Ana Lúcia Santos

University of Lisbon | UL · Departamento de Linguística Geral e Românica

We investigate the acquisition of sentential complementation under causative, perception, and object control verbs in European Portuguese, a language rich in complement types, including the typologically marked inflected infinitives. We tested 58 children between 3 and 5 years of age and 24 adults on a sentence completion task. The results support...

This article investigates the acquisition of different types of clefts and of be-fragments in European Portuguese. We first present the main syntactic and discourse properties of different cleft structures and of be-fragments in European Portuguese, and we discuss how data from first language acquisition may contribute to evaluate different theoret...

The present paper presents an experiment testing Portuguese-speaking children’s comprehension of different types of subject and object clefts – é que clefts, standard clefts and pseudoclefts. We consider previous studies that explain asymmetric difficulties in the comprehension of structures with object A-bar extraction as an effect of featural int...

Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. Under Grillo’s (2009) Generalized Minimality framework, complexity effects of object relatives are construed as intervention effects, which result from an interaction between locality constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality) and the sentence processing system. Spec...

This study presents the validation analysis of the European Portuguese version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory III (CDI-III-PT). The CDI-III-PT is a parental report measure allowing researchers to assess expressive vocabulary and the syntactic abilities of children aged 2;6-4;0. In this study, we present a version compris...

This study investigates the interpretation of inflected infinitives under object control verbs in European Portuguese. It contrasts the behaviour of two different types of control verbs, represented by obrigar ‘force’ and convencer ‘convince’, and belonging each to one of the two classes of control verbs established by Landau (2015). It is argued t...

Intervention effects have been explored in the domain of language acquisition, suggesting that feature similarity between a moved element and an intervening constituent determines the occurrence of processing difficulties. A graded differentiation scale hierarchizing the different possible relations between feature sets defining the moved and the i...

This paper establishes a broad state-of-the-art of the research on the acquisition of the syntax of European Portuguese. It identifies broad questions that are subject to debate, the main topics and lines of research that have been pursued in the last decades, available resources, and new paths that can be developed.

Supplementary Material included in the paper Cadime, I., Santos, A. L., Ribeiro, I., & Viana, F. L. (2021). Parental reports of preschoolers' lexical and syntactic development: validation of the CDI-III for European Portuguese. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 677575. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.677575

In Machine Translation, assessing the quality of a large amount of automatic translations can be challenging. Automatic metrics are not reliable when it comes to high performing systems. In addition, resorting to human evaluators can be expensive, especially when evaluating multiple systems. To overcome the latter challenge, we propose a novel appl...

Quando iniciam as aulas de Português Língua de Herança (PLH), as crianças lusodescendentes, ge-ralmente, já têm uma competência linguística adquirida naturalmente no contexto familiar. Como é sabido, nem sempre esta competência é idêntica à de crianças que cresceram em contexto monolin-gue, mas também não é idêntica à de falantes que adquirem o por...

This paper explores the relevancy of punctuation as a key element establishing a connection between grammar and writing instruction. It explores common conceptions of punctuation, which connect the use of the comma to prosody, contrasting it with present rules for Portuguese, which assume a syntactic definition of the contexts in which a comma shou...

How Do Children Interpret Novel Control Verbs? Ana Lúcia Santos, Alice Jesus, and Silvana Abalada It is generally assumed that subject control with promise-type verbs is difficult for preschool children, a fact resulting from a preference for a ‘closer’ controller and favouring object control readings with ditransitive verbs. This preference for...

This paper discusses the implications of linguistic research on heritage bilingualism for heritage language teaching. It is argued that heritage speakers and second language learners have different instructional needs in the classroom because teaching of a heritage language is a case of native language instruction. Based on a number of comparative...

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system-epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-epistemic] contexts, the selec...

The goals of this study were to analyze the growth and stability of vocabulary, mean length of the three longest utterances (MLLUw), and sentence complexity in European Portuguese-speaking children aged 1;4-2;6, to explore differences in growth as a function of personal and family-related variables, and to investigate the interrelationships among t...

We offer a new insight on the acquisition of control, by considering data from Portuguese. We explore two main issues: (i) the distinction between obligatory control and non-obligatory control and (ii) choice of controller. Our results show that children distinguish certain obligatory and non-obligatory control contexts: children accepted a sentenc...

We compare children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and linguistically impaired children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) by measuring comprehension of relative clauses (A´-movement) and control structures (according to some, a case of A-movement). We tested 11 SLI children (8 to 11 years), 11 high-functioning ASD children (8 to 11 yea...

Download here: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/160 The present volume is an introduction to the study of Language Acquisition, especially centered on Portuguese. Even though the different chapters always take Portuguese as a point of departure, a comparative perspective is assumed and Portuguese data is compared to data from other languages,...

Cara colega Obrigada pelo seu interesse na Manual Técnico dos Inventários de MacArthur-Bates. No entanto, por compromissos com a editora, não posso proceder ao seu envio, pelo que sugiro que os contacte. A editora - Lusoinfo Multimédia - procede ao su envio. Os m/ cumprimentos.

The results from a large-scale study on toddlers’ language acquisition in European Portuguese are presented. Toddlers’ lexical and grammatical competencies were assessed using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The results, based on 3,012 reports completed by parents indicate an increase in the lexical...

The present study analyzes the effect of age and amount of input in the acquisition of European Portuguese as a heritage language. An elicited production task centred on mood choice in complement clauses was applied to a group of fifty bilingual children (six- to sixteen-year-olds) who are acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German dom...

This study compares the performance of Portuguese-German heritage children and adult L2 speakers of European Portuguese whose L1 is German with respect to two aspects of grammar, adverb placement and VP-ellipsis, which depend on a core syntactic property of the language, verb movement. The results show that both groups have acquired V-to-I and adve...

The present study analyses the effect of age and amount of input in the acquisition of European Portuguese as a heritage language. An elicited production task centred on mood choice in complement clauses was applied to a group of 50 bilingual children (6–16-year-olds), who are acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German dominant environ...

We investigate the acquisition of sentential complementation under causative, perception, and object control verbs in European Portuguese, a language rich in complement types, including the typologically marked inflected infinitives. We tested 58 children between 3 and 5 years of age and 24 adults on a sentence completion task. The results support...

We present a corpus of child and child-directed speech of European Portuguese. This corpus results from the expansion of an already existing database (Santos, 2006). It includes around 52 hours of child-adult interaction and now contains 27,595 child utterances and 70,736 adult utterances. The corpus was transcribed according to the CHILDES system...

In this paper, we present extended argumentation against a raising analysis for every type of relative clauses. Specifically, we argue that purpose relative clauses involve raising of a null operator to Spec,CP, contrary to that-relatives, which involve raising of the antecedent DP. We further argue that this analysis applies to all purpose relativ...

This paper discusses the distribution of inflected infinitives in standard and non-standard European Portuguese. In the standard variety, inflected infinitives are generally available in non-obligatory control contexts (subject and adjunct clauses), but can only occur in obligatory control contexts when the temporal orientation of the complement is...

This study investigates the child (L1) acquisition of properties at the interfaces of morpho-syntax, syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics, by focusing on inflected infinitives in European Portuguese (EP). Three child groups were tested, 6–7-year-olds, 9–10-year-olds and 11–12-year-olds, as well as an adult control group. The data demonstrate that...

This study investigates the child (L1) acquisition of inflected and uninflected infinitives in European Portuguese (EP). We test and contrast properties involving two interfaces, focusing on morpho-syntactic and syntax-semantics properties of inflected infinitives, in contrast with uninflected infinitives. We present experimental results from three...

In this paper, I discuss the status of fragment answers to yes-no questions, based on facts from European Portuguese. I argue, along the lines of argumentation in Merchant (2004), that there is reason to believe that at least some of these fragments are derived through deletion. However, I show that data from EP does not support Merchant�s analysis...

1. Acquisition of ellipsis and the syntax -discourse interface 1 Ellipsis is a type of anaphora common in spontaneous speech. As Barss (2003: ix) puts it: "the term anaphora is used to cover a myriad disparate cases of a linguistic expression receiving part, or all, of its semantic interpretation via a dependency upon an antecedent, rather from its...

1. List of tables 2. List of figures 3. Preface 4. Abbreviations used in glosses 5. Chapter 1. Introduction 6. Chapter 2. VPE and the structural and anaphoric properties of minimal answers in EP adult grammar 7. Chapter 3. Learnability issues in VPE and focus 8. Chapter 4. How early can VPE be found? 9. Chapter 5. Answers as a window into the inter...

The coexistence in European Portuguese of Null Complement Anaphora and of VP ellipsis licensed by main verbs poses a learnability problem and ultimately provides a poverty-of-the stimulus argument for the innateness of the identification conditions on VP ellipsis. If the identification constraint operating on ellipsis derives from innate principles...

UNICAMP / FAPESP-FLUL / CNPq) (FLUL / Onset -CEL) vianna@iel.unicamp.br als@fl.ul.pt Resumo A perda de sujeito nulo no Português Brasileiro tem sido objecto de um considerável debate, que inclui também trabalhos em aquisição. Nestes trabalhos, por regra, não são consideradas as respostas a interrogativas globais (nomeadamente, as respostas verbais)...

This paper (i) describes the patterns of answers to yes-no questions in European Portuguese; (ii) presents data illustrating the acquisition of these patterns; (iii) argues that the acquisition of patterns of answer to yes-no questions in European Portuguese provides evidence for two types of modularity in the acquisition process: modularity of syn...

Introdução Este poster tem como objectivo divulgar o trabalho do projecto Netlíngu@, desenvolvido desde Janeiro de 2001 na área de Didáctica do Português -Língua do Departamento de Linguística Geral e Românica da FLUL, em parceria com a uARTE–MCT. Integrado no programa de formação inicial de professores de língua portuguesa (e não esquecendo a form...

In this paper we identify intonation cues that can disambiguate confirmation-seeking questions in adult-child dialogue in European Portuguese (EP). 301 examples of confirmation requests answered by two children and uttered by three different adults were analysed. Results show that (i) most confirmation-seeking questions (92.7%) do not present the i...

Some researchers using different experimental techniques have obtained results that suggest that children as young as 3 years old are able to comprehend and produce VP ellipsis (VPE) (cf. Postman et al. 1997, Thornton & Wexler 1999, Foley et al. 2003, Matsuo & Duffield 2001). However, these are experimental studies testing ellipsis in coordination...

The analysis of question-answer pairs in a corpus of child-adult interaction in European Portuguese offers evidence that at least from 2;0 the intonation patterns of children's answers varies according to the discourse context and signals early sensitivity to the pragmatic value of the question. After 2;0 there is a general increase of low/falling...