ABSTRACT

We examined French-learning toddlers’ sensitivity to Subject-Verb agreement with conjoined subjects. In French, a conjoined NP triggers plural agreement even when made up of individual singular NPs. Processing of this infrequent structure in the input (see Corpus Analyses) requires going beyond surface patterns of non-adjacent dependencies to abstract, feature-based syntactic knowledge. In Experiment 1, results revealed a significant grammaticality effect in 24-month-olds, but not in 18-month-olds, with no interaction with the condition (with either conjoined or non-conjoined agreement; all tested with Head-Turn Preference Procedure). In Experiment 2, 30-month-olds (tested with conjoined agreement only) showed the same pattern as 24-month-olds: a strong grammaticality effect limited to the first half of the experiment. Overall, these results provide some support to the hypothesis that 24- and 30-month-olds (but not 18-month-olds) have abstract knowledge of SV agreement with conjoined subjects, although it imposes a high processing cost. Importantly, this abstract syntactic sensitivity precedes the earliest evidence of simple agreement comprehension.

摘要

我们研究了法语学习的幼儿对连带主体对主体动词一致的敏感性。在法语中，连词NP即使由单个奇异NP组成，也会触发复数约定。在输入中处理这种不常见的结构（请参阅语料库分析）需要超越非相邻依赖的表面模式，以抽​​象的，基于特征的句法知识。在实验1中，结果显示在24个月大的孩子中有明显的语法效果，而在18个月大的孩子中没有，与条件没有交互作用（具有联合或非联合的协议；所有测试均采用首转偏好程序进行） ）。在实验2中，30个月大的孩子（仅通过联合协议测试）显示出与24个月大的孩子相同的模式：强烈的语法效果仅限于实验的前半部分。总体，这些结果为以下假设提供了一定的支持：24和30个月大的婴儿（但没有18个月大的婴儿）具有与相关受试者的SV协议的抽象知识，尽管这会带来较高的处理成本。重要的是，这种抽象的句法敏感性先于简单的协议理解的最早证据。