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    The acquisition of adjunct control: grammar and processing

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    No. of downloads: 949

    Date
    2016
    Author
    Gerard, Juliana
    Advisor
    Lidz, Jeffrey
    DRUM DOI
    https://doi.org/10.13016/M2621K
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    Abstract
    This dissertation uses children’s acquisition of adjunct control as a case study to investigate grammatical and performance accounts of language acquisition. In previous research, children have consistently exhibited non-adultlike behavior for sentences with adjunct control. To explain children’s behavior, several different grammatical accounts have been proposed, but evidence for these accounts has been inconclusive. In this dissertation, I take two approaches to account for children’s errors. First, I spell out the predictions of previous grammatical accounts, and test these predictions after accounting for some methodological concerns that might have influenced children’s behavior in previous studies. While I reproduce the non-adultlike behavior observed in previous studies, the predictions of previous grammatical accounts are not borne out, suggesting that extragrammatical factors are needed to explain children’s behavior. Next, I consider the role of two different types of extragrammatical factors in predicting children’s non-adultlike behavior. With a new task designed to address the task demands in previous studies, children exhibit significantly higher accuracy than with previous tasks. This suggests that children’s behavior has been influenced by task- specific processing factors. In addition to the task, I also test the predictions of a similarity-based interference account, which links children’s errors to the same memory mechanisms involved in sentence processing difficulties observed in adults. These predictions are borne out, supporting a more continuous developmental trajectory as children’s processing mechanisms become more resistant to interference. Finally, I consider how children’s errors might influence their acquisition of adjunct control, given the distribution in the linguistic input. I discuss the results of a corpus analysis, including the possibility that adjunct control could be learned from the input. The kinds of information that could be useful to a learner become much more limited, however, after considering the processing limitations that would interfere with the representations available to the learner.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1903/18604
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    • Linguistics Theses and Dissertations
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations

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    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility