A 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.
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