Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages: Online-First ArticlesA multidimensional perspective on the acquisition of subject-verb dependencies by Haitian-Creole speaking children
Insights from comprehension and production
The present multidimensional study investigates the acquisition of pronominal subject-verb dependencies in
Standard Haitian Creole (HC). A corpus analysis confirms that HC subject pronouns are phonological clitics in the target grammar
and that their reduction is optional and unpredictable. The comprehension and production of dependencies involving these subject
pronouns in 20 preschoolers acquiring HC as their first language were investigated. While the production of third person singular
and plural subject pronouns l(i) and y(o) reveals early mastery of adult constraints on their
phonological reductions, the systematic assignments of l(i) to singular subjects vs. y(o) to
plural subjects of the verb in the syntactic dependency emerge later, in both production and comprehension. The few syntactic
contexts in which HC-learning children show evidence of comprehension involve full forms, rather than phonological reductions.
Possible factors that explain these findings include the relative unpredictability of their forms and the linguistic status of HC
pronouns.
Keywords: Haitian Creole, subject verb dependencies, pronouns, clitics, morphophonology, language acquisition, learnability, paradigm cell complexity, video-matching comprehension task
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Nature, expressions and distribution of Haitian Creole subject pronouns
- 3.Morphosyntactic, morphophonological and distributional acquisition factors
- First factor: Pre-verbal position and adjacency between the number marker and the verb
- Cross-linguistic perspectives
- Possible implications for the acquisition of HC
- Second factor: Syntactic vs. phonological status and distribution of subject pronouns
- Cross-linguistic perspectives
- Possible implications for the acquisition of HC
- Third factor: Resyllabification
- Cross-linguistic perspectives
- Possible implications for the acquisition of HC
- Fourth factor: Semantic transparency and frequency
- Cross-linguistic perspectives
- Possible implications for the acquisition of HC
- Fifth factor: Variation in the expression of number marking and complexity of the paradigm cells
- Cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal perspectives
- Possible implications for the acquisition of HC
- First factor: Pre-verbal position and adjacency between the number marker and the verb
- 4.Experimental study: Acquisition of HC 3rd person singular and plural subject-verb dependencies
- 4.1Introduction
- 4.2Method
- Participants
- Experimental procedures
- Task 1: Video elicitation
- Visual stimuli
- Procedure
- Task 2: Video comprehension
- Video stimuli
- Verbal/Audio stimuli
- Procedure
- 4.3Analyses and results
- Transcription, analyses and results of the video-elicitation task
- Analyses and results of the Video Comprehension Task
- Accuracy analyses
- Sensitivity analyses
- Analyses of the relation between comprehension and production data
- 5.General discussion
- Status and distribution of HC subject pronouns in HC adult grammar
- Production
- Comprehension
- First factor: Pre-verbal position and adjacency between the number marker and the verb
- Second factor: Syntactic status
- Third factor: Resyllabification
- Fourth factor: Semantic transparency and frequency
- Fifth factor: Variation in the expression of number marking and complexity of the paradigm cells
- Comprehension and production
- Limitations
- Follow-ups
- Contribution
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
References
Published online: 17 August 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.22001.bar
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.22001.bar
References (98)
AKA (Akademi Kreyòl
Ayisyen). 2017. Premye rezolisyon sou òtograf lang kreyòl
ayisyen. Available at: [URL]. Retrieved
on 12/12/2017.
Ackerman, Farrell, Blevins, James P. & Malouf, Robert. 2009. Parts
and wholes: Patterns of relatedness in complex morphological systems and why they
matter. In J. Blevins & J. Blevins (Eds.) Analogy
in Grammar: Form and
Acquisition, 54–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ackerman, Farrell & Malouf, Robert. 2013. Morphological
organization: the low conditional entropy
conjecture, Language,
89
(3), 429–465.
