Sanne Berends

Publisher: Universitate din Bucuresti (University of Bucharest)

Publication Name: Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics

The purpose of this research is to explore the emergence of several types of ER pronouns (Dutch) and EN pronouns (French) in L1 acquisition from both a language-internal and cross-linguistic perspective, and to identify the role of... more

The purpose of this research is to explore the emergence of several types of ER pronouns (Dutch) and EN pronouns (French) in L1 acquisition from both a language-internal and cross-linguistic perspective, and to identify the role of syntactic complexity (based on Jakubowicz' Derivational Complexity Metric) in this acquisition process. The analysis of spontaneous speech data reveals substantial temporal differences in the emergences of pronominal constructions, both language-internally and cross-linguistically. This study shows that the emergence patterns can be properly accounted for by applying the Derivational Complexity Metric to the spontaneous child data we collected.

Research Interests:
Dutch, First Language Acquisition, and French

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Publisher: unknown

Publication Date: 2012

Publication Name: Journal of Child Language

Research Interests:
Cognitive Science, Language Acquisition, Pronouns, Linguistics, Clitics, and Child Language

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This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in five-year-olds for sixteen languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that... more

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in five-year-olds for sixteen languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (‘pronoun languages’) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (‘clitic languages’), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for five-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain cross-linguistic differences discussed in the paper.
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This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object... more

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ
clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain cross-linguistic differences discussed in the article.