Transitivity in the early linguistic environment of socioeconomically diverse argentinian children

AUDISIO, CYNTHIA PAMELA; RAMIREZ, MARÍA LAURA; QUIROGA, MACARENA SOL; ROSEMBERG, CELIA RENATA

Moscù

Workshop; Summer Neurolinguistics School; 2020

Higher School of Economics

Acquisition of transitivity happens in the first three years of life (e.g., Pye 1983, Berman 1993). This phenomenon is challenging to smaller children (Bavin & Growcott, 2000, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Naigles, 1996), and even 8-year-olds commit transitivity errors (Brooks & Tomasello, 1999). Therefore, it is worth studying how this process unfolds. There is an ongoing debate on whether children are biased to learn transitive or intransitive verbs first. It has been found that intransitive verbs are acquired earlier than transitive ones (e.g., De Bleser & Kauschke, 2003, for English, Nomura & Shirai, 1997, Tsujimura, 2006, for Japanese). The reverse pattern was also found (e.g., Choi 1999, for Korean, Fukuda 2005, for English and Japanese, Budwig, Narasimhan, & Srivastava, 2006, for Hindi). Some studies argue that observed biases are due to event-type salience (Slobin, 1981) or performance limitations (Valian, 1991, Fukuda & Choi, 2009). Children?s preferences had also been accounted for by the typological properties of the input language (Tsujimura, 2006). Others have found that children?s use of verbs is related to their linguistic environment (e.g., Theakston, Lieven, Pine, & Rowland, 2000). Theakston et al. (2000) found that children tend to use the same verb frames as are found in the input regardless of whether they are transitive or intransitive. Even children that learn languages that share many linguistic properties (e.g., Korean and Japanese) show different preferences in accordance with tendencies observed in their caregivers´ speech (Fukuda & Choi, 2009).Hence, despite possible cognitive biases that affect the acquisition of transitivity, this process is crucially affected by the early linguistic input. On this presentation, we aim to assess the distribution of transitive and intransitive clauses in the linguistic input to normally developing Argentinian Spanish-learning children that are socioeconomically diverse (N = 10 whose parents had, on average, 17 years education and N= 10 whose parents had 10 years of education). For that purpose, we have analysed a representative sample of the input to these children at 20 months drawn from a corpus of 2-hour audio transcripts that registered the naturalistic speech produced in their linguistic environment (Rosemberg, Alam, Stein, Migdalek, Menti, & Ojea, 2015-2016).Results over 8 children (N=4 from low-SES households and N=4 from middle-SES households), show an overall predominance of transitive clauses. Across SES-groups (low vs. middle) and speakers (child vs. adult), approximately 65% of the clauses were transitive and only 35% intransitive. Although transitive clauses are also more frequent in child-directed and overheard speech, there are 10% less transitive clauses in child-directed than overheard speech. Accordingly, the effect of addressee (child-directed vs. overheard) on clause transitivity showed a trend toward significance (ß = -.34, p = .07) in a binomial regression model fitted by following a backward stepwise procedure. High frequency intransitive verbs of motion that are typically present in commands directed to children might be related to this trend (vení, vamos ?come?, andá ?go?). These results are being further explored and the analysed sample increased to include more children.ReferenciasBavin, E. L. & Growcott, C. (2000). Infants of 24-30 months understand verb frames. In M. Perkins & S. Howard (eds.), New directions in language development and disorders, 169?177. New York: Kluwer. Berman, R. (1993). Marking of verb transitivity by Hebrew-speaking children. 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