Monolingual English 4-year-olds were administered a Subject-Verb agreement comprehension task that included stimuli such as the boysspinø versus the boyøspins(…/freely/in the hall). They were categorized as users of Mainstream American English (MAE) (N = 8), Some Variation (N = 9) and Strong Variation (N = 9) based on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (Seymour et al., 2005). Only MAE users performed significantly above chance across conditions (final versus medial with adverb versus medial with prepositional phrase) while comprehension in learners of other varieties was sensitive to syntactic context. Corpus analyses revealed that input frequency cannot explain our comprehension results and confirmed the plausibility of the hypothesis that 3rd person -s competes with other structures to express generic tense in non-mainstream varieties of English.
Barrière, I., Goyet, L., Kresh, S., Legendre, G., & Nazzi, T. (2016). Uncovering productive morphosyntax in French-learning toddlers: a multidimensional methodology perspective. Journal of Child Language, 43(5), 1131–1157.
Bayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 390–412.
Blom, E., Paradis, J., & Sorenson Duncan, T. (2012). Effects of input properties, vocabulary size and L1 on the development of third person singular -s in child L2 English. Language Learning, 62, 965–994.
Blume, M., & Lust, B. C. (2017). Research methods in language acquisition. Washington, DC: Mouton de Gruyter/APA.
Brandt-Kobele, O. C., & Höhle, B. (2010). What asymmetries within comprehension reveal about asymmetries between comprehension and production: The case of verb inflection in language acquisition. Lingua, 120, 1910–1925.
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cleveland, L. H., & Oetting, J. B. (2013). Children’s marking of verbal -s by non-mainstream English dialect and clinical status. American Journal of Speech Language Pathology, 22, 604–614.
Craig, H., Zhang, L., Hensel, S. L., & Quinn, E. J. (2009). African American English-speaking students: An examination of the relationship between dialect shifting and reading outcomes. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 52, 839–855.
de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2, 267–278.
de Villiers, J. G., & Johnson, V. E. (2007). The information in third person /s/: Acquisition across dialects of American English. Journal of Child Language, 34, 133–158.
Fenson, L., Marchman, V. A., Thal, D. J, Dale, P. S., Reznick, S. J., & Bates, E. (2007). MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventory (2nd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.
Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hsin, L., Culbertson, J., Barrière, I., Nazzi, T., & Legendre, G. (2014). Revealing early comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Spanish. In W. Orman, & M. J. Valleau (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp.158–170). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hsin, L., Barrière, I., Nazzi, T., & Legendre, G. (2017). Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Spanish. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 160, 33–49.
Gxilishe, S., de Villiers, P. A., & de Villiers, J. G. (2007). The acquisition of subject agreement in Xhosa. In A. Belikova (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA) (pp.114–123). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Hall, W., Nagy, W. E., & Linn, R. L. (1984). Spoken words: Effects of situation and social group on oral word usage and frequency. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hoff, E. (2003). Causes and consequences of SES-related differences in parent-to-child speech. In M. H. Bornstein (Ed.), Socioeconomic status, parenting and child development (pp.147–160). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hsin, L. (2014). Integrated grammatical architecture: Insights from syntactic development (Unpublished PhD dissertation). Johns Hopkins University.
Johnson, V. E. (2005). Comprehension of third person singular /s/ in AAE-speaking children. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 36, 116–124.
Johnson, V. E., de Villiers, J. G., & Seymour, H. N. (2005). Agreement without understanding? The case of third person singular /s/. First Language, 25, 317–330.
Kortmann, B., & Lunkenheimer, K. (2013). The electronic world atlas of varieties of English. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved from <
[URL]
>
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lahey, M., Lierbegott, J. J., Chesnick, M., Menyuk, P., & Adams, J. (1992). Variability in children’s use of grammatical morphemes. Applied Psycholinguistics, 13, 372–398.
Larsen-Freeman, D. E. (1976). An explanation for the morpheme acquisition order of second language learners. Language Learning, 26, 125–134.
Legendre, G., Vainikka, A., Hagstrom, P., & Todorova, M. (2002). Partial constraint ordering in child French syntax. Language Acquisition, 10, 189–227.
Legendre, G., Barrière, I., Goyet, L., & Nazzi, T. (2010). Comprehension of infrequent subject-verb agreement forms: Evidence from French-learning children. Child Development, 81, 1859–1875.
Legendre, G., Culbertson, J., Zaroukian, E, Hsin, L. B., Barrière, I., & Nazzi, T. (2014). Is children's comprehension of subject–verb agreement universally late? Comparative evidence from French, English, and Spanish. Lingua, 144, 21–39.
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Mayer, M.1969. Frog, where are you?. New York, NY: Dial Books for Young Readers.
Michaelis, S. M., Maurer, P., Haspelmath, M., & Huber, M. (2013). Atlas of pidgin and creole language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved from <
[URL]
>
Miller, J. F., & Chapman, R. (1981). The relation between age and MLU in morphemes. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 24, 1219–1231.
Miller, K. (2012). Not all children agree: Acquisition of agreement when the input is variable. Language Learning and Development, 8, 255–277.
Miller, K. (2013). What Sarah reveals about non-agreeing don’t and theories of root infinitives. Language Acquisition, 20, 305–324.
Pérez-Leroux, A.-T. (2005). Number problems in children. In C. Gurski (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2005 Canadian Linguistic Association Annual Conference. Retrieved from <
[URL]
l>
Radford, A. (1997). Syntactic theory and the structure of English: A minimalist approach. Cambridge: CUP.
Rastegar, Z., Shirazi, H., & Sadighi, F. (2012). An amazing conundrum in children’s comprehension and production of verb inflection. World Applied Sciences Journal, 18, 1095–1101.
Rescorla, L., & Roberts, J. (2002). Nominal vs. verbal morpheme use in late talkers at age 3 and 4. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 45, 1219–1231.
Rowe, M. L. (2008). Child-directed speech: relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge of child development and child vocabulary skills. Journal of Child Language, 35, 185–205.
Schwab, J. F., & Lew-Williams, C. (2016). Language learning, socioeconomic status, and child-directed speech. Wiley Periodicals, 7, 264–275.
Seymour, H. N., Roeper, T., de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (2005). Diagnostic evaluation of language variation. San Antonio, TX: Pearson.
Song, J. Y., Sundara, M., & Demuth, K. (2009). Phonological constraints on children’s production of English third person singular -s. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 52, 623–642.
Syrett, K., Arunachalam, S., & Waxman, S. R. (2014). Slowly but surely: Adverbs support verb learning in 2-year-olds. Language Learning and Development, 10(3), 263–278.
Tortora, C., & den Dikken, M. (2010). Subject agreement variation: Support for the configurational approach. Lingua, 120, 1089–1108.
Verhagen, J., & Blom, E. (2014). Asymmetries in the acquisition of subject–verb agreement in Dutch: Evidence from comprehension and production. First Language, 34, 315–335.
Yang, C., Ellman, A., & Legate, J. (2015). Input and its structural description. In A. Gallego, & D. Ott (Eds.) Fifty years later: Reflections on Chomsky’s Aspects (pp. 285–292). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Barrière, Isabelle, Blandine Joseph, Katsiaryna Aharodnik, Sarah Kresh, Guetjens Prince Fleurio, Géraldine Legendre & Thierry Nazzi
2022. Inequity in Peer Review in Communication Sciences and Disorders. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 31:4 ► pp. 1898 ff.
KENANIDIS, Panagiotis, Vicky CHONDROGIANNI, Géraldine LEGENDRE & Jennifer CULBERTSON
2021. Cue reliability, salience and early comprehension of agreement: Evidence from Greek. Journal of Child Language 48:4 ► pp. 815 ff.
Lieberman, Rochel, Nancy A. Creaghead, Lesley Raisor-Becker, Isabelle Barrière, Noah Silbert & Gary L. Dick
2021. Emotion Valence for Social Communication During Story Retells. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups 6:6 ► pp. 1424 ff.
Maher, Zachary K., Michelle E. Erskine, Arynn S. Byrd, Jeffrey R. Harring & Jan R. Edwards
2021. African American English and Early Literacy: A Comparison of Approaches to Quantifying Nonmainstream Dialect Use. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 52:1 ► pp. 118 ff.
Oetting, Janna B., Jessica R. Berry, Kyomi D. Gregory, Andrew M. Rivière & Janet McDonald
2019. Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Measures of Tense and Agreement With Dialect-Informed Probes and Strategic Scoring. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 62:9 ► pp. 3443 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 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.