DDRI: Intervention Effects in Raising and Control: Evidence from Spanish-speaking children data

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

An important objective of language acquisition research is to understand why certain grammatical constructions take longer to acquire than others. This research proposal investigates two constructions that are not fully mastered until school age: raising verbs such as 'seem', e.g. "Mary seems (to John) to be smart"; and control verbs such as 'promise', e.g. "Mary promised (John) to be cautious". Although semantically and structurally different, these verbs show interesting similarities: i) both involve an interpretative dependency between the subject in the upper clause, 'Mary', and an unpronounced subject in the lower clause -- Mary is the smart/cautious one, and ii) in both cases there is an argument intervening between the two dependent elements, '(to) John'. Despite the extensive literature on the acquisition of these constructions in English, there is no consensus on why they are late to develop. One prominent explanation holds that the delay is due to the presence of the intervening argument, either for grammatical or processing reasons. Interestingly, in Spanish an intervener is possible with 'prometer' (as with 'promise') but not with 'parecer' (in contrast to 'seem'). Therefore a comparison of Spanish and English acquisition could be extremely helpful is evaluating the 'intervention' account. This experimental study is the first to investigate the development of raising and control in Spanish-speaking children. Three comprehension experiments will be conducted on each language in order to determine whether the protracted development of these constructions comes from a common underlying source, namely intervention effects. Two additional experiments designed to measure linguistic processing and memory span will be used to determine whether children's difficulties with these constructions are due to a non-adult syntactic representation, or due to verbal working memory limitations. Discriminating between grammatical or processing deficits has the potential of aiding in the progress of other related domains, such as speech therapy or computational linguistics. This project will also provide research opportunities for undergraduate students, which is expected to have a direct impact on their research education.