Universität Potsdam Oda-Christina Brandt-Kobele Comprehension of verb inflection in German-speaking children Spektrum Patholinguistik – Schriften | 6 Spektrum Patholinguistik – Schriften | 6 Spektrum Patholinguistik – Schriften | 6 Oda-Christina Brandt-Kobele Comprehension of verb inflection in German-speaking children Universitätsverlag Potsdam Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de/ abrufbar. Universitätsverlag Potsdam 2014 http://verlag.ub.uni-potsdam.de/ Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam Tel.: +49 (0)331 977 2533 / Fax: 2292 E-Mail: [email protected] Die Schriftenreihe Spektrum Patholinguistik – Schriften wird herausgegeben vom Verband für Patholinguistik e. V. ISSN (print) 1869-3822 ISSN (online) 1869-3830 Zugl.: Potsdam, Univ., Diss., 2012 Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Barbara Höhle Prof. Dr. Isabell Wartenburger Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 20.07.2012 Umschlagfotos: Paul Sapiano, http://www.flickr.com/photos/peasap/518956588/ Mikko Luntiala, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikko_luntiala/4720244099/ Das Manuskript ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Online veröffentlicht auf dem Publikationsserver der Universität Potsdam URL http://pub.ub.uni-potsdam.de/volltexte/2014/6204/ URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-62046 http://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-62046 Zugleich gedruckt erschienen im Universitätsverlag Potsdam ISBN 978-3-86956-216-2 for Greg Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the sup- port of many people to whom I would like to express my sincere gratitude. First and foremost, I would like to thank Prof. Barbara Höhle, my supervisor. Her advice and guidance as well as her teaching and her own work have helped, influenced and inspired me. I thank for her accepting me as her doctoral student and giving me the chance to work and learn in the stimulating and fruitful environment of the Language Acquisition Group at the Univer- sity of Potsdam. I am very grateful for her continuous support throughout the years. I am very grateful to Prof. Isabell Wartenburger for accepting to serve on my dissertation commitree. The empirical research in this thesis would have been impos- sible to conduct without the help of numerous people. I thank the student assistants who helped me conduct and run the ex- periments: Katja Hummel, Caroline Magister and Maja Stegen- wallner, and I thank all children who participated in the experi- ments and to their parents for making it possible to conduct the research we are interested in. A special thanks goes out to my friends and colleagues Sil- vana Poltrock and Frauke Berger for their support in preparing and running the experiments, as well for inspiring and motivat- ing discussions on the findings. I cannot thank Tom Fritzsche enough for his help and support on all aspects of experimental work throughout the years. He gracefully shared his compre- hensive knowledge about eye tracking, ‘R’, data analysis, sta- tistical analysis and so much more. Working and traveling with you all has been a great experience that I am very thankful for. Many thanks go also to my friends and colleagues Hans Trukenbrod, Susan Ott, Heike Herrmann and Ulrike Frank for support and friendship throughout the years. viii Acknowledgements Over the course of the past few years, many people have gen- erously taken their time to discuss various aspects related to this dissertation. I want to thank the organizers and participants of the IASCL 2008 in Edinburgh, the RASCAL 2009 conference in Groningen, the DSGF 2009 conference in Osnabrück, and the IASCL 2011 in Montreal, for the chance to present and discuss my work presented in this thesis. A special thanks goes to Ana-Teresa Perez-Leroux, Petra Hen- driks, Bart Hollebrandse, Irina Sekerina, Anja Müller and An- gela Grimm. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support I have re- ceived from the collaborative research project CHLASC (Char- acterizing Human Language by Structural Complexity) which pro- vided a part of the funding for this research. It has been an enormous privilege to the able to spend the past few years doing what I like most. I want to thank my fam- ily, my parents and my sisters, for their unfailing love and sup- port throughout the years. Finally, words are not enough to express my love and grati- tude to Greg. I thank you so much for your continuous support regarding all aspects of my work and my life. I thank you for helpful and stimulating discussions, for proof-reading earlier versions of this thesis, for help on LATEX, but most importantly for keeping up my spirits and encouraging me to go on. This is for you and Carl, who always remind me of what matters most. Abstract Previous studies on the acquisition of verb inflection in nor- mally developing children have revealed an astonishing pat- tern: children use correctly inflected verbs in their own speech but fail to make use of verb inflections when comprehending sentences uttered by others. Thus, a three-year old might well be able to say something like The cat sleeps on the bed, but fails to understand that the same sentence, when uttered by another person, refers to only one sleeping cat but not more than one. The previous studies that have examined children’s compre- hension of verb inflections have employed a variant of a picture selection task in which the child was asked to explicitly indicate (via pointing) what semantic meaning she had inferred from the test sentence. Recent research on other linguistic structures, such as pronouns or focus particles, has indicated that earlier comprehension abilities can be found when methods are used that do not require an explicit reaction, like preferential looking tasks. This dissertation aimed to examine whether children are truly not able to understand the connection the the verb form and the meaning of the sentence subject until the age of five years or whether earlier comprehension can be found when a different measure, preferential looking, is used. Additionally, children’s processing of subject-ver agreement violations was examined. The three experiments of this thesis that examined chil- dren’s comprehension of verb inflections revealed the follow- ing: German-speaking three- to four-year old children looked more to a picture showing one actor when hearing a sentence with a singular inflected verb but only when their eye gaze was tracked and they did not have to perform a picture selection task. When they were asked to point to the matching picture, they performed at chance-level. This pattern indicates asym- metries in children’s language performance even within the re- ceptive modality. x Abstract The fourth experiment examined sensitivity to subject-verb agreement violations and did not reveal evidence for sensitiv- ity toward agreement violations in three- and four-year old chil- dren, but only found that children’s looking patterns were influ- enced by the grammatical violations at the age of five. The results from these experiments are discussed in relation to the existence of a production-comprehension asymmetry in the use of verb inflections and children’s underlying grammat- ical knowledge. Zusammenfassung Experimentelle Studien zum Erwerb der Verbflexion bei sprachunauffälligen Kindern haben ein überraschendes Muster aufgezeigt. Kinder im Alter von drei und vier Jahren ver- wenden Verbflexionsendungen anscheinend korrekt in ihrer eigenen Sprachproduktion, aber sie scheinen unfähig zu sein, Verbflexionen in den Äußerungen anderer zu verstehen. Ein Kind ist also problemlos in der Lage ‚Sie schläft auf dem Bett‘ zu sagen, wenn es die Position von z.B. einer Katze beschreiben möchte. Gleichzeitig scheint es nicht zu verstehen, dass sich ein Satz wie ‚Sie schläft auf dem Bett‘ auf nur eine schlafende Katze und nicht mehrere bezieht. Das Verständnis von Sätzen, in denen der einzige Hin- weis auf die Anzahl der Handelnden (den Numerus des Subjekts) die Verbflexion ist, wurde bislang nur mit ‚Zeige- Experimenten‘ untersucht. In solchen Sprachtests soll das Kind durch eine Zeigegeste auf eines von zwei vorgegebenen Bildern explizit anzeigen wie es den vorgegebenen Satz verstanden hat. Aktuelle Studien, die das Verständnis von sprachlichen El- ementen wie Pronomen und Fokuspartikeln bei Kindern un- tersucht haben, lassen erkennen, dass die Testmethodik einen erheblichen Einfluss auf die kindlichen Sprachverständnis- fähigkeiten zu haben scheint. Wenn man Methoden verwen- det, die keine explizite Reaktion von Seiten der Kinder ver- langen, findet man korrektes Verständnis schon bei jüngeren Kindern. Das Ziel dieser Dissertation war es zu untersuchen, ob drei- und vierjährige Kinder tatsächlich nicht in der Lage sind die Beziehung zwischen Verbform (Art der Verbflexion) und Subjektbedeutung (Numerus des Subjekts) zu verstehen oder ob man korrektes Sprachverständnis in jüngeren Populationen finden kann, wenn eine alternative Testmethode, die Messung der Augenbewegungen, verwendet wird. Zusätzlich wurde un- tersucht ob Kinder im gleichen Alter Verletzungen der Subjekt- Verb-Kongruenz in auditiv präsentierten Sätzen entdecken. xii Zusammenfassung Drei Experimente dieser Dissertation, die das kindliche Sprachverständnis in Bezug auf Verbflexion untersucht haben bringen folgendes Muster zum Vorschein: Deutsch-sprachige Kinder im Alter von drei bis vier Jahren schauten mehr zu einem Bild, auf dem nur ein Akteur zu se- hen war, wenn sie einen