Maria Lobo

• PhD Linguistics
• Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

O presente estudo procura aprofundar o desenvolvimento longitudinal da complexidade sintática na escrita, em fases iniciais de desenvolvimento. Parte-se da hipótese de que o uso de estruturas de subordinação contribui para a caracterização da complexidade sintática em produções escritas, nomeadamente em narrativas produzidas nos primeiros anos de e...

Focusing mostly on European Portuguese, this paper proposes that the internal syntax of Portuguese gerund clauses and the gradience in their degree of defectiveness may be explained by an interplay between their external syntax (locus of merge), agreement relations between embedded Tense and matrix Tense and the presence/absence of an intervening h...

Previous literature on the typology of gerund clauses in Portuguese has overlooked a peculiar type of clauses which are always introduced by como (‘as’) and display an array of characteristics that set them apart from all other gerund clauses (and from other, somehow similar, constructions in different languages). In this paper, we provide an in-de...

This study investigates the development, in production, of clitic pronouns in the initial phases of writing by primary school children. Based on a corpus of 272 narrative texts produced by 136 children at the beginning of second grade and at the beginning of third grade, as part of a writing task which integrates the diagnostic instrument of the Pr...

This study explored the trajectory of L3 acquisition (L3A) of three structurally different clefts in European Portuguese (EP) by L1-Mandarin Chinese (MC) L2-English learners, within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2008, 2009). This study also considers the predictions of L3A models that differ with respect to the role...

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...

Neste artigo, procura-se realçar a necessidade de uma articulação entre avaliação e intervenção didática no 1.º ciclo, apresentando-se um projeto – o PIPALE (Projeto de Intervenção Preventiva para a Aprendizagem da Leitura e da Escrita) – dirigido a alunos a frequentar os dois primeiros anos de escolaridade com a finalidade de melhorar os níveis de...

In the period in which language should be acquired, auditory input deprivation compromises oral language exposure. The literature reports difficulties in the oral comprehension of syntactic dependencies resulting from A’ movement, but no difficulties in the acquisition of syntactic structures with A-movement in hearing-impaired children with hearin...

This article presents a study on the syntactic development of children attending the 1st cycle of basic education based on their writing. We seek to (i) identify which are the predominant clause articulation processes at an early stage of compositional writing from the connectors that emerge at this stage; (ii) determine if the clause articulation...

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.

This investigation aims to study the comprehension of A´movement (wh-questions and relatives) in L1 European Portuguese children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), since previous research on syntactic abilities in ASD remains inconclusive. 24 Portuguese speaking children with ASD (aged 5;6 to 13;11), including children with low and high non-verba...

This volume includes fourteen papers on the acquisition of Romance languages, eleven of which were presented at the Romance Turn 9, held in Bucharest in September 2018. The studies offer new insights into central issues in the literature, such as syntactic complexity in both typical and impaired language settings, intervention effects, the acquisit...

In this article, we present an assessment instrument aimed at diagnosing oral language and reading and writing skills in children attending pre-school (5 years) and the early years of primary school. The instrument was mainly designed for the school context, and it was developed in collaboration with kindergarten educators and primary teachers who...

This investigation aims to study the comprehension of passives in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Research on passives is sparse and remains inconclusive. Fourteen Portuguese speaking children with ASD (between ages 7 and 13), including children with low and high non-verbal IQ, were compared to four typically developing (TD) children....

This study investigates the effects of two external linguistic variables – language dominance and time of formal exposure – on the production and placement of clitic pronouns of Portuguese-French bilingual children. Using two elicited production tasks and a parental sociolinguistic questionnaire, we show that language dominance plays a role in rate...

Although there are several referenced and validated international instruments for evaluating oral narratives,which can be used in populations with language disorders to help the diagnosis and to plan intervention, there is yet no such instrument for EP. In this work, we present a first version of an instrument for evaluating oral narrative producti...

This study examines clitic omission in Spanish-Portuguese bilingual acquisition. Using an elicited production task, we show that bilinguals omit clitics in both languages, but their rates of omission are higher in Portuguese. We show that, although bilinguals differ from monolinguals in their rates of omission in Spanish, they progressively become...

