engleski

Acquisition of linguistic complexity between the ages of 6 and 13: a cross-linguistic perspective

The period of late language acquisition can be characterized by the production of linguistically complex phenomena, such as the production of relative clauses (Diessel, 2004), or complex predications (Martinot et al, 2009), but also by the ability to act on the source language through complex reformulation procedures. We argue that children acquire their mother tongue by taking one invariant part from an utterance provided in the input language and modifying another part of the utterance (authors). This mode of adjustment becomes more complex with age, e. g. 10-year-old children reformulate two simple predications with one complex predication (Harris, 1988). The main questions of this paper are: 1. Are complex reformulation procedures verified in the language of linguistically stimulated or non-stimulated children (S+ vs S-)? 2. Are these procedures comparable throughout different languages? The data analysed in this paper are based on child story retelling. The story has been translated from French into Croatian and Italian while controlling the degree of sentence complexity. Children at the age of 6, 8, 10 and 13 (30 per age) were divided into two groups based on a questionnaire that evaluates their familiarity with written language and literacy in general. Three reformulation procedures are analysed in children’s utterances: (1) Analytical reformulation: the child decomposes the meaning of the source verb (from the age of 4) ; (2) Synthetic reformulation: the child synthesizes two or three simple predications from the source text into one complex predication (8 years) ; (3) Transformational reformulation: the child transforms the syntactic construction of the source predication (8 years). Our results are gathered in three languages - Croatian, French and Italian - and show that synthetic and transformational reformulations are underrepresented in the language of S- children. This result suggests that the quality of the language environment is an important factor in acquisition of linguistic complexity.

reformulations, late language acquisition

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