Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-9pm4c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T18:30:29.326Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Comprehension of the copula: preschoolers (and sometimes adults) ignore subject–verb agreement during sentence processing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2019

Benjamin DAVIES Open the ORCID record for Benjamin DAVIES [Opens in a new window] ,
Nan XU RATTANASONE  and
Katherine DEMUTH
Benjamin DAVIES*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia, and ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, NSW2109, Australia
Nan XU RATTANASONE
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia, and ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, NSW2109, Australia
Katherine DEMUTH
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia, and ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, NSW2109, Australia
*
*Corresponding author: Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. E-mail: ben.davies@mq.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Subject–verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns (The sheep is/are fat), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas (Where is/are the [novel noun(s)]?). Novel nouns were either morphologically unambiguous (tup/tups) or ambiguous (/geks/ = singular: gex / plural: gecks). Preschoolers (and some adults) ignored the singular copula, interpreting /ks/-final words as plural, raising questions about the role of SV agreement in learners’ sentence comprehension and the status of is in Australian English.

Keywords

language changecomprehensionagreement
Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , May 2020 , pp. 695 - 708
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arias-Trejo, N., Cantrell, L. M., Smith, L. B., & Canto, E. A. A. (2014). Early comprehension of the Spanish plural. Journal of Child Language, 41(6), 1356–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Arunachalam, S., & Waxman, S. R. (2010). Meaning from syntax: evidence from 2-year-olds. Cognition, 114(3), 442–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) (2013). Socio-economic Indexes for Area (SEIFA), Table 1: Postal Area (POA) SEIFA Summary, 2011 (data cube: Excel spreadsheet, cat. no. 2033.0.55.001). Retrieved from <http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/2033.0.55.0012011> (last accessed 19 September 2017).+(last+accessed+19+September+2017).>Google Scholar
Bååth, R. (2010). ChildFreq: an online tool to explore word frequencies in child language. Lucs Minor, 16, 1–6.Google Scholar
Bernal, S., Lidz, J., Millotte, S., & Christophe, A. (2007). Syntax constrains the acquisition of verb meaning. Language Learning and Development, 3(4), 325–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, K., & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23(1), 45–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2016). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer Program]. Version 6.0.18. Available at <http://www.praat.org/>..>Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Oxford: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budziszewski, P. (2003). Serenity Engine [computer software]. Sydney, NSW: Toybox Labs.Google Scholar
Conti-Ramsden, G. (2003). Processing and linguistic markers in young children with specific language impairment (SLI). Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46(5), 1029–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawford, W. J. (2005). Verb agreement and disagreement: a corpus investigation of concord variation in existential there + be constructions. Journal of English Linguistics, 33(1), 35–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, B., Xu Rattanasone, N., & Demuth, K. (2017). Two-year-olds’ sensitivity to inflectional plural morphology: allomorphic effects. Language Learning and Development, 13(1), 38–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, B., Xu Rattanasone, N., Schembri, T., & Demuth, K. (2019). Preschoolers’ developing comprehension of the plural: the effects of number and allomorphic variation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 185, 95–108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2(3), 267–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Villiers, J. G., & Johnson, V. E. (2007). The information in third-person /s/: acquisition across dialects of American English. Journal of Child Language, 34(1), 133–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deevy, P., & Leonard, L. B. (2018). Sensitivity to morphosyntactic information in preschool children with and without developmental language disorder: a follow-up study. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 61(12), 3064–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Deevy, P., Leonard, L. B., & Marchman, V. A. (2017). Sensitivity to morphosyntactic information in 3-year-old children with typical language development: a feasibility study. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60(3), 668–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fisher, C., Hall, D. G., Rakowitz, S., & Gleitman, L. (1994). When it is better to receive than to give: syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua, 92, 333–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Cauley, K. M., & Gordon, L. (1987). The eyes have it: lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm. Journal of Child Language, 14(1), 23–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrington, J., Cox, F., & Evans, Z. (1997). An acoustic phonetic study of broad, general, and cultivated Australian English vowels. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 17(2), 155–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, J., & Schreier, D. (2004). Reversing the trajectory of language change: subject–verb agreement with be in New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change, 16(3), 209–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, V. E., de Villiers, J. G., & Seymour, H. N. (2005). Agreement without understanding? The case of third person singular /s/. First Language, 25(3), 317–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kamide, Y., Altmann, G. T. M., & Haywood, S. L. (2003). The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing: evidence from anticipatory eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 49(1), 133–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koehlinger, K., Owen Van Horne, A. J., Oleson, J., McCreery, R., & Moeller, M. P. (2015). The role of sentence position, allomorph, and morpheme type on accurate use of s-related morphemes by children who are hard of hearing. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 58(2), 396–409.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kouider, S., Halberda, J., Wood, J., & Carey, S. (2006). Acquisition of English number marking: the singular–plural distinction. Language Learning and Development, 2(1), 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Legendre, G., Barrière, I., Goyet, L., & Nazzi, T. (2010). Comprehension of infrequent subject–verb agreement forms: evidence from French-learning children. Child Development, 81(6), 1859–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Legendre, G., Culbertson, J., Zaroukian, E., Hsin, L., Barrière, I., & Nazzi, T. (2014). Is children's comprehension of subject–verb agreement universally late? Comparative evidence from French, English, and Spanish. Lingua, 144, 21–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenth, R. (2019). Emmeans package: Estimated Marginal Means, aka Least-Squares Means. R package version 1.3.4. Online <https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=emmeans>..>Google Scholar
Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science, 18(3), 193–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2003). Understanding how input matters: verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. Cognition, 87(3), 151–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lukyanenko, C., & Fisher, C. (2016). Where are the cookies? Two- and three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns. Cognition, 146, 349–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lukyanenko, C., & Miller, K. (2018). Children's and adults’ processing of variable agreement patterns: agreement neutralization in English. In Proceedings of the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development, 15. Online <http://www.lingref.com/bucld/42/BUCLD42-37.pdf>.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk: Volume I: Transcription format and programs, volume II: The database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mani, N., & Huettig, F. (2012). Prediction during language processing is a piece of cake–but only for skilled producers. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(4), 843–7.Google ScholarPubMed
McGuckian, M., & Henry, A. (2007). The grammatical morpheme deficit in moderate hearing impairment. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 42(s1), 17–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meechan, M., & Foley, M. (1994). On resolving disagreement: linguistic theory and variation – there's bridges. Language Variation and Change, 6(1), 63–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naigles, L. (2002). Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language. Cognition, 86(2), 157–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pohlert, T. (2014). The pairwise multiple comparison of mean ranks package (PMCMR). Online <https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=PMCMR>..>Google Scholar
R Core Team (2016). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Smit, A. B., Hand, L., Freilinger, J. J., Bernthal, J. E., & Bird, A. (1990). The Iowa articulation norms project and its Nebraska replication. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 55(4), 779–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Soderstrom, M., White, K. S., Conwell, E., & Morgan, J. L. (2007). Receptive grammatical knowledge of familiar content words and inflection in 16-month-olds. Infancy, 12(1), 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sundara, M., Demuth, K., & Kuhl, P. K. (2011). Sentence-position effects on children's perception and production of English third person singular –s. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 54(1), 55–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Waxman, S. R., & Booth, A. E. (2001). Seeing pink elephants: fourteen-month-olds’ interpretations of novel nouns and adjectives. Cognitive Psychology, 43(3), 217–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wood, J. N., Kouider, S., & Carey, S. (2009). Acquisition of singular–plural morphology. Developmental Psychology, 45(1), 202–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Xu Rattanasone, N., Davies, B., Schembri, T., Andronos, F., & Demuth, K. (2016). The iPad as a research tool for the understanding of English plurals by English, Chinese, and other L1 speaking 3- and 4-year-olds. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01773CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zimmerman, I. L., Steiner, V. G., & Pond, R. E. (2011). PLS-5: preschool language scale-5 [measurement instrument]. San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar