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culbertson, Jennifer. 2010. Convergent evidence for categorical change in French: From subject clitic to agreement marker. Language 86.1, 85–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Lisa. 2006. Schwa elision in fast speech: Segmental deletion or gestural overlap? Phonetica 63, 79–112.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Boysson-Bardies, Bénédicte. 2001. How language comes to children. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
De Cat, Cécile. 2005. French subject clitics are not agreement markers. Lingua 115, 1195–1219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delforge, Ann Marie. 2008. Unstressed vowel reduction in Andean Spanish. In Colantoni, Laura & Steele, Jeffrey (eds.), 3rd Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology, 107–124. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Demuth, Katherine. 1994. On the underspecification of functional categories in early grammars. In , Lust et al. (eds.), 119–134.Google Scholar
Demuth, Katherine. 2007. Acquisition at the prosody–morphology interface. In Belikova, Alyona, Meroni, Luisa & Umeda, Mari (eds.), Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA 2), 84–91. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Demuth, Katherine. 2009. The prosody of syllables, words and morphemes. In , Bavin (ed.), 183–198.Google Scholar
Demuth, Katherine & Ellis, David. 2009. Revisiting the acquisition of Sesotho noun class prefixes. In Guo, Jiansheng, Lieven, Elena, Budwig, Nancy, Ervin-Tripp, Susan, Nakamura, Keiko & Ozcaliskan, Seyda (eds.), Cross-linguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Festschrift for Dan Slobin, 93–104. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Demuth, Katherine & Elizabeth McCullough, E. 2009. The prosodic (re)organization of children's early English articles. Journal of Child Language 36, 173–200.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Demuth, Katherine, Patrolia, Meghan, Song, Jae Yung & Masapollo, Matt. 2010. The development of articles in children's early Spanish: Prosodic interactions between lexical and grammatical form. Ms., Brown University & University of Michigan. http://www.cog.brown.edu/~demuth/Articles/2009Demuth-SpanishArticles.pdf (retrieved 15 November 2010). [To appear in First Language.]Google Scholar
Demuth, Katherine & Tremblay, Annie. 2008. Prosodically-conditioned variability in children's production of French determiners. Journal of Child Language 35, 99–127.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dye, Cristina D., Foley, Claire, Blume, Maria & Lust, Barbara. 2004. Syntax first: Mismatches between morphology and syntax in first language acquisition elucidate linguistic theory. Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 28, proceedings supplement http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/BUCLD/supp.html (retrieved 12 July 2010).Google Scholar
Dye, Cristina D., Foley, Claire & Lust, Barbara. 2002. Dissociating finiteness from morphology: New evidence from the acquisition of verbal inflection in French. Presented at the 32nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Toronto, Canada.Google Scholar
Ezeizabarrena, Maria Jose. 2002. Root infinitives in two pro-drop languages. In Teresa Pérez-Leroux, Ana & Liceras, Juana Muñoz (eds.), The acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax: The L1/L2 connection, 33–64. Amsterdam: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Gerken, LouAnn. 1991. The metrical basis of children's subjectless sentences. Journal of Memory and Language 30, 431–451.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerken, LouAnn. 1996. Prosodic structure in young children's language production. Language 72, 683–712.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, Susan, Mylander, Carolyn & Franklin, Amy. 2007. How children make language out of gesture: Morphological structure in gesture systems developed by American and Chinese deaf children. Cognitive Psychology 55, 87–135.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grigos, Maria & Patel, Rupal. 2007. Articulator movement associated with the development of prosodic control in children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 50.1, 119.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grimshaw, Jane. 1981. Form, function and the language acquisition device. In Baker, Carl L. & McCarthy, John (eds.), The logical problem of language acquisition, 163–182. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Tony & Wexler, Kenneth. 1996. The optional-infinitive stage in child English. In Clahsen, Harald (ed.), Generative perspectives on language acquisition, 1–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hauser, Marc, Barner, David & O'Donnell, Tim. 2007. Evolutionary linguistics: A new look at an old landscape. Language Learning and Development 3, 101–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hock, Hans & Joseph, Brian. 1996. Language history, language change and language relationship. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hoekstra, Teun & Hyams, Nina. 1996. Missing heads in child language. In Koster, Charles & Wijnen, Frank (eds.), Groningen Assembly on Language Development, 251–260. Groningen: University of Groningen, Centre for Language and Cognition.Google Scholar
Hoekstra, Teun & Hyams, Nina. 1998. Aspects of root infinitives. Lingua 106, 81–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Höhle, Barbara. 2009. Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization in early language aquisition. In Bavin, (ed.), 125–144.Google Scholar
