In A. Belletti, E. Bennati, C. Chesi, E. Di Domenico, & I. Ferrari (Eds.), Language acquisition and development (2006). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press/CSP.

ON THE ORDER OF ACQUISITION OF A-MOVEMENT, WH-MOVEMENT AND V-C MOVEMENT

NAAMA FRIEDMANN AND HEDVA LAVI

Syntactic movement is a central notion in syntactic theory, and an important factor in accounting for the acquisition of syntax. There are several distinct types of syntactic movement. The first classification relates to the type of element that moves, phrases undergo phrasal movement, and heads, such as verbs, undergo head movement. These movement types further divide by the position to which the constituent moves: phrases can move to an argument position (an argument movement, or A-movement), to spec-VP or spec-IP, or they can move higher up to a non-argument position, to spec-CP (A-bar movement, or Wh movement). Verbs move to I in order to collect (or check) inflection, but they can also move further to C, a movement that is obligatory in Germanic V2 languages, and is optional and stylistic in other languages, like Hebrew. A substantial body of research has looked at the ability of children who are in the process of acquiring language to produce and understand sentences that are derived by various types of movement. With respect to A-movement, following the findings about children's difficulty in understanding passives (Maratsos et al., 1985), Borer and Wexler (1987, 1992) suggested that the ability to assign thematic roles to constituents that moved to another position in the sentence matures only at around the age of 4 or even 5 years. This hypothesis was termed "The maturation of A-chains". Other studies, of passives and unaccusatives, indicate that A-chains are actually acquired much earlier (Fox & Grodzinsky (1998), Friedmann (2004); Guasti (2002), Snyder, Hyams, & Crisma (1995)). The numerous studies that focused on the acquisition of Wh movement found that structures that involve Wh movement do not occur from the onset of sentences production, and that relative clauses, for example, appear around age 2;6 in production (Berman, 1997; Crain, McKee, & Emiliani, 1990; de Villiers, de Villiers, & Hoban, 1994; Labelle, 1990, 1996; McKee, McDaniel, & Snedeker, 1998; Varlokosta & Armon-Lotem, 1998). In comprehension relative 212 The order of acquisition of A-, Wh- and V-C movement clauses are mastered even later, at around the age of five or six (de Villiers et al., 1994; Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2004; McKee et al., 1998; Roth, 1984; Sheldon, 1974; Tavakolian, 1981). These findings have been accounted for by reference to children’s inability to handle the movement that occurs in this structure. Wexler (1992; and also Guasti & Shlonsky, 1995) suggested that linking operators, operators that must be co-indexed with an antecedent and transfer referential features, mature late. Namely, what matures later is the ability to co-index an operator that moves to a non-argument position with an element in the matrix clause. This is the case in object relatives: an empty operator moves from object position within the embedded clause to spec-CP of the embedded clause, and is co-indexed with an NP in the matrix clause, and therefore it can account also for the late acquisition of object relatives. Finally, studies that explored the acquisition of verb movement (thorough I) to C (V-C for short) showed that structures that involve this movement also do not occur early on. V-C movement was found to be acquired later than V-I (Déprez & Pierce, 1993; Soares, 2003), and in Hebrew after age 4 (Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2003; Zuckerman, 2001). However, not much is known about the order of acquisition of the three types of movement within a child, and whether the order is uniform across children, or whether each movement type kicks in at a different stage for different children. The current study tried to establish the order of acquisition of Wh movement, A-movement and V-C movement within the same child, using an imitation task that included 60 Hebrew-speaking children, each repeating 80 sentences derived by different types of movement.

Method

Participants. The participants were 60 Israeli children aged 2;2-3;10: 21 children aged 2;2-2;9, 19 children aged 2;10-3;2, and 20 children aged 3;3-3;10. All the children were monolingual native speakers of Hebrew, with normal language development and no hearing impairment. Procedure. The children were asked to repeat sentences. In order to encourage them to repeat the sentences they received building blocks after each sentence they repeated, in order to build a block tower up "all the way up to the sky". Material. Each child repeated 80 sentences, 10 sentences of each type. A-movement was tested using SV sentences with unaccusatives in which the subjects undergo A-movement, as they move from their base-generated object position to a position before the verb. This structure is frequent in Hebrew, and much more common than passive. The assessment of Wh movement used subject- and object relative clauses and topicalization, all involving movement to spec-CP. V-C movement was tested in sentences in which the verb appears Naama Friedmann and Hedva Lavi 213 right after a temporal adverb, with transitive and unergative verbs. We compared the movement-derived sentences to SV sentences with unergative and transitive verbs. All sentences included 4 words (counting prepositions, complementizers and case markers with the words they attach to), and were randomly ordered. The structures and their constituents were (given only in transliteration due to space limitation):

Basic SV order: A-S-Vunergative-PP yesterday the-boy jumped in-the-garden A-S-Vtransitive-O yesterday the-boy built tower A movement: A-S-Vunaccusative-PP yesterday the-girl fell in-the-garden Wh movement: Topicalization O-S-V-A ACC-the-tower the-boy built yesterday Subject relatives (I)-saw ACC-the-girl that-kissed ACC-grandma Object relatives (I)-saw ACC-the-girl that-grandma kissed V-C movement: A-Vunergative-S-PP yesterday jumped the-boy in-the-garden A-Vtransitive-S-O yesterday built the-boy tower

Results

The type of movement (A, Wh, V-C) had a significant effect on repetition performance, as can be seen in Figure 1. An analysis on the group level indicated that there were strong correlations between different structures with the same movement, that sentences with Wh and V-C movement were repeated significantly worse than their counterparts that did not include movement, and that there were significant differences in performance between movement types. The repetition of A-movement was better than Wh-movement, which in turn was better than V-C movement. The correct repetition on the three structures that are derived by Wh movement – subject relative, object relative and topicalization – was strongly correlated, Cronbach's Alpha = 0.88; the two structures that involved V-C movement, with transitive and unergative verbs, also yielded a strong correlation, Cronbach's Alpha = 0.82. The children showed mastery of A-movement of subjects of unaccusative verbs, and their repetition of SV sentences with unaccusatives did not differ from their repetition of SV sentences with unergative and transitive verbs (with a mean of 93% correct repetition for each of the 3 sentence types). The repetition of the 3 Wh-movement structures was poorer, with a mean of 71% correct, significantly poorer than the repetition of A-movement, t(59) = 5.98, p < .0001. The repetition of sentences with V-C movement was the poorest, with a mean of 32% correct. V-C movement was significantly poorer than both A-movement, t(59)=14.34, p < .0001 and Wh movement, t(59)= 9.15, p < .0001. 214 The order of acquisition of A-, Wh- and V-C movement

A movement 100% 90% Wh movement 80%

70%

60% 50% V-C movement 40%

30%

20%

10%

0% trans SV unerg SV unacc SV S rel O rel topicalization unerg VS trans VS

Figure 1. Average percentage of correct repetition on the 8 sentence types.

The errors in repetition of sentences with V-C movement were mainly SV order reversal: 67% of the target VSO with transitives and 60% of target VS sentences with unergatives were repeated in SV order. No correlation was found between repetition of any of the movement types and age (Rpb < 0.22 for all the sentences with movement), and no significant difference in repetition was detected between the three age groups: For example, a 2;3 year old girl succeeded in repeating all the V-C sentences, whereas a 3;10 boy failed in them. Two girls aged 2;5 succeeded in repeating Wh sentences, whereas 4 children aged 3;7 failed in them.

Individual level analysis Possibly the most important result of this study was that the repetition pattern of each of the 60 children revealed a hierarchical order of acquisition of the three movement types, which created a perfect Guttman scale: with a criterion of 80% correct repetition for “acquired structure”, 56 children acquired movement of the subject of unaccusatives (A-movement); 34 children acquired Wh movement, and 8 acquired V-C movement. Importantly, all children who already acquired V-C also acquired both Wh- and A-movement, and all children who already acquired Wh movement also acquired A-movement. Namely, children who could repeat VS sentences with transitives and unergatives were also able to repeat relatives and topicalization sentences, as well as SV sentences with unaccusative verbs. All children who were able to repeat relative clauses and topicalization sentences were also able to produce the unaccusative subject in preverbal position. Thus, a very clear order of acquisition of the 3 types of movement within each child emerges from this study, presented in Figure 2: Naama Friedmann and Hedva Lavi 215

1) A-movement in unaccusatives 2) Wh movement: subject relative, object relative and topicalization 3) Verb movement to C

V

Wh Wh

A A A

4 children 22 children 26 children 8 children

Figure 2. The gradual acquisition of movement types at the individual level: Four stages of movement acquisition.

Some additional interesting results concern the omission of complements and temporal adverbs and the stage of movement acquisition of each participant. Omissions occurred almost exclusively in sentences with movement. Sentence- initial temporal adverbs were only omitted by children who have not yet acquired V-C movement. Children who already acquired V-C did not omit temporal adverbs. The non-omission of temporal adverbs was also correlated with the acquisition of Wh movement, r = 0.49, p < .0001. Children who acquired Wh movement omitted significantly less temporal adverbs than children who have not acquired Wh movement yet, χ2 = 157.1, p < .0001, possibly because of the shared maximal projection, CP, that is required both for sentence-initial adverbs and for Wh movement. In addition, no complements were omitted from SVO sentences, but 11% of the complements were omitted from VSO target sentences. Importantly, complements were only omitted by children who have not yet acquired V-C movement, when they could not raise the verb to C and repeated VS as SV.

Summary

The study indicates that movement is an important tool in accounting for syntactic acquisition. The acquisition of movement is reflected not only in the ability to produce certain word orders but also in the ability to use complements in movement-derived sentences. Sentences that share the same movement types are acquired together, and although different children acquire movement at different ages, the order of acquisition of A, Wh and V-C movement is fixed across children. First they acquire A-movement, then Wh-movement, and only then V-C movement. 216 The order of acquisition of A-, Wh- and V-C movement

References

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the Joint German-Israeli Research Program grant GR01791 (Friedmann) and by the Adams Super Center for Brain Studies research grant (Friedmann).