Adone, Dany. 1994. The acquisition of Mauritian Creole. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Anderson, Stephen R. 2015. Dimensions of Morphological
Complexity. In M. Baerman, D. Brwon, & G. Corbett (Eds.) Understanding
and Measuring Morphological
Complexity, 11–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Archer, Justine Champion, Tempii, Tyrone, Martha, E. & Walters, Susan. 2018. Phonological
Development of Monolingual Haitian Creole-speaking Preschool Children. Communication Disorders
Quarterly, 39 (3), 426–437.
Aslin, Richard N., Saffran, Jenny R., & Newport, Elissa L. 1998. Computation of
conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological
Science,
9
(
4
), 321–324.
Baptista, Marlyse. 1995. On
the nature of pro-drop in Caperverdean Creole. Harvard Working Papers in
Linguistics,
5
1, 3–18.
Barrière, I., & Monéreau-Merry, M.M. (2012). Trilingualism of the Haitian Diaspora in NYC: Current and Future Challenges. In O. Garcia, B. Otcu & Z. Zakharia (Eds.), Bilingual Community Education and Multilingualism: Beyond Heritage Languages in a Global City. 247–258. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Barrière, Isabelle, Joseph, Blandine, & Fleurio, Guetjens Prince. 2014. Developing and Piloting
the first language assessment tool for Haitian-Creole speaking toddlers. Paper presented at
the 20th Biennal Conference of the Society for Caribbean
Linguistics, Palm Beach, Aruba.
Barrière, Isabelle, Goyet, Louise, Kresh, Sarah, Legendre, Géraldine, & Nazzi, Thierry. 2016a. Uncovering productive morphosyntax in French-learning toddlers: a multidimensional methodology perspective. Journal of Child Language,
43
(5), 1131–1157.
Barrière, Isabelle, Legendre, Géraldine, Joseph, Blandine, Kresh, Sarah, Fleurio, Guetjens Prince, Nazzi, Thierry. 2016b. Le
statut linguistique des pronoms du créole haïtien et du français : une étude de corpus. Actes
du 5ème Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française 2016. [URL].
Barrière, Isabelle, Kresh, Sarah, Aharodnik, Katsyarina, Legendre, Géraldine & Nazzi, Thierry. 2019. The
comprehension of 3rd Person Singular –s by NYC English-speaking
Preschoolers. In Matthew Rispoli & Tania Ionin (eds) Three
Streams of Generative Language Acquisition
Research, 7–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bickerton, Derek. 1984. The
language bioprogram hypothesis. The Behavioral and Brain
Sciences,
7
1, 173–221.
Bonami, Olivier & Luís, Ana R. 2013. A Morphologist Perspective on
Creole Complexity. Rethinking Creole Morphology. Paper presented at CIL
19, Genève.
Buerkin-Pontrelli, Angelica, Culbertson, Jennifer, Legendre, Géraldine & Nazzi, Thierry. 2017. Competing
Models of Liaison Acquisition: Evidence from Corpus and Experimental
Data. Language,
93
(1), 189–219.
Cadely, Jean Robert. 1995. Elision et Agglutination en
Créole Haïtien: Le cas des pronoms Personnels. Etudes
Créoles,
18
(1), 9–38.
. 1997. Prosodie et clicitisation
en Créole Haïtien: Le métissage des Langues et des représentations. Etudes
Créoles,
20
(1), 5–114.
Champion, Tempii, McCabe, Allyssa & Colinet, Yvanne. 2002/2003. The
whole world could hear: the structure of Haitian-American children’s narratives. Imagination,
Cognition and
Personality,
22
(
4
), 381–400.
Cleveland, Leslie H. & Janna B. Oetting. 2013. Children’s
marking of verbal –s by nonmainstream English dialect and clinical status. American Journal of
Speech Language
Pathology,
22
(4) 604–614.
Clahsen, Haald, Aveledo, Fraibet, & Roca, Iggy. 2002. The
development of regular and irregular verb inflections in Spanish child language. Journal of
Child
Language,
29
(3), 599–622.
Culbertson, Jennifer. 2010. Convergent
evidence for categorial change in French: from subject clitic to agreement
marker. Language,
86
(
1
), 885–132.
Déprez, Viviane. 1994. Haitian
Creole: A Pro-Drop Language? Journal of Pidgin et Creole
Languages,
9
(1), 1–24.
DeGraff, Michel F. 1993. Is Haitian Creole a Pro-Drop
Language? In Francis Byrne & John Holm (eds.) The
Atlantic meet Pacific: A global view of Pidginization et
Creolization, 71–90. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2005. Linguists’ most dangerous myth:
The fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism. Language in
Society,
34
1, 533–591.
2017. Mother-tongue books in Haiti:
The power of Kreyòl in learning to read and reading to
learn. Prospects,
47
1, 1–30.
Dejean, Yve. 2010. Creole
and Education in Haiti. In A. K. Spears & C. Berotte Joseph (eds) The
Haitian Creole Language: History, Structure, Use and
Education. NY: Lexington Books.
De Lisser, Tamara Nnena, Durrleman, Stephanie, Rizzi, Luigi, & Shlonsky, Urr. 2016. The acquisition of Jamaican Creole: Null subject phenomenon. Language Acquisition, 23(3), 261–292.
De Villiers, Jill G. & De Villiers, Peter. 1973. A
cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of
Psycholinguistic
Research,
2
1, 267–278.
De Villiers, Jill G. & Johnson, Valerie E. 2007. The information in third person /s/: acquisition across dialects of American English. Journal of Child Language,
34
1, 133–158.
Dugua, Céline; Nardy, Aurélie, Liégeois, Loïc, Chevrot, Jean Pierre, Chabanal, Damien. 2017. L’acquisition
des liaisons après les clitiques préverbaux est-elle spécifique? Apport d’une experimentation à grande
échelle. Journal of French Language
Studies,
27
1, 73–86.
Doukas, Thomas & Marinis, Theodore. 2012. The
acquisition of person and number morphology within the verbal domain in early Greek. University
of Reading. Language Studies Working
Papers,
4
1, 15–25.
Erickson, Lucy C. & Thiessen, Erik D. 2015. Statistical learning of
language: Theory, validity ad predictions of a statistical learning account of language
acquisition. Developmental
Review,
37
1, 66–108.
Fon Sing, Guillaume. 2017. Creoles
are not typologically distinct from non-Creoles. Language
Ecology,
1
(
1
), 44–74.
Gonzalez-Gomez, Nayeli, Hsin, Lisa, Barrière, Isabelle, Nazzi, Thierry, Legendre, Géraldine (2017) Agarra, Agarran: Evidence of Early Comprehension of Subject-Verb Agreement in Spanish. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1601, 33–44.
Gxilishe, Sandile, Smouse, Mantoa Rose, Xhalisa, Thabisa, & de Villiers, Jill. 2009. Children’s
insensitivity to information from the target of agreement: the case of
Xhosa. In Jean Crawford, Koihi Otaki & Masahiko Takashi (eds.), Proceedings
of the 3rd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North
America (pp. 46–53). Somerville, MA, USA: Cascadilla Press.
Henri, Fabiola, Stump, Gregory & Tribout, Delphone. 2020. Derivation
and the morphological complexity of three French-based
creoles. In P. Arkadiev and F. Gardani (eds.). The
complexities of morphology (105–135). Oxford University Press.
Hilton, Dimitri. 2000. Pronominal
Clitics in Haitian Creole: Phonological or Syntactic? In Vicki Carstens & Frederick Parkinson (eds.) Advances
in African Linguistics. Trenton, NJ: SUNY Press. Pp 51–59.
Höhle, Barbara, Schmitz, Michaele, Santelmann, Lynn M., Weissenborn, Jürgen. 2006. The
recognition of Discontinuous Verbal Dependencies by German 19-Month-Olds: Evidence for Lexical and Structural Influences on
Children’s Early Processing Capacities. Language Learning and
Development,
2
(4), 277–300.
Hsin, Lisa, Gonzalez-Gomez, Nayeli, Barrière, Isabelle, Nazzi, Thierry, Legendre, Géraldine. 2021. Converging
Evidence of Underlying Competence: Comprehension and Production in the Acquisition of Spanish Subject-Verb
Agreement. Journal of Child
Language,
49
(5) 851–868.
Jakubowicz, Celia, & Rigaut, Catherine. 2000. L’acquisition des clitiques nominatifs et des clitiques objets en français. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue Canadienne De Linguistique, 45(1–2), 119–157.
Jean-Pierre, Marky. 2016. Language
and Learning in a post-Colonial Context: a Critical Ethnography Study in Schools in Haiti. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, V. E. 2005. Comprehension of third person singular /s/ in AAE-speaking children. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 361, 116–124.
Johnson, Valerie E., de Villiers, Jill, & Seymour, Harry. 2005. Agreement
without understanding? The case of third person singular /s/. First
Language,
25
1, 317–317.
Joseph, Blandine. 2017. Developing
a Tagger adapted to the study of Haitian Child Language. Unpublished Master Thesis Long Island University.
Kayne, Richard S. 1977. Syntaxe du français: le cycle
transformationnel. (traduit de l’américain par Pierre Attal). Paris: Seuil. First
edition (1975): French Syntax: the transformational
cycle. Cambridge, Ms: MIT Press.
Kenanidis, Panagiotis, Chondrogianni, Vicky, Legendre, Géraldine & Culbertson, Jennifer. 2021. Cue
reliability, salience and early comprehension of agreement : evidence from Greek. Journal of
Child
Language,
48
1, 815–833.
Kouider, Sid, Halberda, Justin, Wood, Justin, & Carey, Susann. 2006. Acquisition
of English Number Marking: The Singular-Plural Distinction. Language Learning and
Development,
2
1, 1–25.
Labov, William. 1966. The
Social Stratification of English in New York
City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics.
. 1972. Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Larsen-Freeman, Diane E. 1976. An explanation for the morpheme acquisition order of second language learners. Language Learning, 261, 125–134.
Lefebvre, Claire. 1998. Creole
genesis and he acquisition of grammar: The case of Haitian Creole. Cambridge, UK: Cambrige University Press.
Legendre, Géraldine, Culbertson, Jennifer, Barrière, Isabelle, Nazzi, Thierry & Goyet, Louise. 2010a. Experimental
et empirical evidence for the status et acquisition of sujet clitics et agreement marking in adult et child Spoken
French. In Vincenç Torrens, Linda Escobar, Anna Gavarrò, Juncal Gutiérrez (Eds.) Movement
et Clitics: Adult and Child
Grammar. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 333–360.
Legendre, Géraldine, Barrière, Isabelle, Goyet, Louise, & Nazzi, Thierry. 2010b. Comprehension
of infrequent subject-verb agreement forms: Evidence from French-learning children. Child
Development, 811, 1859–1875.
Legendre, Géraldine, Culbertson, Jennifer, Zaroukian, Erin, Hsin, Lisa, Barrière, Isabelle, & Nazzi, Thierry. 2014. Is
children’s comprehension of subject–verb agreement universally late? Comparative evidence from French, English, and
Spanish. Lingua,
144
1, 21–39.
Lust, Barbara C. 2012. Tracking Universals Requires a
Grammatical Mapping Paradigm. Kleanthese K. Grohmann, Aljona Shelkovaya & Dionysos Zoumpalidis (eds.) Linguists
of Tomorrow: Selected Papers from the First Cyprus Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied
Linguistics, 105–130. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The
CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. Third Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
McWhorter, J. H. 1998. Identifying the creole prototype: Vindicating a typological class. Language, 788–818.
