Thursday, October 121h, 2006 Platform Session 5 Differential acquisition of adjective concord in two romance languages Phaedra Royle & Daniel Valois Université de Montréal Clahsen, Eisenbei(l" & Vainikka (1994) developed the Lexical Learning Hypothesis (LLH) to account for cross-linguistic variation in the acquisition of language-specific structures. Morphological bootstrapping is one of the driving principles of the LLH. According to this principle, children are said to be sensitive to ward-internai structure and to recognize recurring patterns in their input. Spanish and French offer a point of comparison relevant to the morphological bootstrapping: bath show adjectival concord within the complex noun phrase (or Oeterminer Phrase "OP"), however, they differ in terms of regularity. ln Spanish, regular suffixes (-0 and -a) mark concord-[lakasat(l,ik2bla-k~ 'the house small.f white.f-while variable French adjectives have different forms involving idiosyncratic 'fioating' consonants (underlined) -[lapoetSi!mejzbla=ill 'the small.f house white.f. According to the LLH, it should be easier for Spanish-speaking (S) than French-speaking (F) children to acquire adjective concord. Studies of the emergence of the OP in Spanish and French have mainly reported on determiner concord (see, for example, Liceras, Diaz & Mongeon, 2000 and Paradis & Crago, 2004) while descriptions of adjective concord tend to be anecdotal. Our analyses of spontaneous speech corpora reveals that bath F and S children use colour and size adjectives at early (two-word) stages in acquisition. However, tao few combinations are produced in order to assess 1) productivity and 2) erroneous use in either linguistic group. Furthermore, it is not clear that when a child produces a few tokens of a specific structure (viz. in spontaneous speech), that she has mastered it linguistically. Tomasello (2001) argues that children initially produce unanalyzed "chunks" that Gannat be extended to novel complex structures. Our goal was thus to verity productive use of concord in young speakers. This was do ne using elicitation tasks for adjectives. We developed tasks that encouraged participants to specify the colour or size of OPs. Sixteen F (24 to 50 months) and fifteen S children (24 to 59 months) took part in the study. Ail came from monolingual families where bath parents were native speakers of the language studied. Two size ('small' and 'big') and three variable colour adjectives were used in bath French and Spanish (French: vert 'green', brun 'brown' and blanc 'white'; Spanish: negro 'black', blanco 'white' and raja 'red'). Ali stimuli were early acquired as per child-language corpora. Four puzzles were constructed for each language: one verified colour adjective vocabulary; the second OPs with size adjectives; the third OPs with colour adjectives; and the fourth OPs with bath colour and size adjectives. Results reveal that S children produce feminine and masculine forms equally weil. ln addition, once they acquire the use of concord, they Gan produce OPs involving one or two adjectives. F participants showed better production of masculine versus feminine targets over ail tasks. They also exhibited variable production of specific less-frequent colour adjectives. The linguistic behaviour of F-children was more variable than that of S children, as a discontinuity was observed between ability to produce one- and two-adjective structures in some of the F-children. These data support the Lexical Learning hypothesis in that S children seem to rapidly master OP concord with size and colour adjectives, while F children show more variable ability to produce target structures. Results imply that F children have to learn different lexemes for variable adjectives, and that this strains their ability to produce appropriate responses, as a breakdown occurs when French-speaking children produce OPs involving 1) variable adjectives and 2) more than one adjective. Finally, sinGe S children, contrary to F ones, do not exhibit difficulties related to OP length, these data do not support the view that chunking of morphological or syntactic structure is a necessary feature of early language acquisition. References: Clahsen, H., EisenbeiB, S. & Vainikka, M. (1994). The seeds of structure: a syntactic analysis of the acquisition of case marking. ln T. Hoekstra & B.D. Schwartz (Eds.), Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar (pp. 85-118) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Liceras, J.M., Diaz, L. & Mongeon, C. (2000). N-drop and determiners in native and non-native Spanish: More on the raie of morphology in the acquisition of syntactic knowledge. CLAC: Circula de lingüistica aplicada a la comunicaci6n, 3 [http://www.ucm.es/info/circulo/no3/liceras.htm]. Paradis, J. & Crago, M. (2004). Comparing L2 and SU grammars in child French. ln P. Prévost & J. Paradis (Eds.), The acquisition of French in different contexts: focus on functional categories (pp. 89-107). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74,209-253. Fifth International Conference on the Mental Lexicon. Montréal (Québec) Canada: October 11-13,2006