Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

(A)typical trajectories of complex sentence comprehension from pre-school-age to adolescence

Flavia Adani (Free University of Berlin)

Children need some time to attune their parser to the properties of the language(s) they are exposed to. As a result, some complex structures continue to pose difficulties for young comprehenders until school entry (Durrleman & Bentea, 2021; Schipke et al. 2012; Macdonald et al., 2020).

The gradual development of complex sentence comprehension abilities in children has been linked with the degree of accessibility and reliability of certain input properties, such as word order and case marking (e.g., seminal work from McWhinney et al., 1984; Bates et al., 1999) as well as animacy and pronominality of nominal constituents (Kidd et al., 2007 among others).

Taking a complementary perspective to these lines of research, the psycholinguistic studies that we have conducted over the past decade aimed to test the gradual effect of various morphological properties such as number-, gender- and case-marking on comprehension of complex sentences. In this talk, I will discuss published and unpublished data from child speakers of Italian, English, Hebrew and German, across different groups of typically developing children and children and adolescents with developmental disorders. An instance of the complex sentences that will be discussed in the talk are object-initial declarative sentences and object-extracted relative clauses.

I propose that different theories of language development do not need to be contrasted to one another, but their predictions can actually co-exist (Adani et al., 2017). This approach provides complementary perspectives (as well as a considerable explanatory overlap) on how young children make use of their resources to gradually master complex sentences.

Adani, F., Stegenwallner-Schütz, M., & Niesel, T. (2017). The Peaceful Co-existence of Input Frequency and Structural Intervention Effects on the Comprehension of Complex Sentences in German Speaking Children. Frontiers in Psychology, 8(1590). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01590

Bates, E., Devescovi, A., & D'Amico, S. (1999). Processing Complex Sentences: A Cross-linguistic Study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 14(1), 69-123.

Durrleman, S., & Bentea, A. 2021. Locality in the acquisition of object A’-dependencies: insights from French. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5876

Kidd, E., Brandt, S., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Object relatives made easy: A cross-linguistic  comparison of the constraints influencing young children's processing of relative clauses.  Language and Cognitive Processes, 22(6), 860-897. doi:10.1080/01690960601155284

Macdonald, R., Brandt, S., Theakston, A., Lieven, E., & Serratrice, L. (2020). The Role of Animacy inChildren's Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English: Evidence From Sentence–Picture Matching and Eye Movements. 44(8), e12874. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12874

MacWhinney, B., Bates, E., & Kliegl, R. (1984). Cue Validity and Sentence Interpretation in English, German, and Italian. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23(2), 127-150.

Schipke, C., S., Knoll, L., J., Friederici, A. D., & Oberecker, R. (2012). Preschool children's interpretation of object-initial sentences: Neural correlates of their behavioural performance. Developmental Science, 15(6), 762-774.