Eve V. Clark - First Language Acquisition. Chapter 10 Summary

1. Combining clauses:
More complex constructions
2023. 5. 31
June SaKong
• Combining propositions: The first stages
• Coordination and subordination
• Relative-clause constructions and referent specification
• Complement constructions and attitudes
• Temporal constructions and events in time
• Causal constructions and causal sequences
• Conditional constructions and contingency
• Summary
• Combining two or more clauses into a single utterance allow
for more elaborate identifications of referents in conversation
and for identifications of events as related in time (sequential
or simultaneous, for instance), as related by cause and effect,
or as related through contingency.
• Why use more complex forms?
- for more options in the flow of information.
- for the linguistic expression of more complex events and relations
- allows speakers to talk about more complex events like jokes,
arguing, persuading, telling stories.
Combining propositions: The first stages
• Children juxtapose two events to indicate they are connected,
but the precise connection can only be inferred in context,
often in the form of a schwa-vowel as place-holder
• By age 2.5~3, children begin to produce and, because, when,
and if

2. Coordination and
subordination
• The first to appear in
children’s production is and.
• Ardery (1979, 1980) argued,
that children’s
comprehension of
coordinate structures is
best considered in terms of
surface constraints and
processing strategies.
p.262
• Sentential transitive coordinations (65 errors/240)
- The horse kissed the cat and the giraffe pushed the frog.
(28) => the giraffe pushed the frog.
- The turtle pushed the dog and the cat kissed the horse.
(27) => The turtle pushed the horse and the cat kissed the dog.
- The turtle bumped into the dog and the cat jumped over the horse.
(10) => The turtle bumped into the dog.
• difficulty in remembering the full content of the coordinate construction
than to difficulty with the coordinate construction itself.
• gapped-verb coordinations with a particle (57 errors/120)
- The giraffe jumped over the horse and the frog over the cat.
(24) => The giraffe jumped over the horse.
- The horse bumped into the cat and the dog into the turtle.
(13) => The horse bumped into the cat, the dog and the turtle.
- The giraffe jumped over the horse and the frog over the cat.
(12) => The giraffe jumped over the frog and the cat jumped over
the horse.
- The horse bumped into the cat and the dog into the turtle.
(8) => The horse bumped into the cat and the dog jumped over
the turtle.
• the appropriateness of their lexical choices for objects and
actions
- The coordinate type children produced most frequently
(and correctly) was a conjunction of two transitive-verb
clauses. (Sentential transitive coordinations)
- Their transitive-verb coordinations were rare (4%), they
preferred to produce verb phrase coordinations (69%).
- they produced no gapped-verb or gapped-object
coordinations, only combinations with two full clauses

3. • Ardery proposed three factors
(a) verb primacy
(b) linear sequencing
(c) a coordination strategy
• Overall, children seem to understand some coordinate
constructions some time before they produce them
• cohesion was observed
• cohesion links the child’s utterance to the preceding adult
utterance
• adult—child cohesion more than 20% of the time, causal and
adversative relations
Relative-clause constructions and
referent specification
• relative clauses at around age two. examples - Table 10.3.
• children’s early relative clauses typically lack relativizers, the
elements introducing the relative clause itself.
• Slobin’s (1973) : children generally seem to avoid interrupting
linguistic units. Relative clauses are attached to the object
noun phrase (rather than the subject)

4. • The boy the book hit was crying, Echo reproduced as boy the
crying.
• relative clauses may be harder to understand when they
interrupt the main clause, or when the object of the main
clause is also the object of the relative clause
• Regardless of language type, children may use the wrong
relativizer. In French, children tend to overuse que as a
relativizer. They clearly grasped the function of the relative
clause construction, But they still hadn’t fully mastered the
different relativizers — qui, que, ou, quand, etc.—
(five-year-olds)
• Tager-Flusberg (1982) varied the event-types in terms of the
number of participants (two vs. three) and the role filled by
each one (subject/agent, direct object/patient, indirect
object/beneficiary).
• children had to include the relevant information in their
descriptions for scenarios

