Events

he next meeting of CUNY's Psycholinguistics Supper in the Spring 2015 series will be held on Tuesday, February 17:

  = CUNY Graduate Centre
  = 365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th & 35th Streets)
  = Room 7102 (Seventh Floor)
  = 6:45 to 8:00 PM

Please note slightly DELAYED start time.

The speaker will be Isabelle Barriere (Long Island University, Yeled v'Yalda Early Childhood Center), whose talk has the title "Cross-linguistic and bilingual perspectives on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement".

                   ALL WELCOME!

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ABSTRACT.  Recent studies on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement have produced two sets of puzzling results.  The first one pertains to the earlier mastery of subject-verb agreement in production than in comprehension: while productive use around age 3 has been reported for Bantu, English, German and Spanish-speaking children, in the same languages no evidence of comprehension has been identified until a year to two later (Johnson et al., 2005, Perez-Leroux, 2005, Brandt-Kobele & Höhle, Gxilishe et al., 2007).  The second one pertains to cross-linguistic differences: French-learning toddlers have been found to understand subject verb agreement at 2 years 6 months (Legendre et al., 2010).

In order to better understand these two phenomena, I propose a multidimensional methodological approach that enables us to explore both the nature of the developing grammatical representations as well as the information that children may extract from their linguistic environment.  I will present three sets of new studies on French, English and Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals, that adopt this multidimensional approach and combine experimental comprehension data with real and nonce verbs, acoustic analyses of the stimuli and the contributions of the reliability (semantic transparency) and availability (frequency) of the agreement-marker to the acquisition process.

The results will be discussed in relation to distinct hypotheses on the development of morphosyntax.

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Send questions and comments to Dianne Bradley, <DBradley@gc.cuny.edu>