Duygu Özge will present how children use morphosyntax to understand various aspects of meaning at LDS Brownbag Lunch Speaker Series on 16th November, 2020.

Abstract:

Adult-like mastery of morphosyntax involves not only the ability to produce the appropriate items in novel situations but also the ability to use a variety of morphosyntactic cues to understand utterance meaning. We have conflicting evidence whether or not children can interpret morphosyntax as effectively as adults before school-age (age 6-7). For instance, we have evidence that German-speaking children cannot interpret case-marking for thematic role interpretation independent of word order cues until age 6-7 (Dittmar et-al., 2008a, b; Schipke, et al., 2011). Also, we have evidence that preschoolers speaking Kannada and Turkish use verbal cues less effectively when they appear in isolation from other cues (e.g., number of argument or case marking) (Trueswell, Kaufman, Hafri, & Lidz, 2012; Göksun, Küntay, & Naigles, 2008; Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2003). Similarly, Finnish children cannot use the partitive-accusative distinction as a cue to aspectual properties of events until age 6 (Weist, Wysocka, & Lyytinen, 1991). I will report a series of experiments showing that children can use morphosyntax, as young as 4 years of age, to decode meaning in a variety of situations where they need to interpret (i) case morphemes to predict the argument structure, (ii) verbal morphemes in relativization and passivization to understand the semantic roles, and (iii) case morphemes to interpret partitivity. I will present the implications of these findings for child language acquisition/processing. I will finally talk about our new project where preschoolers need to use morphosyntax to interpret more complex meanings such as conditionality, biconditionality, and counterfactuality.


Last Updated:
25/12/2020 - 15:08