Laying the Groundwork for the DELV (Precursor literature, dissertations, joint work of the Working Groups prior to the conceptualization of the DELV)
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Publication Copula/Auxiliary Comparisons in African American and Impaired Standard American English(2000-01-01) Burns, Frances; Paulk, Cynthia J.; Seymour, Harry; Pearson, Barbara Z.The valid identification and description of language impairment in children who speak African American English (AAE) has been a major clinical challenge for over 30 years. This challenge centers on the issue of "deficit" versus "difference" for language features that contrast with Standard American English. The distinction between "deficit" and "difference" in identifying language disorders in child African American English speakers is the key to valid language assessment in AAE. Most syntactic targets in SAE are presumably invariable while many syntactic targets in AAE are variable. For example, the SAE target syntactic form for the copula "is" would be represented by "He is bad". Whereas that same production in AAE might yield either "He is bad" or "He_bad". Our research focuses on how one determines if a child AAE speaker who uses "He_bad" does so as a function of dialect, not impairment.Publication Negative Islands in Language Acquisition(1999) Adulkarim, Lamya; Roeper, Thomas; de Villiers, Jill G.Modern linguistics research has two problems: 1) intuitional judgements are not always clear and do not always match the subtle predictions made by theory, and 2) the distinction between semantics and syntax becomes increasingly obscure. Acquisition data has traditionally been seen as undermined by "performance" factors, but the results of twenty years of research has revealed that acquisition data can be as subtle as intuitional data. Now the question arises: can acquisition data offer unique insights into linguistic ability. Two factors suggest that this is possible: 1) the time course of acquisition can reveal which factors belong together, and 2) the large amount of data, drawn from responses to contextually natural stories allows us to see effects that may be beyond any kind of sharp intuition. In this paper, we reveal some acquisition data on the effect of negative islands on long distance WH movements. The experiment we developed was set to examine the theory of barriers on WH movement. In particular, the revised version of barriers as it is described in Relativized Minimality (Rizzi, 1990).Publication Overt Copulas in African American English Speaking Children(1998) Benedicto, Elena; Abdulkarim, Lamya; Garrett, Debra; Johnson, ValerieThe goal of this paper is to suggest a linguistically based principle to account for the distribution of overt vs. zero copulas in African American English. We will propose an approach based on Feature Interpretability and the Principle of Full Interpretation (Chomsky 1995). We suggest that, in Present Tense contexts, the copula is overt in presentational (as opposed to predicational) sentences to support the presence of a situation argument in INFL.Publication They Be Taggin, Don't They?: The Acquisition of Invariant Be(1996) Jackson, Janice; Ramos, Eliane; Hall, Fred; Coles, D'Jaris; Seymour, Harry; Dickey, Mike; Broderick, Kimberly; Hollebrandse, BartDoes African-American English (AAE) have a separate grammar from Standard American English (SAE)? AAE has a number of distinctive features, several of which have been discussed extensively in the sociolinguistic literature: the variable use of third-person singular -s; the absence of plura -s; the variable use of copula; and others. (See Labov, 1966, 1969a, b, and Fasold, 1972 for discussion.) Perhaps the most distinctive feature of AAE is habitual or invariant "be".Publication Complementing Cognition: The Relationship between Language and Theory of Mind(1997) de Villiers, Jill G.; Pyers, JenniePublication The emergence of bound variable structures(1990) Roeper, Thomas; de Villiers, Jill G.Even for aduelts, quantifiers such as "all", "some", "every" seem to involve difficult mapping between logic and grammar. A sentence like "every boy ate every food" requires a little concentration before the meaning comes through. One might think that there is no natural mapping of such sophisticated aspectes of cognition onto grammatical structure. Current linguistic theory, however, reveals that syntax puts sharp limits on how quantification works. The study of quantifiers might reveal how cognition connects to grammar and how they are intertwined int he process of acquisition. We will try to present the acquisition problem in a manner slightly abstracted from the technical details of linguistic theory.Publication Abstract operators in early acquisition(1995) Vainikka, Anne; Roeper, ThomasWe wish to argue in this paper that abstract operators block extraction fo children (as they do for adults), and that such operators are available in children's syntax already from about the age of three onwards. In particular, we will be concerned with abstract operators in purpose clauses and related constructions in the production data (for example, And the chicken gave it to Bozo to eat, Adam 3;4 file 28, see Appendix A) in a comprehension experiment (for example Where did the boy buy it to splash on his face?). Given the early occurrence of these phonologically null but syntactically complex elements, we propose that the notion of an operator is something very basic in Universal Grammar and that this notion is available as soon as the appropriate syntactic position is available at S-structure.Publication Negative concord in child African American English: Implications for Specific Language Impairment(2004-01-01) Coles-White, D'JarisIn this study, African American English (AAE)-speaking children’s comprehension of 2 different types of double negative sentences was examined and contrasted with that of a comparison group of Standard American English (SAE)-speaking children. The first type of double negative, negative concord, involves 2 negative elements in a sentence that are interpreted together as single negation. The second type of double negative, called true double negation, involves 2 negatives that are interpreted as independent negatives. A cross-sectional cohort of 61 (35 AAE, 26 SAE) typically developing children ranging in age from 5;2 (years;months) to 7;11 participated. The children responded to story-based grammatical judgment tasks that required them to differentiate between negative concord and true double negation. Results revealed no statistically significant differences between AAE- and SAE-speaking children in the way they interpreted negative concord and true double negation. However, there were significantly more correct responses to negative concord sentences across combined groups. In particular, the older children (i.e., 7-year-olds) produced more correct responses to negative concord than did the younger group (i.e., 5-year-olds). Explanations for these findings are framed in terms of children’s knowledge about sentences with 2 negatives, the constraints affecting the interpretation of 2 negatives that include negative concord, and the clinical importance of negative concord for assessing specific language impairment in child AAE speakersPublication Questions after stories: Supplying context and removing it as a variable.