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This study falls under the broad area of child language acquisition with specific focus on Shona morphosyntax. The understanding that knowledge of the nature of child language contributes to the sustainability of language acquisition matters forms the basis of the investigation. A qualitative approach is followed in the study, specifically focusing on the constraints on the development of inflectional morphemes (IMs) in the acquisition of nouns and verbs in child Shona. The study investigates the development of child Shona inflectional morphology and how morphology interacts with syntax. The constraints that operate in the acquisition of Shona are identified. The study refers to linguistic theories for an account of the development of child Shona morphosyntax. The study is based on the understanding that knowledge of the nature of child language contributes to the sustainability of language acquisition matters. The data used in this study is collected from four Shona speaking children. The ages of the children range from two years (2; 0) to three years and two months (3; 2). Two female and two male children participated in this study. The primary method of data collection used in this study is the naturalistic method, while elicitation is used to elicit plural formation. The results indicate that child Shona morphosyntax is characterized by omission of the various inflectional morphemes on nouns and verbs, while the lexical morphemes are retained. The child Shona IM is phonologically different from the adult Shona IM. This is because the children are constrained and hence use simplification strategies in order to try to be faithful to the input grammar. The noun and verb IMs are produced in the form of a reduced syllable, because the children dropped the consonant in the IM syllable and retained the vowel. The study reveals that the development of child Shona morphosyntax is based on pivotal constituencies of the sentence. These pivots are the nouns and verbs that are used by the children. The study identifies constraints that operate on the process of child Shona development as phonological, morphological, semantic, visibility and frequency constraints. The finding that is arrived at through this study is that syntax is in place before morphology. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil.

Vocabulary is well acknowledged as playing a critical role in language and reading development for young children, particularly for children learning English as an Additional Language (EAL) in school (Scarborough, 2001; Stahl & Nagy, 2005). However, most previous research on vocabulary has focused on measuring individual words and failed to examine knowledge of multi-word phrases, despite corpus evidence that these items are common in the English lexicon (Erman & Warren, 2000). The nature of multi-word vocabulary knowledge and its possible contribution to literacy skills among children remains underexplored, possibly due to a lack of available suitable measures. The current thesis details the development and administration of an original multi-word phrase task containing transparent, semi-transparent and non-transparent verb + object phrases to 108 British monolingual English speakers and learners with EAL in school years 3, 4 and 5. Results showed a strong effect of item transparency, even greater than frequency. Year 4 monolingual English speakers had significantly higher scores than year 3 monolingual learners on non-transparent items, while among learners with EAL year 3 and 4 performances were similar and year 5 learners’ scores were significantly higher. The second phase of the study explored the contribution of multi-word phrase knowledge to reading among 40 year 4 monolingual English speaking children and Bengali speakers with EAL. Multiple regression analysis showed that multi-word task performance accounted for a significant amount of variance in reading scores, when controlling for non-verbal intelligence, receptive and expressive single word vocabulary and language background. These findings are of import for increasing our understanding of vocabulary development among young learners and provide insight into the particular needs of learners with EAL.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation documents the emergence of a new language, Light Warlpiri, in the multilingual community of Lajamanu in northern Australia. It then examines the acquisition of Light Warlpiri language, and of the heritage language, Lajamanu Warlpiri, by children. Light Warlpiri has arisen from contact between Lajamanu Warlpiri (a Pama-Nyungan language), Kriol (an English-based creole), and varieties of English. It is a Mixed Language, meaning that none of its source languages can be considered to be the sole parent language. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol, while most nouns and the nominal morphology are from Warlpiri. The language input to children is complex. Adults older than about thirty speak Lajamanu Warlpiri and code-switch into Aboriginal English or Kriol. Younger adults, the parents of the current cohort of children, speak Light Warlpiri and code-switch into Lajamanu Warlpiri and into Aboriginal English or Kriol. Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, the two main input languages to children, both indicate A arguments with ergative case-marking (and they share one allomorph of the marker), but Lajamanu Warlpiri includes the marker much more consistently than Light Warlpiri. Word order is variable in both languages. Children learn both languages from birth, but they target Light Warlpiri as the language of their everyday interactions, and they speak it almost exclusively until four to six years of age. Adults and children show similar patterns of ergative marking and word order in Light Warlpiri. But differences between age groups are found in ergative marking in Lajamanu Warlpiri - for the oldest group of adults, ergative marking is obligatory, but for younger adults and children, it is not. Determining when children differentiate between two input languages has been a major goal in the study of bilingual acquisition. The two languages in this study share lexical and grammatical properties, making distinctions between them quite subtle. Both adults and children distribute ergative marking differently in the two languages, but show similar word order patterns in both. However the children show a stronger correlation between ergative marking and word order patterns than do the adults, suggesting that they are spearheading processes of language change. In their comprehension of sentences in both Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, adults use a case-marking strategy to identify the A argument (i.e. N+erg = A argument, N-erg = O argument). The children are not adult-like in using this strategy at age 5, when they also used a word order strategy, but they gradually move towards being adult-like with increased age.