Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T10:52:35.085Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Acquisition of locative utterances in Norwegian: structure-building via lexical learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2018

Natalia MITROFANOVA  and
Marit WESTERGAARD
Natalia MITROFANOVA*
Affiliation:
UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Norway
Marit WESTERGAARD
Affiliation:
UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Norway NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: natalia.mitrofanova@uit.no
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly produce locative utterances lacking overt prepositions, with the rate of preposition omission decreasing significantly by age 3. Furthermore, our results suggest that phonologically strong and semantically unambiguous locative items appear earlier in Norwegian children's utterances than their phonologically weak and semantically ambiguous counterparts. This conclusion is confirmed by a corpus study. We argue that our results are best captured by the Underspecified P Hypothesis (UPH; Mitrofanova, 2017), which assumes that, at early stages of grammatical development, the underlying structure of locative utterances is underspecified, with more complex functional representations emerging gradually based on the input. This approach predicts that the rate of acquisition in the domain of locative PPs should be influenced by the lexical properties of individual language-specific grammatical elements (such as frequency, morphological complexity, phonological salience, or semantic ambiguity). Our data from child Norwegian show that this prediction is borne out. Specifically, the results of our study suggest that phonologically more salient and semantically unambiguous items are mastered earlier than their ambiguous and phonologically less salient counterparts, despite the higher frequency of the latter in the input (Clahsen et al., 1996).

Keywords

Norwegianlocative prepositionslexical learning
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , July 2018 , pp. 981 - 1005
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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

