Computational complexity and the acquisition of functional categories by French-speaking children with SLI
Computational complexity and the acquisition of functional categories by French-speaking children with SLI
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具有 SLI 的法语儿童的计算复杂性和功能类别的习得
DOI：
10.1515/ling.2003.007
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发表时间：
2003
期刊：
影响因子：
1.1
通讯作者：
C. Jakubowicz
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
C. Jakubowicz
先前对正常发育的法语儿童和有特殊语言障碍的儿童进行的研究表明，现在时态和过去时态之间存在明显的不对称——过去式构成倾向于现在时态。基于关于有限性的本质和法语中过去组成的投影的具体假设，我们根据计算复杂性假设解释了这种不对称性（Jakubowicz和Nash 2001）。根据这一假设，内核功能范畴（即法语中的INFL）比添加到子句的功能骨架中的补充功能范畴（即法语中的PAST）更容易计算。另外，考虑到在法语的过去式结构中，从句的有限性是用现在形式的助词来表达的，而表示事件的动词以分词的形式出现，孩子们在使用过去时态方面的困难可能是由于在助词中没有明显的形态标记来表示过去的意义。本文中报道的研究旨在确定这种替代理论解释的充分性，我们称之为形态显著性假说，用于解释法语儿童在过去构成方面的困难。为此，研究人员对两组分别为3岁和4岁的正常发育儿童和一组5岁以下的有特殊语言障碍的儿童进行了一项基于诱导产生过去时和过去完成时的研究；5岁到9岁。结果表明：(1)正常儿童对过去完成时的准确性明显低于对过去完成时的准确性；(2)特殊语言障碍儿童完全无法使用过去完成时，而过去完成时则（几乎）系统地或选择性地避免使用，这取决于儿童。我们认为这些发现为计算复杂性假说提供了进一步的支持
Previous research conducted with French-speaking normally developing children and children with specific language impairment has shown a striking asymmetry between present and past tense production - the passe compose - in favor of the present. Based on specific assumptions about the nature of finiteness and the projection of the passe compose in French, we have explained this asymmetry in terms of the computational complexity hypothesis (Jakubowicz and Nash 2001). According to this hypothesis, kernel functional categories (i.e. INFL in French) are easier to compute than supplementary functional categories that are added to the functional skeleton of the clause (i.e. PAST in French). Alternatively, given that in the French past-tense construction the finiteness of the clause is expressed by an auxiliary in its present form, while the verb denoting the event surfaces as a participle, children's difficulty in using the past tense could be due to the absence of overt morphological marking that signals past meaning in the auxiliary. The research reported in this article was designed to determine the adequacy of this alternative theoretical interpretation, which we call the morphological salience hypothesis, for explaining the difficulties of French-speaking children with respect to the passe compose. To this effect, a study based on elicited production of the past tense and the pluperfect was conducted with two groups of normally developing children aged three and four respectively and a group of children with specific language impairment who ranged in age from 5;5 years to nine years of age. Results showed (i) that normal children are significantly less accurate on the pluperfect than on the past tense, and (ii) that the pluperfect is completely unavailable to the SLI group, while past tense is (almost) systematically or optionally avoided depending on the children. We argue that these findings provide further support for the computational complexity hypothesis