Linguistic / English
Mr.Alexziz
testing_recursion_in_child_english.docxTesting Recursion in Child English (and Explaining the Concept to Non-linguists)
Barbara Zurer
Tom Roeper
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Anca Sevcenco
University of Bucharest
This presentation has two goals: 1) reporting an experiment on children’s acquisition of recursion in specific syntactic constructions, and 2) using an extended debriefing to explain the concept of recursion in language to the participants (and/or their parents).
Despite the importance of recursion for syntactic creativity (Hauser et al., 2002), surprisingly little is understood about its language-particular manifestations and how they are acquired (Roeper & Snyder, 2005). The universal recursive operation of Merge creates a variety of self-embedded structures (SES), such as possessive, prepositional (PP), sentential, etc. and their formal basis is unclear. Many SES share the computational property of Indirect Recursion (IR), i.e. they take their own output as input: XP=>X_YP, YP=>Y_XP (see Hinzen & Arsenijevic, 2012). Nonetheless, they are realized differently across languages and interact with other properties differently. In (1) and (2) are found sequences of English locative PPs and relative clauses (RC), respectively.
(1) A lion next to the crocodile next to the bear. (2) A lion that’s next to the crocodile that’s next to the bear. (3) The lion is next to the bear and the crocodile.
Both constructions admit two major interpretations: A non-hierarchal, “conjunctive” reading, with the lion between the crocodile and the bear as in (3) and a hierarchical, IR reading that puts the animals in the order lion-crocodile-bear. Both interpretations are always available, but a control group of adults showed a significant preference for IR (93%). A contrast between PP and RC is suggested by constraints on IR in Romanian. Although IR in both English and Romanian passes through the DP, the latter limits IR to prepositions with functional-category-marking (de) for PPs but not for RCs. The current study explores the acquisition path from ages 3-10 yrs and tests the hypothesis that one form of IR (PP or RC) triggers the other.
The study was carried out in a museum environment that showcases “research live,” i.e. combines actual data collection for hypothesis-testing with education about the hypotheses. Participants were 48 Englishspeaking children, who were asked to rearrange animals in an array on an iPad and then describe what they had done. They also repeated sentences with recursive PPs and RCs (as in [1] and [2]). Preliminary results show an increase from an average of 90% conjunctive interpretations in both comprehension and production among the 3-year-olds to an average of 85% IR-interpretations among the 9- and 10-year-olds. There was an observable, but not statistically significant difference favoring the RC over the PP condition for 5- and 9-yr-olds, and a tendency for some children to repeat PP items using RCs (cf. Pérez-Leroux et al., 2012). These results are consistent with proposals that the acquisition of IR proceeds according to a step-by-step typology (Roeper, 2011), where PP and RC are in a trigger relationship.
Following the formal experiment, the researcher scaffolded the child in activities that highlighted the distinction between non-hierarchical conjunctive and hierarchical recursive readings of the experimental prompts and other constructions that exhibit self-embedding in English and several other languages, as in (4) to (6):
(4) possessives, John’s father’s bicycle (Limbach & Adone, 2010) (5) adjective phrases, the second green ball (Matthei, 1982) (6) sentence complements, CHI (age 5): Well#, do you think that they would know that it says their name? (MacWhinney, 2000). Recursion was shown to be a useful wedge to help participants appreciate the role of abstract hierarchical structures in processing sentences in everyday discourse.
Sample stimuli and response: Show me “there is a zebra under the lion under the crocodile.”
References:
Arsenijevic, B. & Hinzen, W. (2012). On the absence of X-within-X recursion in human grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3): 423-440.
Hauser, M.T., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, T. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298 (5598). 1569-1579.
Limbach, M. & Adone, D. (2010). Language acquisition of recursive possessives in English. Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 34, 281–290.
Matthei, E. H. 1982. The acquisition of prenominal modifier sequences. Cognition 11, 301–332. MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. Third Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Pérez-Leroux, A.T.,. Castilla-Earls, A. P., Bejar, S. & Massam, D. (2012). Elmo’s sister’s ball. The problem of acquiring nominal recursion. Language Acquisition 19 (4), 301-311.
Roeper, T. (2011) The Acquisition of recursion: How formalism articulates the acquisition path. Biolinguistics, 5.1–2: 057–086.