Höhle, Barbara & Weisseborn, Jurgen. 2003. German-learning infants' ability to detect unstressed closed-class elements in continuous speech. Developmental Science 6.1, 22–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Höhle, Barbara, Weisseborn, Jurgen, Keifer, Dorothea, Schultz, Antje & Schmitz, Michaela. 2004. Functional elements in infants' speech processing: The role of determiners in syntactic categorization of lexical elements. Infancy 5, 341–353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyams, Nina. 2007. Aspect matters. In Deen, Kamil Ud, Nomura, Jun, Schulz, Barbara & Schwartz, Bonnie D. (eds.), Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA) (University of Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics 4.1), 1–19.Google Scholar
Ingram, David. 1976. Phonological disability in children (Studies in Language Disability and Remediation 2). London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Ingram, David & Thompson, William. 1996. Early syntactic acquisition in German: Evidence for the Modal Hypothesis. Language 72, 97–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon & Rose, Yvan. 2007. Positional neutralization: A case study from child language. Language 83, 707–736.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jordens, Peter. 1990. The acquisition of verb placement. Linguistics 28, 1407–1448.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Josefsson, Gunlog. 2002. The use and function of non-finite root clauses in Swedish child language. Language Acquisition 10.4, 273–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jurafsky, Dan, Bell, Allan, Fosler-Lussier, Eric, Girana, Cynthia & Raymond, Wiliam. 1998. Reduction of English function words in Switchboard. In Mannell, Robert H & Robert-Ribes, Jordi (eds.), International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP'98), vol. 7, 3111–3114. Australian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA).Google Scholar
Kedar, Yarden. 2009. The role of functional categories in first language acquisition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Kedar, Yarden, Casasola, Marianella & Lust, Barbara. 2006. Getting there faster: 18- and 24-month-old infants' use of function words to determine reference. Child Development 77, 325–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kent, Raymond D. 1992. The biology of phonological development. In Ferguson, Charles A., Menn, Lise & Stoel-Gammon, Carol (eds.), Phonological development: Models, research, implications, 65–90. Timonium, MD: York Press.Google Scholar
Kilani-Schoch, Marianne & Dressler, Wolfgang. 2001. Filler+infinitive and pre- and protomorphology demarcation in a French acquisition corpus. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 30, 653–685.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirk, Cecilia. 2008. Substitution errors in the production of word-initial and word-final consonant clusters. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 51, 35–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Labelle, Marie. 2000. Root infinitives in child language. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 45, 159–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1969. Contraction, deletion, and the inherent variability of the English copula. Language 45, 715–762.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1995. The case of the missing copula: The interpretation of zeros in African-American English. In Gleitman, Lila R. & Liberman, Mark (eds.), An invitation to cognitive sciences, vol. 1: Language, 25–54. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1981. Topic, antitopic and verb agreement in non-standard French. Amsterdam: John Banjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lavoie, Lisa. 2002. Some influences on the realization of ‘for’ and ‘four’ in American English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 32.2, 175–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Legendre, Géraldine, Culbertson, Jennifer, Barrière, Isabelle, Nazzi, Thierry & Goyet, Louise. 2010. Experimental and empirical evidence for the status and acquisition of subject clitics and agreement marking in adult and child Spoken French. In Torrens, Vincenç, Escobar, Linda, Gavarro, Anna & Gutierrez, Juncal (eds.), Movement and clitics, 333–360. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Lleó, Conxita. 1998. Proto-articles in the acquisition of Spanish: Interface between phonology and morphology. In Fabri, Ray, Ortmann, Albert & Parodi, Teresa (eds.), Models of inflection, 175–195. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lleó, Conxita & Demuth, Katherine. 1999. Prosodic constraints on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Cross-linguistic evidence from Germanic and Romance languages. In Greenhill, Annabel, Littlefield, Heather & Tano, Cheryl (eds.), Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 23, 407–418. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Lust, Barbara. 1999. Universal grammar: The strong continuity hypothesis in first language acquisition. In Bhatia, Tej & Ritchie, William (eds.), Handbook of child language acquisition, 111–156. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Lust, Barbara. 2006. Child language: Acquisition and growth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lust, Barbara, Flynn, Suzanne & Foley, Claire. 1996. What children know about what they say: Elicited imitation as a research method for assessing children's syntax. In McDaniel, Dana, McKee, Cecile & Cairns, Helen Smith (eds.), Methods for assessing children's syntax, 55–76. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lust, Barbara, Suñer, Margarita & Whitman, John (eds.). 1994. Syntactic theory and first language acquisition, vol 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Nittrouer, Susan. 1993. The emergence of mature gestural patterns is not uniform: Evidence from an acoustic study. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 959–972.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, Ann M. & Menn, Lise. 1993. False starts and filler syllables: Ways to learn grammatical morphemes. Language 69, 742–777.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Colin. 1995. Syntax at age two: Cross-linguistic differences. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 26, 325–382.Google Scholar
