Rules vs. Constructions A debate on question-acquisition

Lucia Pozzan, Lidiya Tornyova & Virginia Valian

IASCL 2011

Special thanks to L anguage A cquisition R esearch C enter Team Margarita Zeitlin Syelle Graves Erin Quirk Paul Feitzinger Nathan LaFave 2

English Main Questions

• Subject-Auxiliary Inversion Declarative: John is eating pizza Yes/no question: Is Wh-question: What John is eating pizza?

John eating? • Children’s questions: lack of inversion

Why my dog is digging a hole?

Katie’s brother is feeding the doll?

3

Our View

• • • Input is important but it is not the only factor Differences in syntactic properties are reflected in the input and, therefore, in inversion patterns across languages Children analyze input in terms of syntactic features, categories, and operations 4

Research Questions

• • Study 1 (Tornyova & Valian): Are inversion patterns in acquisition determined by syntactic properties of the adult language (reflected in the target input)?

Study 2 (Pozzan & Valian): Can input frequency alone account for inversion patterns in English-learning children? 5

Study 1: Tornyova & Valian

• • Both Bulgarian and English display inversion in main wh- and yes/no questions Different properties of question formation

Bulgarian English

6

Elicited Imitation

• • • 4 groups: 2 Bulgarian (n=27, ages 2;2 - 3;3; Mean 2;9 ) 2 English (n=20, ages 2;4 - 3;2; Mean 2;9) Imitated 24 wh- or yes/no questions 7

Procedure

Bulgarian wh-question

Kude e igral Ivan s tebe?

Where aux-sum played Ivan with you

Bulgarian yes/no question

S tebe li e igral Ivan?

With you li aux-sum played Ivan

English wh-question

Where did John play with you?

English yes/no question

Was John playing ball with you?

8

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Inversion by Question Type

No aux Non-inversion Correct inversion Wh-Q Y/N-Q Bulgarian Wh-Q English Y/N-Q 9

• •

Summary

Children are sensitive to the syntactic regularities that underlie input differences Level of syntactic consistency predicts differences in performance

Bulgarian English

10

Study 2 Elicited Production and Input

• • Do frequencies of questions in the adult input account for children’s production patterns? • How should frequency of inversion be measured?

Are production patterns better accounted for in terms of abstract categories (e.g., arguments vs. adjuncts)? 11

L1 Production Participants & Materials

• • • • N = 38 monolingual children Age: 4;3 (Median: 4;2 Range: 3;2-5;8) SPELT: 33/40 Materials: 16 main questions

auxiliary

is are

Total wh-

4 (what, which, why, when) 4 (what, which, why, when)

8

4

8

yes/no

4 12

Protocol

This is an asking game. This is Katie and this is her mom. Katie wants to know some things. We are going to help her ask her mom questions.

“Why my dog is digging a hole?”

13

1,00 0,80 0,60 0,40 0,20 0,00 correct

Question-type

non-inversion no aux other double aux wh yes/no Wilcoxon Signed Ranks: Z = 2.5, p=.012

14

correct

Wh-type

non-inversion no aux other double aux Wilcoxon Signed Ranks: Z = 2.5, p=.011

15

correct Wh- by auxiliary non-inversion no aux other double aux 16

• Can (token) frequency in adult input account for the observed pattern?

• No input data on these particular children. Assumption: adult input to children is fairly homogeneous 17

How to measure frequency?

• Absolute Frequency (inverted main questions ): • Inverted wh-: Why are you laughing?

• Inverted yes/no: Are you laughing?

• Relative Frequency (inverted main / all questions): • Non inverted wh-: I don’t know why you are laughing.

• Non inverted yes/no: You are laughing?

18

CHILDES Corpora

SEARCH: Wh-elements:

what , which , when , why

Auxiliary and copula:

is

,

are

Corpus

Bates Bloom 70 Clark Gleason Snow Valian

Total

# Children

27 3 1 24 1 21

77

Age Range

1;8-2;4 1;4-2;10 2;3-3;2 2;1-5;2 2;3-3;9 1;9-2;8

1;8-5;2

Adult Input Utterances

11,274 40,385 32,349 37,698 19,801 26,250

167,757

19

Corpus

Bates Bloom 70 Clark Gleason Snow Valian

Total

What 735 1339 1092 1008 800 1423

6,397

Absolute Frequency (inverted questions)

Question-Type

Which 5 16 16 26 23 35

121

When 3 12 2 4 5 6

32

Why 19 33 125 27 21 14

239

Yes/No 258 1056 299 487 59 581

2,740

20

Relative Frequency

(inverted/all questions)

Question-type Corpus

What Which When Why Yes/No Bates 735/760 (97%) 5/5 (100%) Bloom 70 1339/1428 (94%) 19/22 (86%) Clark 1092/1190 (92%) Gleason 1008/1205 (84%) 17/20 (85%) 28/29 (96%) Snow 800/283 (97%) 24/27 (89%) Valian 1423/1599 (89%) 37/38 (97%)

Total 6397/7005 (91%) 130/141 (92%)

3/3 12/13 2/5 4/4 6/10

32/40

(100%) (92%) (40%) (100%) 5/5 (100%) (60%)

(80%)

19/21 (90%) 258/336 (77%) 33/35 125/132 27/33 21/25 14/17

239/263

(94%) (95%) (82%) (84%) (83%)

(91%)

1056/1447 299/766 487/772 59/70 581/919 (73%) (45%) (63%) (84%) (63%)

2740/2210 (65%)

21

Results

 Absolute Frequency: errors should occur in which,

when

and

why

 Relative Frequency: errors should occur in yes/no and

when

-questions  Results: inversion errors only occur in why questions when and 22

Take-home Message

• • •

Study 1:

input does matter! A grammar in which operations are implemented uniformly is a ‘simpler’ grammar

Study 2:

elements pattern together according to syntactic category, not just (token) frequency In progress: • • Token vs. Type Frequency Wh- + is/are + NP combinations • Relative frequency (counting all inverted and non-inverted strings) 23

Bonus Slide Wh- + is/are +

NP

combinations

Auxiliary NP-Subject

is

What

brother/dog/he other 385 4670

When

2 16

Which

3 90

Why

Yes/no 57 98 124 1691

are

Total (is)

you other

Total (are)

5056

786 552

1338 18

11 3

14 93

10 18

28 155 1815

50 34

84

716 212

928

24

Bonus Slide 2 Overall Correct Imitation

All questions

Bulgarian- and English-speaking children show similar overall correct imitation rates 100 90 80 30 20 10 0 70 60 50 40 73

Bulgarian English

74 25