Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney Recent documents in Ellen H Courtney en-us Sun, 31 May 2009 05:45:43 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/12 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/12 Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:32:18 PST H. Douglas Adamson http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/11 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/11 Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:04:30 PDT Languages such as Turkish, Korean, and Japanese exhibit evidential morphemes encoding information source as direct or indirect evidence. Investigations of child acquisition of evidential systems (notably, Aksu-Koc, 1988; Choi, 1995; Matsui, Yamamoto & McCagg, 2006) reveal that development of evidential meaning is a protracted process, relying on children's incremental understanding of mental states. This study examines child production of five Quechua suffixes, including three evidential enclitics (direct evidence, hearsay, report), and two verb inflections that differentiate perceived and unperceived events in past time. For this purpose, the research team recorded 15 conversations between mothers and their children, aged 2;3-8;0, as well as story retellings produced by 13 children aged 2;6-5;7. All participants were from rural communities outlying Cuzco, Peru. It was observed that children begin producing some suffixes at age two, but it is not until the age of four that children produce all the morphemes as true evidential markers. Ellen H. Courtney http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/9 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/9 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:48:44 PDT P. Bloom http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/8 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/8 Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:39:21 PDT Navajo and Quechua, both languages with a highly complex morphology, provide intriguing insights into the acquisition of inflectional systems. The development of the verb in the two languages is especially interesting, since the morphology encodes diverse grammatical notions, with the complex verb often constituting the entire sentence. While the verb complex in Navajo is stem-final, with prefixes appended to the stem in a rigid sequence, Quechua verbs are assembled entirely through suffixation, with some variation in affix ordering. We explore issues relevant to the acquisition of verb morphology by children learning Navajo and Quechua as their first language. Our study presents naturalistic speech samples produced by five Navajo children, aged 1;1 to 4;7, and by four Quechua-speaking children, aged 2;0 to 3;5. We center our analysis on the role of phonological criteria in segmentation of verb stems and affixes, the production of amalgams, the problem of homophony, and the significance of distributional learning and semantic criteria in the development of the verb template. The phenomena observed in our data are discussed in light of several proposals, especially those of Peters (1983, 1995), Pinker (1984), Slobin (1985), and Hyams (1986, 1994). Ellen H. Courtney http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/7 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/7 Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:11:09 PDT Largely based on observations of English-speaking children, investigators have proposed constraints on verb learning, e.g., syntactic bootstrapping, the principle of uniqueness, and innate semantic-conceptual categories. Children produce overgeneralization errors as they acquire verb meaning, and data from some languages reveal an intriguing asymmetry: children use intransitive verbs transitively, while seldom using causative-transitive verbs intransitively. This study presents experimental evidence corroborating Courtney's (2002) finding that Quechua-speaking children's overgeneralization errors observe the same asymmetry. The transitive variants of change-of-state verbs were elicited from 30 Peruvian children, aged 2;8-4;11. The ensuing discussion offers an account of the asymmetry and considers learnability issues in Quechua verb acquisition, specifically the usefulness of constraints proposed for children acquiring English, which is typologically very different from Quechua. Ellen H. Courtney http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/5 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/5 Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:04:02 PDT Ellen H. Courtney http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/4 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/4 Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:56:21 PDT This study investigates the production of Quechua relative clauses by Peruvian adults and children, aged 2;8-4;7. Quechua relative clauses may be internally-headed, externally-headed, or headless. Previous studies (e.g., O'Grady, 2003), suggested two outcomes: children will have less difficulty producing subject-gap relative clauses than other types; and, compared to adults, children will produce more headed relatives, especially internally-headed relative clauses. A procedure was used to elicit production of two relative clauses for each of four types: subject-gap, direct object-gap, non-direct object-gap, possessor-gap. Participants produced all types with equal ease, although children produced more errors; children produced comparatively more headless relatives, and their headed relative clauses were overwhelmingly externally-headed. This outcome is attributed to children's learning [modifier+noun] constructions resembling headless and externally-headed relative clauses. Ellen H. Courtney http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/3 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/3 Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:49:35 PDT This paper uses data concerning the acquisition of Quechua causatives to explore the development of morphological features that reflect variation in argument structure: (1) case-marking on the causees of morphological causatives and (2) transitivity permutations for change-of-state verbs. Quechua speakers assign to the causee varying degrees of volitional control through use of different case inflections. As to Quechua change-of-state verbs, those corresponding to verbs that participate in the causative alternation in other languages, such as English break and boil, pose a particular challenge. According to Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1994, 1995), these verbs tend to be basically transitive across languages, with the intransitive variant formed morphologically, and they express eventualities that are externally caused. In Quechua, many such verbs are basically intransitive, with the transitive variant constructed morphologically. Naturalistic data from five Quechua-speaking children aged 2;4 through 3;5 suggest that the causee is initially expressed as a directly affected object, lacking volitional control. Also, children may first construe all change-of-state verbs as basically transitive, expressing changes construed as externally caused. Ellen H. Courtney http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/2 http://works.bepress.com/ellenhcourtney/2 Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:21:27 PDT Languages long in contact in the Andean countries, Quechua and Spanish are intriguing partners in bilingual speech because they exhibit very different word order patterns. In a study exploring the development of Spanish word order in Quechua-speaking children, Minaya & Luján (1982) reported that children frequently produced "hybrid" (S)VOV structures. They proposed that the children had a transitional grammar with a nonadult phrase structure rule. This study presents a vigorous challenge to this claim. First, both adult and child speakers of Quechua duplicate not only verbs, but a variety of constituent types, presumably for emphatic effect. Second, the Minaya & Luján proposal attributed to the children a transitional "wild grammar." It will be shown that the appearance of the VOV pattern in child L2 Spanish clearly represents transfer of a pragmatic strategy and not a transitional, illicit, hybrid grammar. Ellen H. Courtney