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Null subject comprehension and production revisited: a look at English and Italian
Date created: 2023-08-01 12:49 PM | Last Updated: 2025-01-14 08:03 PM
Category: Project
Description: This study will investigate how children acquire language-specific syntax, and how this syntax is represented in acquisition. The empirical domain is the option to drop the subject of a sentence, or null subjects (e.g. “Tickles me” instead of “He tickles me”). This option varies across languages, and must therefore be acquired based on a child’s linguistic input. However, children initially appear to acquire the incorrect option: in languages which do not permit null subjects, children produce sentences with null subjects from 1-3 years of age (for reviews see Hyams 2011; Valian 2016). Our research question: how and when do children represent null subject sentences? The literature offers two main accounts: first, the null subject sentences may accurately reflect children’s linguistic knowledge, i.e. a competence account. Alternatively, they may result from immature processing resources, therefore underestimating children’s competence, i.e. a performance account. We will test the predictions of competence and performance accounts with a comparison between children’s comprehension and production of null subjects. The participants will be monolingual 20-28 month olds acquiring English (a non-null subject language) and monolingual 20-28 month olds acquiring Italian (a null subject language). For children’s comprehension, we will use the head-turn preference paradigm – a well-established methodology but a novel application for null subjects. This method offers several advantages over other comprehension tasks, including the use of an implicit measure (rather than explicit), and a test sentence which is not interpreted with respect to an external context. For the production method, we will use an elicited imitation task. This paradigm is more commonly used to investigate children’s null subjects, allowing for a replication of previous studies and serving as a baseline measure for comparison with the novel comprehension task. Both tasks will be deployed online via the Children Helping Science study platform, formerly Lookit (Scott & Schulz 2017).
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