Cue reliability, salience and early comprehension of agreement
Evidence from Greek
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20366282 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Panagiotis KENANIDIS (0000-0002-7401-3010, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, corresponding author), Vasiliki Chondrogianni (0000-0002-8580-5662, University of Edinburgh), Vicky CHONDROGIANNI, Géraldine Légendre (Johns Hopkins University), Jennifer Culbertson (0000-0002-1737-6296, University of Edinburgh) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 815-833 |
| Publication date | 2021-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Child Language (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-0009 • E-ISSN: 1469-7602 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0305000920000628 |
| PMID | 33077015 |
| OpenAlex | W3093179027 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 45 |
Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared to Spanish and English) predicting early comprehension, as in French. We investigated two and three-year-old Greek-speaking children's ability to distinguish third person singular and plural agreement in a picture-selection task. We also examined the frequency of these morphemes in child-directed speech to address input effects. Results showed that three-year-olds are sensitive to both singular and plural agreement, earlier than children acquiring English and Spanish, but later than French, and despite singular agreement being more frequent than plural agreement in the child corpus. These findings provide further support for the role of salience and reliability during early acquisition, while highlighting a potential effect of morpheme position
Agreement · Cognitive psychology · Comprehension · Linguistics · Morpheme · Perception · Plural · Language Development and Disorders · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development
A First Language
The Acquisition of Spanish
Verb Syntax in Italian Child Grammar
Toward Tense as a Clinical Marker of Specific Language Impairment in English-Speaking Children
Control of grammar in imitation, comprehension, and production
Categorical data analysis
The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
Direct object predictability
Uncovering productive morphosyntax in French-learning toddlers
The information in third-person /s
Functional projections, markedness, and “root infinitives” in early child Greek
Clausal Structure in Child Greek
Agreement without understanding? The case of third person singular /s
The influence of typology and modality on the acquisition of verb agreement morphology in British Sign Language
Italian children's use of verb and noun morphology during the preschool years
Greek
Parametrizing Agr
The suffixing preference
The role of morphology in gender determination
What asymmetries within comprehension reveal about asymmetries between comprehension and production
The Emergence of Linguistic Person in Spanish-Speaking Children
Is children's comprehension of subject-verb agreement universally late? Comparative evidence from French, English, and Spanish
Verb inflections in German child language
The Full Competence Hypothesis of Clause Structure in Early German
Convergent evidence for categorial change in French
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |