Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
1.1
0.9
Journals
Languages
Special Issues
Errors of Commission in Child Language
share announcement

Errors of Commission in Child Language

A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 September 2022) | Viewed by 10407

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Uli Sauerland

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Interests: semantics; pragmatics; language acquisition; grammatical theory; morphology; syntax; language diversity; cognition
Prof. Dr. Artemis Alexiadou

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
1. Department of English and American Studies, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany
2. Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Schützenstraße 18, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Interests: syntax; morphology; heritage languages
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Maria Teresa Guasti

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Departement of Psychology, University of Milano Bicocca, 20216 Milan, Italy
Interests: language acquisition; language impairment; morphology; syntax; semantics; rhythm

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Young children generally make shorter utterances than adults and are felt to commit language errors of omission. However, children occasionally use extra words or morphemes in their utterances or use phrasing that is less concise than the one adults would use. Such errors of commission seem to be rooted in the linguistic and cognitive creativity of the child, especially when commission errors are recurrent across children or even across languages. Currently, work specifically looking at commission errors in different child languages has been rather limited. This Special Issue addresses the need for a broader and more diverse study of commission errors.

We want to approach the task in the spirit of making a map based on a grid of coordinates.  On one axis, we place different languages, one per column. On the other axes, we place different domains of language where some preliminary evidence for commission errors exists: the first two areas concern the internal structure of complex events, namely 1) the expression of causation and agency, and 2) the primitive components of change of state and motion events. The other four areas concern the internal structure of propositions: 3) the binary connectives, especially Boolean disjunction (or); 4) negative concepts such as exclusion (only), adjectival antonyms (e.g., short), and negation; 5) quantificational concepts including genericity and distributivity; 6) dependencies most frequently analyzed as variable binding; and 7) all other phenomena.

Contributions should ideally address contiguous areas of this grid, for example, by looking at all the evidence from one language to add an entire column to the Atlas or look at one area across different languages where evidence is available already or address the methodology of identifying recurrent commission errors. Much relevant evidence is available already, for example, in the form of public or private corpus collections or parental reports. However, these data sources have not been systematically analyzed for commission errors. We expect contributions to identify the currently available sources of data, note gaps, and arrive at conclusions that both methodologically and analytically advance the state of the art.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors at <[email protected]>. Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purpose of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Tentative completion schedule:

  • Abstract submission deadline: 30 April 2022
  • Notification of abstract acceptance: 31 May 2022
  • Full manuscript deadline: 15 September 2022

Prof. Dr. Uli Sauerland
Prof. Dr. Artemis Alexiadou
Prof. Dr. Maria Teresa Guasti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • language acquisition
  • first language
  • language production
  • language diversity

Published Papers (5 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

19 pages, 866 KiB  
Article
Filipino Children’s Acquisition of Nominal and Verbal Markers in L1 and L2 Tagalog
by Aireen Barrios and Rowena Garcia
Languages 2023, 8(3), 188; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8030188 - 08 Aug 2023
Viewed by 2841
Abstract
Western Austronesian languages, like Tagalog, have unique, complex voice systems that require the correct combinations of verbal and nominal markers, raising many questions about their learnability. In this article, we review the experimental and observational studies on both the L1 and L2 acquisition [...] Read more.
Western Austronesian languages, like Tagalog, have unique, complex voice systems that require the correct combinations of verbal and nominal markers, raising many questions about their learnability. In this article, we review the experimental and observational studies on both the L1 and L2 acquisition of Tagalog. The reviewed studies reveal error patterns that reflect the complex nature of the Tagalog voice system. The main goal of the article is to present a full picture of commission errors in young Filipino children’s expression of causation and agency in Tagalog by describing patterns of nominal marking and voice marking in L1 Tagalog and L2 Tagalog. It also aims to provide an overview of existing research, as well as characterize research on nominal and verbal acquisition, specifically in terms of research problems, data sources, and methodology. Additionally, we discuss the research gaps in at least fifty years’ worth of studies in the area from the 1960’s to the present, as well as ideas for future research to advance the state of the art. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Errors of Commission in Child Language)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

48 pages, 776 KiB  
Article
Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language
by Imke Driemel, Johannes Hein, Cory Bill, Aurore Gonzalez, Ivona Ilić, Paloma Jeretič and Astrid van Alem
Languages 2023, 8(3), 179; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8030179 - 26 Jul 2023
Viewed by 1831
Abstract
Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce [...] Read more.
Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, as well as a movement-based approach and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar. We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Errors of Commission in Child Language)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

21 pages, 468 KiB  
Article
Mapping Commission Errors to Grammatical Development: A Case Study of Malayalam
by Gayathri G. Krishnan, Arathi Raghunathan and Vaijayanthi M. Sarma
Languages 2023, 8(1), 29; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010029 - 16 Jan 2023
Viewed by 1566
Abstract
Young children learning Malayalam use morphological categories and inflections quite productively and accurately in general. However, their utterances sometimes show the use of extra morphological material (or commission errors), revealing mismatches between adult and child grammars. In this paper, we present a survey [...] Read more.
Young children learning Malayalam use morphological categories and inflections quite productively and accurately in general. However, their utterances sometimes show the use of extra morphological material (or commission errors), revealing mismatches between adult and child grammars. In this paper, we present a survey of such errors that are observed in longitudinally collected, spontaneous speech production data of monolingual Malayalam and bilingual Malayalam–English acquiring children in order to identify both the range of commission errors and the underlying grammatical features that may have triggered them. A close analysis of the data shows us that such errors are restricted to a few grammatical loci and shed light on the specific challenges that some grammatical constraints pose for developing grammars. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Errors of Commission in Child Language)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

17 pages, 369 KiB  
Article
Argument Marking and Verbal Agreement in the Speech of Georgian Children
by Tamar Makharoblidze, Teona Damenia, Nino Doborjginidze, Nino Tsintsadze, Tinatin Tchintcharauli and Tamar Kalkhitashvili
Languages 2022, 7(4), 314; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7040314 - 19 Dec 2022
Viewed by 1368
Abstract
This paper describes the language acquisition and verb-forming processes related to the issue of argument marking for native-speaker Georgian children from 24 to 42 months of age, who were born and raised in Georgia. Because of the complexity of the Georgian verbal system, [...] Read more.
This paper describes the language acquisition and verb-forming processes related to the issue of argument marking for native-speaker Georgian children from 24 to 42 months of age, who were born and raised in Georgia. Because of the complexity of the Georgian verbal system, it is a challenge to study the acquisition process in this language. We attempted to observe how native-speaker children overcome this complexity during the acquisition process. The study is based on samples of four Georgian-speaking children from the developing corpus of Georgian-speaking children. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Errors of Commission in Child Language)
31 pages, 529 KiB  
Article
Errors of Commission in Constructions Involving Movement to the CP Domain
by Elaine Grolla
Languages 2022, 7(4), 300; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7040300 - 24 Nov 2022
Viewed by 1204
Abstract
In this overview paper, I discuss data from child languages available in the literature that instantiate errors of commission. I focus on three constructions involving movement to the left periphery of the clause: the production of aux-doubling (where more than one auxiliary verb, [...] Read more.
In this overview paper, I discuss data from child languages available in the literature that instantiate errors of commission. I focus on three constructions involving movement to the left periphery of the clause: the production of aux-doubling (where more than one auxiliary verb, either followed by neg or not, is produced in yes/no and Wh-questions), medial Wh-questions (where two Wh-phrases are produced in long-distance Wh-questions), and the production of full resumptive DPs in the relativized position of the relative clause. I claim that these extra elements are not produced at random places, but precisely at the locations where copies (or traces) of the moved elements are claimed to occur. This is taken as an indication of children’s abstract grammatical knowledge. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Errors of Commission in Child Language)
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-5
Back to TopTop