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation documents the emergence of a new language, Light Warlpiri, in the multilingual community of Lajamanu in northern Australia. It then examines the acquisition of Light Warlpiri language, and of the heritage language, Lajamanu Warlpiri, by children. Light Warlpiri has arisen from contact between Lajamanu Warlpiri (a Pama-Nyungan language), Kriol (an English-based creole), and varieties of English. It is a Mixed Language, meaning that none of its source languages can be considered to be the sole parent language. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol, while most nouns and the nominal morphology are from Warlpiri. The language input to children is complex. Adults older than about thirty speak Lajamanu Warlpiri and code-switch into Aboriginal English or Kriol. Younger adults, the parents of the current cohort of children, speak Light Warlpiri and code-switch into Lajamanu Warlpiri and into Aboriginal English or Kriol. Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, the two main input languages to children, both indicate A arguments with ergative case-marking (and they share one allomorph of the marker), but Lajamanu Warlpiri includes the marker much more consistently than Light Warlpiri. Word order is variable in both languages. Children learn both languages from birth, but they target Light Warlpiri as the language of their everyday interactions, and they speak it almost exclusively until four to six years of age. Adults and children show similar patterns of ergative marking and word order in Light Warlpiri. But differences between age groups are found in ergative marking in Lajamanu Warlpiri - for the oldest group of adults, ergative marking is obligatory, but for younger adults and children, it is not. Determining when children differentiate between two input languages has been a major goal in the study of bilingual acquisition. The two languages in this study share lexical and grammatical properties, making distinctions between them quite subtle. Both adults and children distribute ergative marking differently in the two languages, but show similar word order patterns in both. However the children show a stronger correlation between ergative marking and word order patterns than do the adults, suggesting that they are spearheading processes of language change. In their comprehension of sentences in both Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, adults use a case-marking strategy to identify the A argument (i.e. N+erg = A argument, N-erg = O argument). The children are not adult-like in using this strategy at age 5, when they also used a word order strategy, but they gradually move towards being adult-like with increased age.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation documents the emergence of a new language, Light Warlpiri, in the multilingual community of Lajamanu in northern Australia. It then examines the acquisition of Light Warlpiri language, and of the heritage language, Lajamanu Warlpiri, by children. Light Warlpiri has arisen from contact between Lajamanu Warlpiri (a Pama-Nyungan language), Kriol (an English-based creole), and varieties of English. It is a Mixed Language, meaning that none of its source languages can be considered to be the sole parent language. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol, while most nouns and the nominal morphology are from Warlpiri. The language input to children is complex. Adults older than about thirty speak Lajamanu Warlpiri and code-switch into Aboriginal English or Kriol. Younger adults, the parents of the current cohort of children, speak Light Warlpiri and code-switch into Lajamanu Warlpiri and into Aboriginal English or Kriol. Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, the two main input languages to children, both indicate A arguments with ergative case-marking (and they share one allomorph of the marker), but Lajamanu Warlpiri includes the marker much more consistently than Light Warlpiri. Word order is variable in both languages. Children learn both languages from birth, but they target Light Warlpiri as the language of their everyday interactions, and they speak it almost exclusively until four to six years of age. Adults and children show similar patterns of ergative marking and word order in Light Warlpiri. But differences between age groups are found in ergative marking in Lajamanu Warlpiri - for the oldest group of adults, ergative marking is obligatory, but for younger adults and children, it is not. Determining when children differentiate between two input languages has been a major goal in the study of bilingual acquisition. The two languages in this study share lexical and grammatical properties, making distinctions between them quite subtle. Both adults and children distribute ergative marking differently in the two languages, but show similar word order patterns in both. However the children show a stronger correlation between ergative marking and word order patterns than do the adults, suggesting that they are spearheading processes of language change. In their comprehension of sentences in both Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, adults use a case-marking strategy to identify the A argument (i.e. N+erg = A argument, N-erg = O argument). The children are not adult-like in using this strategy at age 5, when they also used a word order strategy, but they gradually move towards being adult-like with increased age.

