LOT Winter School 2010

Course Titel
Language Acquisition and Grammatical Variation

 

Teacher

William Snyder

E-mail:                     william.snyder@uconn.edu

Postal Address:         University of Connecticut, Department of Linguistics, 337 Mansfield Road, Unit 1145, Storrs,
                               CT 06269-1145, U.S.A.            

Homepage:                http://web.uconn.edu/snyder  

Course Level:

Course assumes familiarity with contemporary generative research in syntax and/or phonology, such as Principles-&-Parameters Syntax
(including Minimalism), Government Phonology, or OT Phonology.

 

Course Description

Linguistic theory seeks to specify the range of grammars permitted by the human language faculty, and thereby to specify the child’s “hypothesis space” during language acquisition. Based on (Snyder 2007), this course shows how the time course of child language acquisition can serve as a testing ground for theories of grammatical variation.  The focus will be on statistical hypothesis-testing using longitudinal corpora of spontaneous speech, although the techniques of elicited production and truth-value judgment will also be discussed. Students will be encouraged to bring up examples from their own research areas for general discussion.   

Day-to-day Program

Monday:      What the child has to learn: Approaches to grammatical variation in contemporary syntax and phonology. Deriving acquisitional predictions: 'Cumulative Complexity' revisited. [Snyder 2007, Chs. 1-3]

 

Tuesday:        'Grammatical Conservatism' in children's spontaneous speech. Review of CHILDES and the CLAN system.  MLU, FREQ, and COMBO. In-class exercises with spontaneous-speech data.  Case-study: The English verb-particle construction. [Snyder 2007, Ch. 4]

 

Wednesday: Testing a prediction of ordered acquisition with spontaneous-speech data: Paired t-test; Binomial methods based on relative or absolute frequency. Testing a prediction of concurrent acquisition: Correlation analysis; partial correlation with control variables.  Case-study: Particles and root compounding. [Snyder 2007, Ch.5]

 

Thursday:      Cross-sectional techniques: Elicited Production and Truth Value Judgement. Testing predictions of concurrent and ordered acquisition: Paired t-test, Fisher Exact Test, χ2 tests. Case-study: Scrambling and case-marking in Korean. [Snyder 2007, Ch.6]

 

Friday:           Further case studies in phonology and syntax: Syllable structure in Dutch, Noun-drop in Spanish, and prepositional questions in Spanish and English. Implications of Grammatical Conservatism for linguistic theory. [Snyder 2007, Chs. 7-8]

 

Reading list

 

 

Background and preparatory readings: 

 

Students are strongly encouraged to read, in advance, the monograph on which the course is based:

 
 Snyder, William (2007) Child Language: The Parametric Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 

No other readings are specifically required.