Meakins, Felicity & Wilmoth, Sasha. 2020. Overabundance resulting from language contact: Complex cell-mates in Gurindju Kriol. Peter Arkadiev & Francesco Gardani (eds.) Morphological Complexity 136–162. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Miller, Karen. 2012. Not
all children agree: Acquisition of agreement when the input is variable. Language Learning and
Development
8
(3) 255–277.
. 2013. Acquisition
of variable rules: /s/-lenition in the speech of Chilean Spanish-speaking children and their
caregivers. Language variation and
change, 251, 311–340.
. 2019. Children’s acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. In Tania Ionin & Matthew Rispoli (eds.), Three streams of generative language acquisition research. Selected papers from the 7th meeting of generative approaches to language acquisition, 35–58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Miller, Karen & Schmitt, Cristina. 2010. Effects
of variable input in the acquisition of plural in two dialects of
Spanish. Lingua,
120
1, 1178–1193.
Miller, Karen & Shmitt, Cristina. 2012. Variable
Input and the Acquisition of Plural Morphology, Language
Acquisition,
19
(3), 223–261.
Molina, Daniele, Marcilese, Mercedes & Name, Cristina. 2017. Ora
está, ora não está: Input Variável e Acquisição Da Flexão Verbal De 3a Pessoa Do Plural NO
PB, Matraga,
24
(41), 288–309.
Monéreau-Merry, Marie-Michelle. 2017. “
Marie
Manje la Pom Nan
.” Examining the Cognitive Process of Restructuring and Advantage
Selection in the Definite Article System in Haitian Creole among U.S. Born Heritage Speakers of Haitian
Creole. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center.
Naigles, Letitia. 2002. Form
is easy, meaning is hard: Resolving a paradox in early child
language. Cognition,
86
(2), 157–199.
Nazzi, Thierry & Bertoncini, Josiane. 2009. Phonetic
specificity in early lexical acquisition: New evidence from consonants in coda
positions. Language and
Speech.
52
1, 463–480.
Nazzi, Thierry, Kemler Nelson, Deborah, G., Jusczyk, Peter W. & Jusczyk, Ann Marie. 2000. Six-month-olds’
detection of clauses in continuous speech: Effects of prosodic
well-formedness. Infancy,
1
1, 123–147.
Nevat, Michael, Ullman, Michael T., Eviatar, Zohar & Bitan, Tali. 2018. The
role of distributional factors in learning and generalizing affixal plural inflection: An artificial language
study. Language, Cognition &
Neuroscience,
33
(9), 1184–1204.
Newkirk-Turner, Brandi L. & Green, Lisa. 2016. Third
person singular –s and event marking in child African American
English. Linguistic
Variation,
16
1, 103–130.
Nishibayashi, Léo-Lyuki & Nazzi, T. 2016. Vowels
then consonants: emergence of a consonant bias in early word form
segmentation. Cognition, 1551, 188–203.
Noël, Audrey. 2014. La
théorie du macrosystème interlectal et l’acquisition languagière en context plurilingue: réflexion sur la situation
réunionnaise. Actes du Congrès de Linguistique Française, accessible
at: [URL]
Pérez-Leroux, Ana T. 2005. Number problems in children. In C. Gurski (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2005 Canadian Linguistic Association Annual Conference (p. 12). Retrieved from [URL]
Poline, Yerania, Ng, Sally, Aharodnik, Katsiaryna & Barrière, Isabelle. 2019. Effects of variation and methodology in the acquisition of Subject-Verb agreement by Dominican Spanish-speaking preschoolers. Council of Undergraduate Research- 2019 Research Experience for Undergraduates Symposium. Marriott Hotel, Arlington, VA.
Phillips, Colin. 1995. Syntax
age two: cross-linguistic differences. MIT working papers in
Linguistics,
26
1, 37–93.
