Language Acquisition
2022
Locality and Intervention in the Acquisition of Greek Relative Clauses (Appeared in Languages - see here)
This project looks at data we collected from 35 typically developing Greek speaking children. The data show that similarity in gender and case between a relativized object and an intervening subject in object relative clauses does not pose additional difficulties in comprehension. We examine this finding in comparison to results from cross-linguistic research showing that gender e.g. in Hebrew, does induce intervention effects in the acquisition of object relative clauses by typically developing children. Following recent developments in the literature on Relativized Minimality, we present an analysis of the cross-linguistic picture that arises from our investigation.
Previous works on the acquisition of evidentiality had mostly focused on languages like Turkish or Korean where evidentiality is morphologically encoded. Our paper offers a new perspective, as it looks at Greek, where evidentiality is encoded syntactically. We designed a new comprehension experiment which was administered to a large group of participants consisting of 100 children and 35 adults. .is number of participants is substantially larger than in previous studies. The statistical analysis we run revealed results suggesting that children eventually align with adults in terms of comprehension around the age of 9. We attribute this delay to the interaction of a number of grammatical factors that are involved in the way evidentiality is encoded in the syntax, thus, highlighting important differences between the languages that encode evidentiality in morphology and those, like Greek and English, that encode it in the syntax.