Productive inventory and case/agreement contingencies: a methodological note on Rispoli (1999)

Rispoli (1999) suggests that previous studies arguing for a contingency between the case of subject pronouns and the presence/absence of verbal agreement in the acquisition of English (e.g. Schütze, 1997) suffer from methodological problems, and presents new data that fail to support earlier finding...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child language 2001-06, Vol.28 (2), p.507-515
Main Author: Schutze, Carson T
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Case (Grammar)
Child
Child development
Child Language
Child, Preschool
Children
Children & youth
Comparative Analysis
Contingency theory
Correlation
Criticism
Developmental psychology
English
English language
Functional heads
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Grammar
Grammatical agreement
Humans
Hypotheses
Language Acquisition
Linguistics
Methodology
Morphology
Morphosyntax
Native language acquisition
Preschool children
Pronouns
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Research Methodology
Syntax
Tense
Verbal Behavior
Verbal Learning
Verbs
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Summary:Rispoli (1999) suggests that previous studies arguing for a contingency between the case of subject pronouns and the presence/absence of verbal agreement in the acquisition of English (e.g. Schütze, 1997) suffer from methodological problems, and presents new data that fail to support earlier findings. I show that Rispoli's methodology unnecessarily biases his study against finding the predicted contingencies: it fails to take account of children's productive lexical inventory of pronoun forms. As a result, syntactic versus morphological sources of error fail to be distinguished. I explain why this distinction is crucial within the AGR/Tense Omission Model, and clarify its predictions.
ISSN:0305-0009
1469-7602
DOI:10.1017/S0305000901004731