Pierce, Amy E. 1992. Language acquisition and syntactic theory: a comparative analysis of French and English child grammars. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
Pratas, Fernanda & Hyams, Nina. 2010. Introduction to the acquisition of finiteness in Capeverdean. In Joao Costa, Ana Castro, Maria Lobo & Fernando Patras (eds.) Language acquisition and development: proceedings of GALA 2009. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Rastegar, Zahra, Shirazi, Haghighi, & Sadighi, Firooz. 2012. An
amazing conundrum in children’s comprehension and production of verb inflection. World Applied
Sciences
Journal,
18
(8), 1095–1101.
Saint Martin, Weston. 2005. Les
Formes des Pronoms Personnels de l’Haïtien et leur place en comparaison avec celles du
français. Unpublished Master Thesis, University of Georgia.
Scholes, Robert J. 1981. Developmental Comprehension of
Third Person Personal Pronouns in English. Language and
Speech, 24 (1), 91–98.
Smolík, Filip & Bláhová, Veronika. 2017. Comprehension
of verb number morphemes in Czech children: Singular and plural show different relations to age and
vocabulary. First
Language,
37
(1), 42–57.
Soderstrom, Melanie, Seidl, Amanda, Kemler Nelson, Deborah G., Jusczyk, Peter W. 2003. The Prosodic
bootstrapping of phrases: Evidence from prelinguistic infants. Journal of Memory and
Language,
49
1, 249–267.
Swingley, Daniel. 2008. Onsets
and codas in 1.5-year-olds’word recognition. Journal of Memory and
Language,
60
(2), 252–269.
Valdman, A., Villeneuve, Anne-José & Siegel, Jason F. 2015. On the influence of the
standard norm of Haitian Creole on the Cap Haïtien dialect: evidence from sociolinguistic variation in the thirsd person
singular pronoun. Journal of Pidgin and Creole
Languages,
30
(1), 1–43.
Valian, Virginia. 1991. Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children. Cognition, 401, 21–81.
Valian, Virginia, Prasada, Sandeep, & Scarpa, Jodi. 2006. Direct
object predictability: effects on young children’s imitation of sentences. Journal of Child
Language,
33
1, 247–269.
Varlakosta, Spyridoula, Vainikka, Anne & Rohrbacher, Bernhard. 1998. Functional
projections, markedness and “root infinitives” in early child Greek. The Linguistic
Review,
15
(2–3), 197–208.
Verhagen, Josie, & Blom, Elma. 2014. Asymmetries
in the acquisition of subject–verb agreement in Dutch: Evidence from comprehension and
production. First
language,
34
(4), 315–335.
Vieira, Maria Cristina P. 2006. A emergência do padrão flexional
de 3ª pessoa do plural na aquisição de PB como L1. Master
Thesis, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (in Portuguese).
Von Holzen, Katie, Nishibayashi, Leo-Lyuki, & Nazzi, Thierry. 2018. Consonant
and vowel processing in word form segmentation: an infant ERP study. Brain
Sciences, 8(2), 24.
Xanthos, Aaris, Laaha, Sabine, Gillis, Steven, Stephany, Ursula, Aksu-Koç, Christofidou A., Gagarina, Natalia, Hrzica, Gordana, Ketrez, F. Nihan, Kilani-Sloch, Marianne, Korecky-Kröll, Katharina, Kovačević, Melita, Laalo, Klaus, Palmovic, Marijan, Pfeiler, Barbara, Voiekova, Maria D. & Dressler, Wolfgang U. 2011. On the role of
morphological richness in the early development of noun and verb inflection. First
Language,
3
(4), 461–479.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Barrière, Isabelle, Valerie Shafer & Suzanne van der Feest
2024. Chapter 12. Variation in phonological and morphosyntactic development in multilingual pre-schoolers. In Multilingual Acquisition and Learning [Studies in Bilingualism, 67], ► pp. 324 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.