7,566 research outputs found
Children\u27s Sensitivity to Prosody and Ostension in Answers to Wh-Questions
No full textThis paper examines the effects of two often overlooked factors in children’s answers to wh-questions: the prosodic contour of the question and the complexity of the visual stimuli. There are two potential effects on the interpretation of a question in English: whether it is moved, and what kind of prosody it has
Pied-piping in wh-questions:What do children say about it?
No full textErrors/non-target responses characterizing sub-extraction of a wh-phrase from complex DPs in child speech are found in first language acquisition studies (van Kampen 1997 among others) and have provided the basis for arguing the complexity of question formation involving pied-piping.
In this dissertation, data were drawn from 81 children, aged 3;0-6;0, participating in two experiments, with one eliciting a D-linked question in complex phrases such as inda milo ‘which apple’ in Cypriot Greek. The results validated previous literature on sub-extraction phenomena and have provided the first observation for such cases in the specific variety. Errors were characterized by movement of the operator and stranding of the noun in which+NP structures, such as ‘which apple’. Another error involved movement of the operator and pied-piping of a noun, but stranding of the second noun in wh+NP+NP structures, such as ti xroma tsenda (lit., ‘which color bag’).
Results from the production experiment show that children show high percentages of omission of the NP in D-linked questions (up to 50%) in all age groups. Their responses involve stranding of the NP (7%-17%), which does not seem to fade out even in the oldest age group. These errors appear across ages when children produce a wh-question with the wh-phrase ti ‘which’. In a set of responses, where inda ‘which’ is used, errors are found only in the youngest group and do not appear with the successful use of inda ‘which’.
A comprehension task was later administered to a subset of the children that participated n the production experiment and some of the data collected are used to compare the acquisition of D-linked questions between production and comprehension. Children provided more than 60% successful responses in the comprehension experiment showing a steady development by age. Lower percentages are found in object D-linked questions, suggesting greater difficulty in the comprehension of object D-linked questions in comparison with subject D-linked questions (Goodluck 2005 and subsequent work). Subject D-linked questions initially appear to be acquired at the age of 4, whereas object D-linked questions appear at the age of 6.
With focus on sub-extractions, the Immediate Move Hypothesis is proposed to account for these errors in D-linked questions and other environments of similar type. It predicts the ‘optionality’ in pied-piping, expands the syntactic term ‘shortest’ in the Minimal Link Condition and provides a theory of movement in children based on the smallest possible element satisfying the maximum number of requirements in syntax.
The types of errors produced by children involve a logical explanation under which fundamental notions of Minimalism, such as Economy, are expressed through different structures defining these errors as innately-motivated patterns
Understanding and motivating employees at WH Smith
No full textFollowing a number of management team changes, WH Smith Travel wanted to establish how its employees viewed the company’s organizational culture. Here, Gareth English, senior consultant with business psychology experts, OPP, explains how conducting workforce surveys helped to gauge the impact of the changes, identify areas for improvement and encourage employee engagement.</jats:p
Immunity to wh-misidentification
No full textThis paper responds to arguments due to Joel Smith and Annalisa Coliva that try to show that James Pryor’s notion of wh-misidentification is philosophically uninteresting, and perhaps even spurious. It also proposes definitions of wh-misidentification and immunity to wh-misidentification which try to improve in various ways on the characterisations that standardly figure in the literature, and explores the relationship between misidentification and the epistemic structures characteristic of some kinds of Gettier cases
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The Emergence of Barriers to Wh-movement, Negative Concord, and Quantification
No full textColes-White, D.J., de Villiers, J. G., & Roeper, T. (2004). The emergence of barriers to wh-movement, negative concord and quantification. In A. Brugos, L. Micciulla, & C. Smith (Eds.), BUCLD 28, The proceedings of the 28th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 98-107). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.98-10
Assessing the Acquisition of Romani in Roma Children
No full textThe paper presents the first comprehensive look at the language development of Romani-speaking children from resource-poor Roma communities in several European countries. 250 participants aged 3- to 10-years participated. The experimental tasks assess knowledge in eight key areas of grammar and morphology, including fast mapping of novel items. The special properties of Romani allow new insights on long distance wh-movement and possessive agreement, and the data question the universality of other distinctions in passives and wh-movement from complements. The results demonstrate that the Roma children as a group are as proficient in their primary language as children in other countries, despite massive economic deficits and lack of parental education. This is important because Roma children are massively overrepresented in special education and “special schools” especially in Eastern Europe, and one contributing factor is their inadequate skill in the state language of their domicile
Wh-Islands: A View from Correspondence Theory
No full textThis paper discusses a family of restrictions on syntactic extraction, so-called wh-islands. The analysis will be based on the OT syntax model developed in Vogel (2004a,b) which focuses on the correspondence between semantic, syntactic and phonological representations, in the spirit of work by Jackendoff (1997), Williams (2003) and Culicover & Jackendoff (2005). I will argue that the wh-island restriction results from the impossibility to establish a perfect semantics-syntax mapping in the relevant structures. The resulting constraint violations add up to yield the wh-island effect. Exceptions to the wh-island restrictions in English are argued to be prosodically licensed.
Section 2 introduces the model I am using, and presents examples of some accounts of ineffability which I developed elsewhere. That section also introduces the basics of my treatment of wh-movement. Section 3 develops the account of wh-islands. Section 4 discusses the exceptions to the wh-island restriction that we see in English, and extends my account to handle these cases. The OT implementation of this account is presented in Section 5.The definitive version of this paper is published in Modeling Ungrammaticality in Optimality Theory. It is available at https://www.equinoxpub.com/equinox/books/showbook.asp?bkid=212Vogel, R. (2009). Wh-Islands: A View from Correspondence Theory. In C. Rice (Ed.), Ungrammaticality in Optimality Theory. Oakville, CT:Equinox Pub. Ltd, 2009ISBN-13 9781845532154 (published book
The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions
No full textThe current experiment addresses the proposal by Cheng & Rooryk (2000) that wh-in-situ questions in French are marked by an obligatory rising contour, which is the result of an intonation morpheme [Q: ] in C. Twelve native French speakers participated in a production study in which they produced the target interrogatives, along with a range of similar sentences. While most participants were perceived to assign wh-in-situ questions a sentence-final rise, a minority was not. Moreover, the rise associated with wh-in-situ was smaller than the rise exhibited in yes-no questions, which C&R claim to be licensed by the same morpheme. Given that these two results are unexpected under C&R’s account, we conducted a further acoustic analysis of the productions, which revealed that for sentences lacking a sentence-final rise, the the in situ wh-word had an elevated high pitch accent. A statistical analysis shows a negative correlation between the height of the pitch accent assigned to the wh-word and the presence and height of the sentence-final rise, indicating that instead of the sentence-final rise for wh-in-situ questions being optional, it may instead be variable and predictable by focus placed on the wh-word, for discourse reasons. We discuss three possibilities for the status of the intonation morpheme concerning yes-no and wh-questions and the role of information structure in French wh-in-situ questions.Peer reviewed
ABSA/WH Smith sponsorship manual
No full textAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:q97/03518 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo
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