A crucial component of child language acquisition is successful generalization. First, a speaker must acquire abstract knowledge of how a particular linguistic-structure conveys meaning, and use this knowledge to generalize the structure to new lexical-items. For example, a speaker can use abstract knowledge of a SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT structure to produce a sentence such as The man rolled the ball, even if the verb roll has never been encountered in this structure before. Second, a learner must appropriately restrict ‘overgeneralizations’ whereby a structure is used with an unsuitable verb (e.g. *The man fell the boy). The most prominent theories regarding restriction of overgeneralizations are based on frequency of use and (semantic, phonological or pragmatic) compatibility between the item and construction. Since developmental evidence for these accounts is mostly limited to the judgment paradigm, which is unsuitable for testing children aged 5 and under, the aim of this thesis was to examine whether these restriction mechanisms are used by children as young as 3 or 4 – whose generalization mechanisms are at an earlier stage of development - and to develop new paradigms for doing so. Study 1 used a production priming paradigm to examine children’s (aged 3-4; 5-6) restrictions of verbal un- prefixation (e.g., *unbend). Children’s production probability of verbs in un- form (e.g., *unbend) was negatively predicted by the frequency of the target verb in bare form (i.e., bend/s/ed/ing) and by the frequency of synonyms to a verb’s un- form (e.g., straighten for *unbend). Additionally, grammaticality judgments from older children (aged 5-6) revealed that preferences for un- forms were positively related to the extent to which the verb’s semantics overlapped with a covert, probabilistic semantic “cryptotype” of meanings thought to be shared by verbs that are grammatical in un- form (e.g., tie, pack, twist, screw, cover). Study 2 investigated whether overgeneralization errors in the domain of English past-tense (i.e., when ‘regular’ inflections are applied to verbs that require ‘irregular’ inflection; e.g., *sleeped, *throwed) are best attributed to analogy across exemplars, or to a default, “add –ed” rule applied regardless of a verb’s memorized associations. Past-tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by showing children (aged 3-4; 5-6; 6-7; 9-10) animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb (e.g., gezz; chake) and asking what the animal ‘did yesterday’. A verb’s likelihood of receiving regular inflection (e.g., gezzed, chaked) was positively associated with its phonological similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the analogy-based approach. Study 3 investigated the suitability of an online measure of sentence processing, namely Event Related Potentials (ERP), to investigate the role of verb-frequency in restricting transitive overgeneralizations. In line with previous studies, ‘P600’ and ‘LAN’ components were evoked in response to overgeneralization errors. However, the magnitudes of these components were not sensitive to a manipulation of verb-frequency (e.g., *The clown laughed the boy vs. *The clown giggled the boy), raising doubt toward the suitability of ERP for examining the relative acceptability of overgeneralization errors. Overall, the research indicates that even young children’s generalizations are sensitive to the linguistic input (i.e., statistical regularities and generalized semantic or phonological patterns of use) and are not well explained by a system of abstract rules that act on discrete categories, whether this applies to syntactic categories (e.g., add -ed to any instance of the category “VERB”) or discrete verb classes (e.g., a narrow-range rule that acts invariably on any verb that is part of an ‘alternating’ verb-class).

