Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared to Spanish and English) predicting early comprehension, as in French. We investigated two and three-year-old Greek-speaking children's ability to distinguish third person singular and plural agreement in a picture-selection task. We also examined the frequency of these morphemes in child-directed speech to address input effects. Results showed that three-year-olds are sensitive to both singular and plural agreement, earlier than children acquiring English and Spanish, but later than French, and despite singular agreement being more frequent than plural agreement in the child corpus. These findings provide further support for the role of salience and reliability during early acquisition, while highlighting a potential effect of morpheme position.

中文翻译：

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提示可靠性、显着性和对协议的早期理解：来自希腊语的证据

以前跨语言（英语、西班牙语、法语）的研究认为，感知显着性和提示可靠性可以解释早期理解口头协议的跨语言差异。在这里，我们通过调查希腊语的早期理解进一步验证了这一假设，其中标记具有较高的显着性和可靠性（与西班牙语和英语相比）预测早期理解，如法语。我们调查了两岁和三岁的讲希腊语的儿童在图片选择任务中区分第三人称单数和复数一致的能力。我们还检查了这些语素在面向儿童的语音中的频率，以解决输入效果。结果表明，三岁的孩子对单数和复数的一致性都比较敏感，早于孩子学习英语和西班牙语，但晚于法语，尽管在子语料库中单数一致比复数一致更频繁。这些发现为早期习得过程中的显着性和可靠性的作用提供了进一步的支持，同时强调了语素位置的潜在影响。