Chapter published in:
Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Edited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 7–33

The comprehension of 3rd person singular -s by NYC English-speaking preschoolers

| Long Island University
| City University of New York
| City University of New York
| Johns Hopkins University
| CNRS-Paul Descartes University
Monolingual English 4-year-olds were administered a Subject-Verb agreement comprehension task that included stimuli such as the boy s spin ø versus the boy ø spin s (…/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.
Keywords: 3rd person singular, subject-verb agreement, variation, input, comprehension, constrained elicitation, African American English, Caribbean English, Mainstream American English
Published online: 15 April 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.02bar
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