ERIC Number: EJ1236210
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2020
Pages: 34
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1048-9223
EISSN: N/A
Intervention Effects in the Acquisition of Raising: Evidence from English and Spanish
Mateu, Victoria Eugenia
Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, v27 n1 p1-34 2020
The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before tested in this language. Spanish "parecer" is ambiguous between a functional verb, which does not select an experiencer argument, and a lexical verb, which requires an overt experiencer (e.g.. In the first part of this study, we consider the hypothesis that the experiencer argument of "seem" may induce intervention effects even when it is not overtly produced and find support for this claim--English-speaking children perform poorly on StSR both when the intervening experiencer is overtly expressed and when it is implicit; Spanish-speaking children, on the other hand, only perform poorly on StSR with lexical "parecer" but do well on StSR with functional "parecer." These results are in line with intervention accounts. The second part of this study aims to investigate whether these intervention effects are rooted in children's grammatical or processing deficits. Results from a verbal processing task suggest that for a group of children--those who perform at chance or above on the StSR task--comprehension of sentences with an intervening experiencer is modulated by processing capacity. However, for those who consistently obtain a non-adult-like interpretation of StSR, processing capacity does not positively correlate with their performance. We hypothesize that, for this group, the difficulty is instead grammar-based.
Descriptors: Spanish Speaking, Intervention, Difficulty Level, English, Spanish, Native Language, Contrastive Linguistics, Language Processing, Verbs, Ambiguity (Semantics), Grammar, Task Analysis, Correlation, Performance, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory, Computational Linguistics, Foreign Countries, Young Children, Adults, Puppetry, Ethics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Spain; California (Los Angeles)
Grant or Contract Numbers: BCS1451589