本篇論文的目的在於探討兒童在親子對話中行使重新請求 (request reformulation) 的情況，研究問題如下: 1.兒童採取哪些重新請求的策略以達到請求的目的? 2.親子對話中，常見的重新請求的序列模式（patterns of request reformulation sequences）為何？ 2.如何從兒童重新請求的使用反映出角色取代能力 (perspective-taking ability )的發展? 研究對象為一位三歲和一位六歲的男孩。研究結果顯示隨著年紀的增長，兒童能使用更多元的重新請求策略。研究也發現造成請求失敗的原因隨著不同年齡的兒童有所差異。隨著年紀的增長，兒童面臨的失敗原因和挑戰日漸複雜、困難，兒童會依據不同的失敗原因採取重新請求的策略。最後，研究顯示不同年齡兒童採取的重新請求策略可以展現出他們不同階段的角色取代能力的發展。三歲的兒童無法跳脫自己的觀點而從別人的角度來看待自己的請求，所以重新請求著重於強調自己的需求。六歲的兒童較能夠從別人的立場看待自己的請求，所以他較有能力在考量對方的觀點和利益之後採用對雙方有益的策略。 / The purpose of this study is to explore how children at different age make reformulation to compensate for an unsuccessful request. Firstly, we aim to investigate what reformulation strategies children apply and the patterns of reformulation sequences. Second, we further aim to explore how children’s use of reformulation strategies reveals the development of perspective-taking ability. The data analyzed are natural conversations of two Mandarin-speaking mother-child dyads. Subjects in this present study are two male children. One subject is three years and six months old and the other is six years old. The strategies of request reformulation adopted in this study are mainly based on Levin and Rubin’s (1984) categorization. The results show that children would have a greater variety of reformulation strategies as they get older. Furthermore, aggravation and explanation are both children’s main strategies of reformulation. With the growth of age, children decrease the use of aggravation and increase the use of bargain and mitigation. Furthermore, the results of reformulation sequences reveal that the two children are confronted with different causes of the failure to obtain compliance, which influences their adoption of reformulation strategies. The younger child faced the communicative breakdown and his mother’s ignorance while the older child encountered his mother’s queries and disagreements. Finally, the two children’s application of reformulation strategies revealed their different ability to take the other’s perspectives. The younger child’s reliance on aggravation and speaker-oriented negotiation reveals that he is embedded in his own viewpoints and is less able to view his request from the hearer’s viewpoints while the older child is more able to view the request from the hearer’ perspective and take her benefits into account. Our findings throw some light on children’s use of request reformulation strategy and the development of the perspective-taking ability.

<p>The present study aims to examine the grammar of Spanish heritage children in relation to the syntax-discourse interface by analyzing the distribution of subject pronouns in focus and topic contexts. Focus and topic are related to the information structure of a clause, the former refers to new information of the sentence and the latter indicates old or known information (Lozano-Pozo, 2003). Studies exploring this phenomenon in various combinations of languages and L2 populations have found a clear overextension and overuse of overt subject pronouns in topic contexts in pro-drop languages, where the preferred option is the null pronoun, due to cross-linguistic influence from the L1 (Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1999; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006; Belletti et al., 2007; Sorace et al., 2009). Considering the results of previous research, this study examines the extent to which Spanish heritage speakers exhibit knowledge of subject pronoun distribution in focus and topic contexts by comparing them to their monolingual counterparts.</p> <p>Thirteen child heritage speakers of Spanish and twenty-seven monolingual children completed a structured elicitation task which consisted of a story followed by a question asking about an embedded subject (Focus condition) or an embedded direct object (Topic condition). Results revealed no overextension of overt subject pronouns in topic contexts due to cross-linguistic influence from English. However, differences were found in the focus condition. Heritage children diverged from the monolingual group since they produced considerably fewer instances of overt subject pronouns. It is hypothesized that heritage children are opting for the null pronoun option as the default option, which suggests they are prolonging the Null Subject Stage (Hyams, 1986). This finding points to protracted development due to a lack of activation of the language. Further findings are discussed taking into consideration current approaches that examine the effects of language dominance, exposure, and use.</p>