Subject-verb agreement is pervasive in many languages and it is one of the earliest syntactic relations that children must master. Prior research has suggested that its course of acquisition is different in different languages: early production but late comprehension have been observed in English, Spanish and Xhosa (Bantu) while production and comprehension are both early in French (by 30 months of age). The PIs in this collaborative project, Dr. Legendre and Dr. Barriere, seek to reconcile these results by evaluating the hypothesis that children can detect agreement markers better and earlier in languages in which these markers are both perceptually salient and semantically transparent.
The research project will target four languages chosen because their relevant properties allow a number of factors to be teased apart: English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole. This project is innovative in seeking to investigate the role of perceptual factors, both at the sentential level and cross-linguistically, and fosters interdisciplinary approaches to the study of language acquisition by melding research in theoretical syntax, psycholinguistics, corpus analysis, and speech perception, and combining their respective research methods. The project will stimulate international collaborations between the PIs in the US and research consultants in France, and will provide valuable research experience for a post-doctoral researcher, and for graduate and undergraduate students at the two US sites.