Pierce, Amy. 1992. Language acquisition and syntactic theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radford, Andrew. 1990. Syntactic theory and the acquisition of English syntax: The nature of early child grammars of English. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Radford, Andrew. 1994. Tense and agreement variability in child grammars of English. In Lust, et al. (eds.), 135–157.Google Scholar
Santelmann, Lynn. 1998. The acquisition of definite determiners in child Swedish: Metrical and discourse influences on functional morphology. In Greenhill, Annabel, Hughes, Mary, Littlefield, Heather & Walsh, Hugh (eds.), Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 22, 651–662. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Schlyter, Suzanne. 2003. Development of verb morphology and finiteness in children and adults acquiring French. In Dimroth, Christine & Starren, Marianne (eds.), Information structure and the dynamics of language acquisition, 15–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schütze, Carson & Wexler, Kenneth. 2000. An elicitation study of young English children's knowledge of tense: Semantic and syntactic properties of optional infinitives. In Howell, S. Catherine, Fish, Sarah A. & Keith-Lucas, Thea (eds.), Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 24, 669–683. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Scobbie, James, Gibbon, Fiona, Hardcastle, William & Fletcher, Paul. 2000. Covert contrast as a stage in the acquisition of phonetics and phonology. Papers in laboratory phonology, vol. 5: Acquisition and the lexicon, 194–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1984. Phonology and syntax: The relation between sound and structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Shi, Rushen, Werker, Janet & Cutler, Ann. 2006. Recognition and representation of function words in English-learning infants. Infancy 10.2, 187–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shockey, Linda. 2003. Sound patterns of spoken English. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, Dan & Welsh, Charles. 1973. Elicited imitation as a research tool in developmental psycholinguistics. In Ferguson, Charles A. & Slobin, Dan (eds.), Studies of child language development, 485–497. New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston.Google Scholar
Smith, Neil. 1973. The acquisition of phonology: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Song, Jae Yung, Sundara, Megha & Demuth, Katherine. 2009. Phonological constraints on children's production of English third person singular -s. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 52.3, 623–642.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, Antonella, Serratrice, Ludovica, Filiaci, Francesca & Baldo, Michela. 2009. Discourse conditions on subject pronoun realization: Testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children. Lingua 119.3, 460–477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, Michael. 1992. First verbs: A case study of early grammatical development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valian, Virginia. 2006. Young children's understanding of present and past tense. Language Learning and Development 2, 251–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valian, Virginia. 2009. Abstract linguistic representations and innateness: The development of determiners. In Lewis, William D., Karimi, Simin, Harley, Heidi & Farrar, Scott O. (eds.), Time and again: Theoretical perspectives on formal linguistics in honor of D. Terence Langendoen, 189–206. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valian, Virginia & Aubry, Stephanie. 2005. When opportunity knocks twice: Two-year-olds' repetition of sentence subjects. Journal of Child Language 32, 617–641.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Valian, Virginia, Solt, Stephanie & Stewart, John. 2009. Abstract categories or limited scope formulae: The case of children's determiners. Journal of Child Language 36, 743–778.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Veilleux, Nanette & Stephanie, Shattuck-Hufnagel. 1998. Phonetic modification of the syllable /tu/ in two spontaneous American English dialogues. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP'98), paper 382. http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/icslp_1998/i98_0382.html (retrieved 26 November 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vihman, Marilyn. 1996. Phonological development: The origins of language in the child. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Weber-Fox, Christine & Neville, Helen. 2001. Sensitive periods differentiate processing of open- and closed-class words: An ERP study of bilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 44, 1338–1353.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wexler, Kenneth. 1994. Optional infinitives, head movement and the economy of derivations. In Lightfoot, David & Hornstein, Norbert (eds.), Verb movement, 305–362. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wexler, Kenneth. 1998. Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: A new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua 106, 23–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitman, John. 1994. In defense of the strong continuity account of the acquisition of verb second. In Lust, et al. (eds.), 273–288.Google Scholar
Whitman, John, Lee, Kwee-Ock & Lust, Barbara. 1991. Continuity of the principles of universal grammar in first language acquisition: The issue of functional categories. 21st North Eastern Linguistic Society (NELS 21), 383–397.Google Scholar
Wijnen, Frank. 1996/1997. Temporal reference and eventivity in root infinitives. MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 12, 1–25.Google Scholar
Wijnen, Frank, Krikhaar, Evelyne & Os, Els den. 1994. The (non)realization of unstressed elements in children's utterances: Evidence for a rhythmic constraint. Journal of Child Language 21, 59–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed