The early processing of number agreement in the DP: evidence from
Transcrição
The early processing of number agreement in the DP: evidence from
BUCLD 30 – Nov 04 – 06 2005 The early processing of number agreement in the DP: evidence from from the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese Letícia Sicuro Corrêa, Marina R.A. Augusto, José FerrariFerrari-Neto Ferrari-Neto Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) www.letras.puc-rio.br/lapal - [email protected] A minimalist approach to the acquisition of grammatical number from a psycholinguistic point of view Linguistic assumptions: Assumptions concerning bootstrapping: ! Language includes a universal computational system (CHL) and a lexicon upon which the former operates (Chomsky, 1995; 1999). ! Children are pre-disposed to assume that recurrent patterns in the speech around them (PF) are grammatically relevant. !The lexicon is constituted of open class and closed class elements -- matrices of features (phonological, semantic and formal features). ! The computational system, once bootstrapped, functions as a language acquisition device. ! Formal features are the only grammatically relevant lexical features, i.e. accessible to the computational system. !Children segment the speech in prosodic units / processing windows. !Grammatical operations give rise to systematic patterns in PF (closed class items--determiners, affixes, classifiers; and word order as a reflex of assymetric ccommand – Linear Correspondance Axiom). !Number is a formal phi-feature, which can be intrinsic or optional. !The identification of distributional patterns within a processing window enables the segmentation of closed class elements. !The optional number feature heads its own functional projection NumP (Picallo, 1991; Ritter, 1991; Augusto et al. 2005). !Non-interpretable formal phi-features are valued by means of Agree once a ccommand configuration results from Merge. ! The parser analyzes members of closed classes/functional elements as functional heads, giving rise a structure in which elements are in a c-command relation. !The acquisition of language specific syntactic properties involves fixing the values of the formal features of functional heads. !The identification of patterns corresponding to functional items (D in particular) initializes the computational system, enabling parsing to take place. !Children are predisposed to represent as a functional element heading its own projection those closed class items to which some semantic interpretation can be ascribed. Grammatical Number and language acquisition: Number in Brazilian Portuguese DPs: !Number is a formal feature in most known languages, though there are exceptions (Eg. Pirahã – a language of the Amazon region that seems to lack grammatical number (Everett, 1986; Corbett, 2000)). !Number assumes different values in a single language (Eg. Singular and plural) and values differ across languages(singular, dual, trial, quadral, paucal and plural (cf. Corbett, 2000)). !Number agreement can be differently expressed across languages. ! Children MUST Solving reference on the basis of number agreement: an experiment with 2 year olds PF: [Ω u"’dabu(")] = Os dabo(s) (The(pl) novel noun(pl)) Speech segmentation in prosodic units ! Lexemes recognition ! /us/ /’dabo(s)/ Parsing 1: morphological / word order analysis and access to lemmas ! ?! [FP[o]f [s]] f [√? (s)]l ] [Ω [ωu"] [ω’dabu(")]] number affix D Masc Def Conceptual representation Reference ?! Num Pl novos carro novo The (pl) my (pl) car (pl) new (pl) !There are singular nouns that end in /s/. ! Hence the crucial information about number is available in D. Parse the elements segmented within a processing window. Recognize D as a functional element and N as a lexical element on the basis of phonetic and distributional regularities. Recognize systematic variation within the closed class affixes in D. Recognize the element that systematically varies as a number morpheme – an independent functional feature in the lexicon Parse the DP and compute number agreement (c-command configuration). Aims: !To verify whether young children would be able to solve reference on the basis of the processing of number agreement in the DP . Task: ! Picture-identification with pseudo-nouns and invented objects ! The child is asked to show something to a puppet called Dedé (among 4 pictures), three of them presenting unknown objects – two with singletons and one with multiple tokens of the same type. Participants: 18 children (18-24 m, mean age 24 months). DP Material: !Grammatical plural: Mostra os dabos pro Dedé. (Standard) Mostra os dabo pro Dedé. (Non-standard) (Show the (pl) dabo(s) to Dedé) The values identified in D are the results of Agree ∃y[y=σx*Cx] There is a set y such that y is a supremum of the semilattice of dabos ! carros meu Conditions: N ? D NumP [pl/masc] Num N [pl/masc] [pl/masc] ! meus Os “More than one entity” If chidren are able to identify the correct set of unknown objects on the basis of the Plural DP in both variants, they • have recognized Number as a formal feature, • have identified the value of the marked form • rely on agreement to acquire novel nouns 12 charts (3 per condition) +6 fillers !Ungrammatical Plural Mostra o dabos pro Dedé. (suffix in N) Mostra o dasbo pro Dedé. ( infix in N) !Singular Control Mostra o dabo pro Dedé. Dependent variable: number of choices of the mutiple token picture. Results: Grammaticality: more “plural” responses to grammatical plural DPs (t(17) = 5.65 p <.0001) (Graph 1) No significant difference between standard and non-standard plural (t(17) = 1.16 p=.26) nor between suffix and infix (t(17) = 0.97 p=.34) (Graph 2) Graph 1: Mean plural responses Graph 2: Mean plural responses as a function of the presence of -s 7 7 6 6 5 Mean Semantic interpretation Os Non-standard 4 3 2 1 0 Grammatical Plural Ungrammatical Plural Singular 5 Mean Recognize variation within closed class elements as an expression of Agree. (Merge and Agree assuming LCA) Standard Children acquring BP MUST Recognize number as a formal feature and identify the values that the number feature assumes on the basis of interface information. Parsing 2: Syntactic Computation ! Predominantly optional formal feature. ! Two values: singular (unmarked) and plural, marked by the affix -s ! There are two co-existing number systems: 4 3 2 1 0 Standard Plural Non-standard Plural "Plural suffix" only "Plural infix"