(1996) de Villiers, Jill G.; Roeper, ThomasIn the philosophy of science considerable attention has been paid to the question of how to be sure that a given experimental result can be taken as supporting evidence for a theory. How do we escape from this dilemma in our linguistic research? How can we know that a certain set of results is evidence on behalf of a theory and not due to the auxiliary assumptions required for the test? We have tried to do acquisition studies on aspects of reasonably refined linguistic theories, so that there are other kinds of evidence already articulated in their defense. In our experiments, the auxiliary assumptions are held constant across two conditions that elicit different responses, so the minimal difference between the two conditions must be held responsible for the responses. If the auxiliary assumptions are appealed to as explanation for one phenomenon, they can be shown to make precisely the wrong predictions for a second phenomenon within the same experiment.Publication Imagining Articles: What a and the Can Tell Us About the Emergence of DP(2000-01-01) Schafer, Robin; de Villiers, Jill G.Publication Assessing Language Pragmatics: Who, What and How(2004-01-01) de Villiers, Peter; de Villiers, Jill G.Publication Finding Signatures of Linguistic Reasoning(2017-01-01) de Villiers, Jill G.Hinzen lays out the platform of un-Cartesian linguistics, and the ramifications threaten widespread beliefs about the relations between language and thought. The theoretical story is compelling but my commentary will address my concerns as a laborer in research.Publication Unbiased Language Assessment: Contributions of Linguistic Theory(2017-01-01) de Villiers, Jill G.This review addresses several situations of language learning to make concrete the issue of fairness—and justice—that arises in designing assessments. First, I discuss the implications of dialect variation in American English, asking how assessment has taken dialect into consideration. Second, I address the question of how to assess the distributed knowledge of bilingual or dual-language learners. The evaluation of the language skills of children growing up in poverty asks whether the current focus on the quantity of caregiver input is misplaced. Third, I address a special case in which the young speakers of a minority language, Romani, are judged to be unfit for schooling because they fail tests in the state language. Finally, I examine the difficult issue of language assessments in countries with multiple official languages and few resources. In each of these areas, the involvement and expertise of linguists are essential for knowing how the grammar works and what might be important to assess.Publication The Emergence of Barriers to Wh-movement, Negative Concord, and Quantification(2004-01-01) Coles-White, D'Jaris; de Villiers, Jill G.; Roeper, ThomasPublication Linguistic Determinism and the Understanding of False Beliefs(2000-01-01) de Villiers, Jill G.; de Villiers, PeterWe intend in this chapter to put forward a radical proposition about the relationship between language and the understanding of false beliefs. We begin by contrasting the roles that language acquisition might play with respect to the development of theory of mind reasoning, separating out the language-for-the-task from the social constructivist view of language as one of several facilitators of social cognition, and both of these from the strongest position that certain linguistic structures make available a representational format for false beliefs. We then present empirical data from a longitudinal study of normally developing preschool children and from our work with language-delayed oral deaf children, to test among the rival hypotheses for the role of language in the development of false belief reasoning. The empirical data make a suprisingly coherent story, though many pieces remain to be worked into the puzzle. The empirical story is at least suggestive enough that it forces us to examine the strongest theoretical position seriously, and ask, is it viable?Publication Finding fundamental operations in language acquisition: Formal features as triggers(1999) Roeper, ThomasPublication Missing Agreement: Where is it Dialect and Where Deficit?(2000-01-01) Roeper, Thomas; Abdulkarim, Lamya; Seymour, HarryPublication What Every 3-year-old Should Know(2001-01-01) Roeper, Thomas; de Villiers, Jill G.Publication Deficit or difference: African American children's linguistic paths towards a Theory of Mind(2001-01-01) Allen, Brenda A.; de Villiers, Jill G.; François, SamanthaThe present paper raises one of many major problems with past research. More specifically, the question is raised with regard to how the presumption of language deficits has been studied, especially the use of language deemed necessary for the development of a theory of mind. The data used to argue that there are deficits in the quality of language encountered in working-class African American households, namely the reduced frequency of references to the mind and mental states, results from language transcripts where simple counts of mental verb usage are recorded for different race/class groups. While such a coding scheme lends a gross measure of mental verb usage, it tells us nothing about the syntactic structures in which such verbs were used. Yet recent theories argue that it is not just the amount of mental verb usage that is the necessary precursor to the development of a theory of mind. Rather, it is maintained that it is the mastery of complement sentences with mental verbs that enable the ultimate development of a theory of mind (Astington and Jenkins, 1995; de Villiers and Pyers, 1997; de Villiers and de Villiers, 2000). The theory of complement sentences also includes communication verbs as a possible linguistic route to a theory of mind because such verbs allow for the same syntactic structures as mental verbs (Astington and Jenkins, 1997; de Villiers and Pyers, 1997; de Villiers and de Villiers, 2000).Publication Assessing What Every 5-Year-Old Should Know(2001-01-01) de Villiers, Peter; de Villiers, Jill G.; Roeper, Thomas; Seymour, HarryIn this session we're going to talk about assessing language skills in 5-year-olds, bascially assessing language skills in 4 to 8 year olds as it turns out, simply to introduce you to the area. This is part of a substantive project involving collaboration between Harry Seymour and Tom Roeper at UMass and Jill de Villiers and Peter de Villiers at Smith College. It is funded by the National Institutes of Health, trying to develop a comprehensive test of language functioning in children between ages of 4 and about 8 to 10, and in particular, trying to develop a test that is dialect neutral.