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<p dir="ltr">This research examines the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender by children from 5 to 13 years old, born and raised in the United States to families who have at least one parent who is a native speaker os Spanish.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p>

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).

<p dir="ltr">This study investigates the acquisition of obligatory and variable subjunctive across modality type among child heritage speakers of Spanish. Specifically, it focuses on the production of obligatory and variable subjunctive in deontic, epistemic, and epistemological predicates, and the role of extralinguistic factors such as chronological age, proficiency and language exposure/use in the use of the subjunctive.</p><p dir="ltr">The subjunctive mood, known for its grammatical complexities, has been extensively studied among heritage speakers. Previous research has documented difficulties in the mastery of the subjunctive mood with Spanish heritage speakers showing lower rates of subjunctive use in variable contexts, but higher rates in obligatory contexts (Montrul, 2007, 2009; Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Van Osch & Sleeman, 2018). These findings have been taken as evidence of interface vulnerability effects in the acquisition of mood. Nonetheless, recent studies by Lustres et al. (2020) and Perez-Cortes (2021) have suggested that differences between obligatory and variable subjunctive might be mitigated if the modality of the predicates is controlled. This study builds upon existing literature that emphasize the role of modality in language acquisition (Blake, 1983; Merino, 1983; Silva-Corvalán, 1994) and employs a comparative analysis to examine whether child heritage speakers of Spanish exhibit similar patterns of subjunctive use as their monolingual peers and parents. The study contributes to heritage language research by incorporating child participants, filling a significant gap in existing literature predominantly focused on adult heritage speakers.</p><p dir="ltr">Thirty child heritage speakers of Spanish (age range: 6;5 - 12;8, <i>M=</i> 9;11, <i>SD=</i>1.91), thirty monolingual children from Mexico (age range: 6;0 - 12;2, <i>M=</i> 9;46, <i>SD=</i>2.17), fifteen immigrant parents (age range: 29 - 47, <i>M=</i> 39;27, <i>SD=</i>6.56) and fifteen monolingual parents (age range:<b> </b>25 - 45<b>, </b><i>M=</i> 34;67, <i>SD=</i>6.87) completed an elicited production task. The results revealed significant differences in subjunctive use between groups. The heritage children were outperformed by the monolingual children and parents as they exhibited lower subjunctive use. However, there was variability in their production. The results showed that the heritage children employed the subjunctive more frequently in deontic contexts than in epistemic and epistemological contexts. Similarly, monolingual children showed high subjunctive usage in deontic and epistemic contexts but lower usage in epistemological contexts. No differences were observed between obligatory and variable contexts within the same modality. These findings challenge previous assertions regarding the influence of selection type and underscore the significance of modality in research of mood. Despite variability within participants, the results indicated that the subjunctive production was influenced by the participants’ age and proficiency levels. High proficiency along with increased age led to a higher proportion of subjunctive. These findings provide support to the Bilingual Alignment approach and the activation approach which relates differences in heritage grammars to the degree of activation of each language on the mind.</p>