Ambridge, B. (2010). Frequency effects in language acquisition: defining the limits of frequency as an explanatory concept Journal of Child Language, 37, 453–60.Google Scholar
Ambridge, B, Kidd, E., Rowland, C. F., & Theakston, A. L. (2015). The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 42(2), 239–73.Google Scholar
Anderssen, M. (2005). The acquisition of compositional definiteness in Norwegian. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B. M., & Walker, S. C. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1973). Early syntactic development: a cross-linguistic study with special reference to Finnish. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Caha, P. (2009). The nanosyntax of case. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Casasola, M. & Cohen, L. (2002). Infant categorization of containment, support and tight-fit spatial relationships. Developmental Science, 5, 247–64.Google Scholar
Caselli, C., Casadio, P., & Bates, E. (1999). A comparison of the transition from first words to grammar in English and Italian. Journal of Child Language, 26(1), 69–111.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1973). What's in a word? On the child's acquisition of semantics in his first language. In Moore, T. E. (Ed.), Cognitive development and acquisition of language (pp. 65–110). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., Eisenbeiss, S., & Penke, M. (1996). Lexical learning in early syntactic development. In Clahsen, H. (Ed.), Generative perspectives on language acquisition: empirical findings, theoretical considerations and crosslinguistic comparisons (pp. 129–59). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Eisenbeiss, S. (2009). Contrast is the name of the game: contrast-based semi-structured elicitation techniques for studies on children's language acquisition. University of Essex: Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 57(7).Google Scholar
Eisenbeiss, S. (2010). Production methods. In Blom, E. & Unsworth, S. (Eds.), Experimental methods in language acquisition research (pp. 11–34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Felix, S. (1992). Language acquisition as a maturational process. In Weissenborn, J., Goodluck, H., & Roeper, R. (Eds), Theoretical issues in language acquisition (pp. 25–51). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gagarina, N., & Voeikova, M. (2009). Acquisition of case and number in Russian. In Stephany, U. & Voeikova, M. (Eds.), Development of nominal inflection in first language acquisition: a cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 179–215). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Gelman, A., & Hill, J. (2006). Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gibson, E. J., & Spelke, E. S. (1983). The development of perception. In Mussen, P. H., (Ed.) Handbook of child psychology, vol. 3: cognitive development (pp. 1–76). New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. R., & Wanner, E. (1982). Language acquisition: the state of the art. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gülzow, I. & Gagarina, N. (2007). Frequency effects in language acquisition: defining the limits of frequency as an explanatory concept. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 434–46.Google Scholar
Johnston, J. R., & Slobin, D. I. (1979). The development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. Journal of Child Language, 6(3), 529–45.Google Scholar
Kern, S., Gayraud, F., & Chenu, F. (2014). The role of input in early first language morphosyntactic development. LIA Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 5(1), 1–18.Google Scholar
Koopman, H. (2000). Prepositions, postpositions, circumpositions, and particles. In The syntax of specifiers and heads: collected essays of Hilda J. Koopman (pp. 204–60). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lakusta, L., Wagner, L., O'Hearn, K., & Landau, B. (2007). Conceptual foundations of spatial language: evidence for a goal bias in infants. Language Learning and Development, 3, 179–97.Google Scholar
Leikin, M. (1998). Acquisition of locative prepositions in Russian. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27(1), 91–108.Google Scholar
Lieven, E. (2010). Input and first language acquisition: evaluating the role of frequency. Lingua, 120(11), 2546–56.Google Scholar
Mandler, J. M. (1996). Preverbal representation and language. In Bloom, P., Peterson, M. A., Nadel, L., & Garrett, M. F. (Eds.), Language and space (pp. 365–84). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mandler, J. M. (2004). The foundations of mind: origins of conceptual thought. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mitrofanova, N. (2017). Early underspecification of functional categories: evidence from the acquisition of locative PPs in Russian. Language Acquisition.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. (1974). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 38, no. 149.Google Scholar
Nicholas, K. E. (2011). Children's omission of prepositions in English and Icelandic. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Arizona.Google Scholar
Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1956). The child's conception of space. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Phillips, C. (2010). Syntax at age two: cross-linguistic differences. Language Acquisition, 17(1/2), 70–120.Google Scholar
Pulverman, R., Sootsman, J. L., Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2002). Infants’ non-linguistic processing of motion events: one-year-old English speakers are interested in manner. In Clark, E. V. (Ed.) Space in language: Location, Motion, Path, and Manner (31st Stanford Child Language Research Forum) (pp. 11–20). Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Quené, H., & Bergh, H. v. d. (2008). Examples of mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects and with binomial data. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 413–25.Google Scholar
Quinn, P. C. (1994). The categorization of above and below spatial relations by young infants. Child Development, 65(1), 58–69.Google Scholar
Quinn, P. C., Norris, C. M., Pasko, R. N., Schmader, T. M., & Mash, C. (1999). Formation of a categorical representation for the spatial relation between by 6- to 7-month-old infants. Visual Cognition, 6(5), 569–85.Google Scholar
Radford, A., & Ramos, E. (2001). Case, Agreement and EPP: evidence from an English-speaking child with SLI. University of Essex: Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 36, 42–81.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (2005). On the grammatical basis of language development: a case study. In Cinque, G. & Kayne, R. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative syntax (pp. 70–109). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1973). Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In Ferguson , C. A. & Slobin, D. (Eds.), Studies of child language development (pp. 175–205). New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1985). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, vol. 1: the data. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Svenonius, P. (2006). The emergence of axial parts. Nordlyd, 33(1), 49–77.Google Scholar
Svenonius, P. (2010). Spatial P in English. In Cinque, G. & Rizzi, L. (Eds.), Mapping spatial PPs: the cartography of syntactic structures (pp. 127–60). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Svenonius, P. (2012). Spanning. Unpublished ms, CASTL, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics, vol. 1: concept structuring systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Taraldsen, K. T., & Svenonius, P. (2007). The construct state in Norwegian prepositional phrases. Unpublished ms, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M., & Rowland, C. F. (2004). Semantic generality, input frequency, and the acquisition of syntax. Journal of Child Language, 31(1), 61–99.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (1987). Learning to use prepositions: a case study. Journal of Child Language, 14(1), 79–98.Google Scholar
Wagner, L., & Carey, S. (2005). Twelve-month-old infants represent probable endings of motion events. Infancy, 7, 73–83.Google Scholar
Westergaard, M. (2008). Verb movement and subject placement in the acquisition of word order: pragmatics or structural economy? In Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Larranaga, P., & Clibbens, J. (Eds.), First language acquisition of morphology and syntax: perspectives across languages and learners (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 45) (pp. 61–86). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Westergaard, M. (2009). The acquisition of word order: micro-cues, information structure and economy (Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today 145). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Westergaard, M. (2016). Word order and finiteness in acquisition: a study of English and Norwegian wh-questions. In Eide, K. M. (Ed.), Finiteness matters: on finiteness-related phenomena in natural language (pp. 255–86). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar