Papers by Dominique Brunato
Proceedings of The 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, 2015
In this paper we assessed the effect of gender morphology on children's comprehension of object r... more In this paper we assessed the effect of gender morphology on children's comprehension of object relatives in Hebrew and Italian. We compared headed object relative clauses in which the relative head (the moved object) and the intervening embedded subject have the same or different genders. The participants were 62 children aged 3;9–5;5, 31 speakers of Hebrew and 31 speakers of Italian. The comprehension of relative clauses was assessed using a sentence–picture matching task. The main result was that whereas gender mismatch sharply improved the comprehension of object relatives in Hebrew, it did not significantly affect comprehension in Italian. In line with our previous work (Friedmann et al., 2009), we propose that the children's problem in the comprehension of headed object relatives stems from the intervention of the embedded subject between the moved relative head and its trace. We ascribe the different behavior of children in Hebrew and in Italian to the different status of the gender feature in the two languages: in Hebrew, gender is part of the featural composition of the clausal inflectional head, hence it is part of the feature set attracting the subject, whereas in Italian, where tensed verbs are not inflected for gender, it is not. Under the assumption that intervention effects are amenable to the locality principle Relativized Minimality, it is expected that only features functioning as attractors for syntactic movement will enter into the computation of intervention. We thus account for the different effect of gender mismatch in object relative comprehension in the two developing systems. Thus, the main finding of this work is comparative in nature: there is no effect of gender per se; rather, the potential effect of gender is crucially modulated by the morphosyntactic status of the feature in each language.
This paper focuses on the comprehension of relative clauses by typicallydeveloping children, and ... more This paper focuses on the comprehension of relative clauses by typicallydeveloping children, and more specifically, reviews the well-known asymmetry between subject relative clauses (SRc) and object relative clauses (ORc). This asymmetry, which consists in a greater difficulty that children display with ORc, has shaped different models of relative clauses acquisition, some of which will be examined here and broadly divided into two major categories, according to their preference for underdeveloped syntactic abilities in children or to the emphasis on processing factors. Moving from the observation that not all ORc are difficult in the same way, I will also consider the role of linguistic features in children comprehension and present some experiments that have investigated how the manipulation of the type of ORc influences children's performance. In Italian, e.g., a finer difference in the time of acquisition of ORc has emerged between ORc with preverbal subject and ORc with postverbal subject. Moreover, some recent findings in Hebrew have shown a gradient of difficulty also in ORc with preverbal subject, which is higher when both the head of the relative and the embedded subject share the lexical restriction feature. These experiments have motivated an approach which adopts the syntactic principle of locality, known as Relativized Minimality , as a metric of syntactic complexity to explain the acquisitional data.
Drafts by Dominique Brunato
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Papers by Dominique Brunato
Drafts by Dominique Brunato