Acquisition of Recursive Prepositional Phrases by Native and L2 Speakers of Spanish
Jon Nelson
Background: Roeper (2007) claims that recursive English structures resist instruction and
cause initial confusion among young speakers; studies by Pérez-Leroux et al (2012) bear this
out. Furthermore, recent investigation of the acquisition of recursive syntactic structures
(Limbach and Adone (L&A) 2010) has compared preference for recursive or conjunctive interpretations among young children and both native (NS) and non-native (NNS) adults. They
found that preference for the conjunctive interpretation actually increased steadily from the
ages of 3 to 5 then dropped off substantially with adult NSs. NNSs preferred recursive readings at rates similar to the children, but their other answers did not pattern with the children.
NNSs also chose conjunctive interpretations at twice the rate of NSs. Roeper (2011) proposes that the acquisition default is that “a child first analyzes adjacent structures as Direct
Recursion with a conjunctive” instead of a recursive reading. Moreover, the interface that
recursion has with interpretation is taken to be an innate component of UG.
Aims: This project tests consecutive locative PPs to determine whether native and L2 speakers of Spanish prefer conjunctive or recursive interpretations, or something else. I test two
hypotheses: that NNSs prefer conjunctive interpretations at a higher rate than NSs (in line
with L&A’s findings), and that NSs prefer recursive readings at higher rates than NNSs. The
second is not an automatic corollary of the first, as other possibilities exist, including dropping either PP. Three different types of recursive PPs are used in test items: two recursive
PPs with matching prepositions, two recursive PPs with different prepositions and triple recursive PPs. Matching prepositions were compared with different ones as it has been suggested (Oiry, 2012) that consecutive PPs with matching prepositions lend themselves more
readily to recursion than PPs with different ones.
An example of this structure is as follows:
1. The CDs in the box next to the books.
With a recursive interpretation, the box is next to the books; with a conjunctive one, the
books are inside the box and next to the CDs. It is also possible to interpret ‘in the box’ and
ignore the books, and vice versa.
The triple PPs lend a further level of ambiguity, as the last PP has yet another point of attachment (medially):
2. The box on top of the table near the chair next to the plant
Assuming ‘the table near the chair’ to be a fixed condition, there are three ways to interpret
the PP ‘next to the plant’. Full recursion (low attachment) involves the chair next to the plant;
conjunction (high attachment) puts the box next to the plant; an alternative interpretation
has the table next to the plant (medial attachment).
Methodology: L1 and L2 speakers participated in oral comprehension tasks. Miniature movies were narrated within PowerPoint. Each movie culminated with a question that offered
choices of photos representing (for the double PP) recursive or conjunctive interpretations,
as well as ones in which either PP was not represented at all. The triple PP questions had
options allowing for low, medial or high attachment; the condition set by PP1+PP2 (e.g. the
table near the chair in (2) above) held true in all options.
Results: The suggestion that chains of two PPs using identical prepositions encourage recursive interpretations more than different ones is borne out with NSs, who chose no conjunctive readings in these scenarios; with different prepositions, NSs preferred the conjunctive
reading in a significant number of samples. Nevertheless, NNSs demonstrated no significant effect from identical prepositions. NNSs preferred conjunctive readings with pairs of
preposition at a rate more than double that of NSs, in keeping with the hypothesis. NSs also
interpreted situations recursively at a rate significantly higher than that of NNS. The difference between NSs and NNSs seems to disappear or even reverse itself with triple PPs. Here
NSs prefer high attachment/conjunction far more than before, while the increased ambiguity produces no significant effect on NNSs.
Conclusions: Recursive interpretations of chains of two PPs are clearly preferred by NSs to
conjunctive ones; this effect is more pronounced when the PPs contain identical prepositions. NNSs show far higher rates of conjunctive interpretations, similar to what was found
by L&A (2010). The effect was blurred with the addition of a third PP; it is unclear if this may
be due to processing limitations. The results, in which adult NNS performance correlates to
that of the NS child, may have implications for late access to UG.
References
Limbach, Maxi and Dani Adone. (2010). Language Acquisition of Recursive Possessives in
English. In Katie Franich, Kate M. Iserman, and Lauren L. Keil (editors), Proceedings of the
34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development: 281-290. Somerville,
MA: Cascadilla Press.
Oiry, Magda. (2012). Personal communication.
Pérez-Leroux, Ana T., Susana Bejar, Diane Massam and Anny Castilla-Earls. (2012). The Acquisition of NP Recursion in English-Speaking Children. In Alia K. Biller, Esther Y. Chung and
Amelia E. Kimball (editors), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Boston University Conference
on Language Development: 449-460. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Roeper, Tom. (2007). The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illuminates Humanism.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Roeper, Tom. (2011). The Acquisition of Recursion: How Formalism Articulates the Child’s
Path. Biolinguistics 5.1-2: 057-086.