5. percentage
• Comparisons of two-participant scene descriptions showed
that children produced relative clauses equally for agents and
patients.
• Four- and five-year-olds did produce relative clauses but were
more likely to do so for specifying the beneficiary than the
agent or patient.
• always in utterance-final position
• Diessel and Tomasello (2005) : four-year-olds’ children still
had considerable difficulty in repeating some types.
• relative clauses introduced into copular constructions (e.g.,
There’s the man who...) should be easier for children to
produce than relative clauses where the main and
subordinate clause verbs link the two propositions (e.g., The
dog chased the cat that Dan saw).
oblique
genitive
• Although IO-relatives are rare in child-directed speech, they
resemble OBJ-relatives and children showed few problems in
their repetitions. OBL-relatives were manageable in English
but very difficult in German. GEN-relatives were difficult in
both languages.
• This makes them harder to interpret and much harder to
produce
• some relative-clause types are relatively rare in adult speech
to children, the relevant mastery around age twelve

6. • the typology of the language : English or French (the phrase
to be modified occurs before the modifying element) tend to
master relative clauses earlier than children acquiring Turkish
or Japanese (after the modifying element).
• children must identify both function (specification of the
referent) and form, and learn how to interpret and use,
mastery of relative clauses as a whole in a language can take
many years.
Complement constructions and
attitudes
• Complement constructions in English consist of finite clauses
(i.e., with an inflected verb) or nonfinite clauses (with an
infinitive verb) embedded in one of the argument slots of the
main verb, as in I thought that he would be late (with a finite,
tensed verb in the complement) or I wanted them to clean
up their rooms (with a nonfinite, infinitival verb in the
complement).
• describing one event to be embedded as part of another
event
• I know (that) X or I see (that) Y. But such complements
typically lack the complementizer that in children’s speech
• they used that as a complementizer in only 14 of 1,224
instances (1.2%)

7. • In 98% of all their utterances containing guess, bet, mean,
know, or think as the apparent main verb, the verbs are
actually being used as parenthetical verbs to express the
speaker’s attitude to the content of the adjoined clause.
• age two and three appears to serve two main functions.
1) reiterations of directives
2) complaints
• Why would children begin by using complement-taking
matrix verbs as parentheticals, discourse markers, or as
devices for introducing one’s attitude to the content of the
complement, rather than as true complement constructions?
they generally hear from their parents. In over 4,000
examples, parents produced these verbs 97% of the time with
no that marking the following clause
• Lexical specificity : acquisition of nonfinite to complements in
English,
• verbs of intention (e.g., want to, be going to [future], have to
[obligation]), verbs of inception (e.g., try to, be ready to, need
to), verbs of invitation (e.g., like to, be supposed to), verbs of
instruction (e.g., show how to, know where to, ask to), and
certain verbs of negation (e.g., forget to, used to, not nice to).

8. • promise, the subjects of the matrix verb and the verb in the
complement are the same. other verbs of communication, the
subject of the main verb is not the subject of the verb in the
complement.
• For an exception like promise, children take several years to
acquire the relevant meaning, and rarely interpret it correctly
before age eight or nine
• Acquisition of these constructions proceeds verb by verb, and
mastering the adult meanings of some of the matrix verbs
takes many years.
Temporal constructions and events in
time
• Events time line : sequential organization, simultaneity, or
overlap.
• The focus here is on adverbial clauses introduced by a
temporal conjunction.
• When children first talk about more than one event, they
simply juxtapose them
• early uses of these conjunctions - when, before, or after - are
sometimes hard to interpret because children haven’t yet
worked out exactly what they mean.
• Their order of mention typically follows the order of
occurrence
• By age three, children have begun to produce temporal
descriptions with when to mark both co-occurrence (11a—
11b) and sequence (11c—11d)
• it is often unclear at first which conjunctions children really
understand and use appropriately.

9. • three-year-olds ignored the conjunction (before or after) and
attended only to the order of mention of the two events,
• they were wrong over 80% of the time when the two didn’t
coincide.
• They also made mistakes with conjunctions and used before
in place of after, and vice versa.
• By 4;6 to 5;6, most children interpret both conjunctions
appropriately. But they still have to master other temporal
conjunctions, such as while, during, until, and since, takes
time
• temporal conjunction depends on at least two factors — the
temporal relation(sequential, simultaneous, or overlapping),
the starting point of the utterance (initial event, some medial
event, or the ending event).
• The prior mention marks the event as given and so is taken
up first, leaving the other to be presented as new
Causal constructions and causal
sequences
• Children begin to express causation within events from
around age two to two-and-a-half on. They use a causative
verb for what the agent does in causing a change of state in
the patient or theme, presenting one event as the cause and
another as the effect or outcome.
• it is sometimes unclear whether temporal, causal, or
conditional sequence. Determination must depend on the
pragmatic context.
p.278

10. • D seems to be using because instead of so.
• he also produced because where a temporal conjunction
• eight children (from 2;0 to 3;5), because (28%), so (14%).
• Because was nearly always followed by a cause and so by an
effect.
• With internal causation, ’cos I sad, ’cos I want to, or ’cos he
tired. With external (usually physical) causes, an initiating
causal event is presented as bringing about some result.
• Some children use because for internal states and
justifications:
• They contrast because with another term, such as from, to
mark external causation
• Causal clauses may be offered to explain a resultant state of
affairs or given as a justification for carrying out a desired
action,
• Understanding of causality in many domains can take many
years, but three- and four-year-olds have already mastered
some of the linguistic means for talking about one event
being the cause of another.
Conditional constructions and
contingency
• Conditional constructions emerge in children’s speech soon
after temporal and causal constructions, but the full range
takes children a long time to master.
• the cognitive complexity of the notion of contingency, the
pragmatic conditions on use of a conditional, and the formal
complexity of the construction itself
• several cognitive prerequisites: contingency, hypotheticality,
inference, and genericity.

11. • First, children need to recognize that one event may be
contingent on another.
• Second, children need to recognize when an event is
hypothetical rather than actual.
• one-and-a-half can pretend that one object is another; they
pretend that a block is a car,
• they also begin to talk about hypothetical events, marking
them with terms like almost,
• Third, children need to be able to infer that two events are
connected.
• Christy was able to infer a possible consequence and express
it in anticipation of what was about to happen.
• Fourth, children need to understand the generic nature of
certain events and combinations of events.
• These early generalizations typically take the form of timeless
statements often with plural subjects,

12. p.282
• the earliest ones lack any explicit
conjunction in the form of if (or
when).
•
• they seem to start from the semantic pattern used for future
predictives, where the first of two events is possible but
uncertain and the second is contingent on the first,
All three children used
when in the certain cases
and if in the uncertain ones,
• To assess their understanding of conditionals, (Reilly 1982, 1986)
asked children what if questions that fell into five categories:
(a) What if questions asked in the context of a story; e.g., “What
if you eat three ice-creams?” (to elicit such responses as you
get sick or you will get sick).
(b) What if questions asked about pigs and bears, both stories
with familiar, known outcomes; “What if the straw house had
been made of bricks?”
(c) What if questions about pretend,
(d) What if questions about when sentence completions:
(e) What if questions about familiar items & familiar events

13. • Sequence of acquisition : 7 stages
- Stage I : children simply juxtapose two clauses;
- Stage II : they begin to use the conjunctions if and when,
mainly for future predictives.
- Stage III : they extend predictive when to relate objects to
familiar contexts in protogeneric utterances,
- Stage IV : their first hypothetical and their first predictive if
- Stage V : their first hypothetical conditionals:
- Stage VI : fully differentiating their uses of when and if.
- Stage VII : clearly differentiate if from when,
three-year-olds offered appropriate responses only
36% of the time, her four-year-olds did so 93% of
the time. also use more counterfactuals

14. • By age four, many children make use of future, present, and
counterfactual conditions in talking
• some typical counterfactuals produced by six- to eleven-
year-olds who were describing a picture of a girl watching a
rabbit run away from its cage
Summary
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