This paper investigates the interpretation preferences for null and overt subject pronouns in anaphoric and cataphoric contexts in L2 Portuguese and, specifically, whether: i) the L1 of the participants (Italian and German) influences their interpretation; ii) there is evidence of development; iii) there are differences determined by pronoun type a...

We present data from an elicited production task and from spontaneous production to investigate the development of clitic climbing by European Portuguese speaking children. We show that clitic climbing is acquired early, that children are sensitive to the presence of proclisis triggers that favour clitic climbing, and that there is development of t...

This study investigates clitic omission and clitic placement in Portuguese-French bilingual children. Using two elicited production tasks, we show that the global pattern of development is very similar to the one found in monolingual acquisition: bilingual children are sensitive to the type of clitic (more omission in accusative contexts than in re...

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...

This volume presents eleven papers on the acquisition of Romance, most of them presented at the Romance Turn VIII, held in Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain, in September 2016. Part I of the volume is devoted to passives and related constructions. The results unveil domains in comprehension in which children are adult-like, and other domains where there...

We report two experiments, a self-paced reading task and an off-line questionnaire, that tested if the overt subject pronoun in European Portuguese was sensitive to the animacy (animate vs. inanimate) of the antecedent in object position. We found higher reading times when the overt pronoun was forced to retrieve an inanimate antecedent compared to...

The present study investigates the comprehension and production of Portuguese wh-questions by hearing impaired children with cochlear implants. We investigate whether the asymmetries found in typically developing children are also present in our target group or whether the difficulties are more widespread. In particular, we investigate whether ther...

Differently from the standard contemporary variety of European Portuguese, in which subject-verb inversion is considered categorical in gerund clauses, in Old Portuguese and Dialectal European Portuguese we can find both subject-verb and verb-subject orders in gerund clauses. These variable word orders challenge classical assumptions that correlate...

Like other null-subject languages, European Portuguese (EP) has two types of subject pronouns (null and overt pronouns) that differ in their preferences to retrieve antecedents. Several studies have shown different syntactic and semantic biases for each pronominal form, either in EP or in other null-subject languages. The findings have been explain...

In previous studies that included elicited production and comprehension tasks (Costa, Lobo and Silva 2011), it has been shown that there is a high discrepancy between the rates of production of subject relative clauses vs. object relative clauses both in children and adults, but the two groups differed qualitatively. In the comprehension task, adul...

This chapter deals with two main topics: constituent order (focusing on the interaction between subject positions and interpretation), and null subjects. Both issues relate to case, agreement and expletives. The chapter discusses what motivates and licenses verb-subject orders in Romance non-wh sentences and identifies focalization, theticity and n...

This volume contains a selection of papers of the 28th Going Romance conference, which was organized by the Linguistics centers of Universidade de Lisboa and Universidade Nova de Lisboa in December 2014. It assembles the invited contributions by Alain Rouveret, Guido Mensching, Luigi Rizzi, and Roberta D’Alessandro, and eleven peer-reviewed papers...

This paper investigates how European Portuguese children interpret null and overt subject pronouns of adverbial clauses when there are two potential antecedents in the main clause, in order to find out how early the preferred readings are acquired in European Portuguese for each type of pronoun. Our results show that the control group of adults beh...

This paper investigates how European Portuguese children interpret null and overt subject pronouns of adverbial clauses when there are two potential antecedents in the main clause, in order to find out how early the preferred readings are acquired in European Portuguese for each type of pronoun. Our results show that the control group of adults beh...

This paper describes the behavior of present participles in a corpus of Old Portuguese and it raises some hypotheses concerning their syntactic status, compared to other non-finite forms. Although present participles in contemporary Portuguese no longer exist as verbal forms, in Old Portuguese we could find verbal occurrences of this form. In Old P...

Neste capítulo,descrevem-se as construções da gramática do português que correspondem a estratégias de marcação de foco, quer essas estratégias usem as diferentes possibilidades de alteração da ordem básica SVO/SVX, quer recorram às estruturas clivadas. O capítulo está dividido em duas grandes secções. Em 50.1, descreve-se a marcação de foco (infor...

This chapter discusses some properties of pronominal forms in the two main varieties of Portuguese, European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), from the perspective of binding theory (BT). Specifically, it focuses on a few basic patterns of 3rd person anaphora bearing on some of BT's central issues, such as the nature of binding domains...

Interrogatives, relatives and clefts are structures that have a common property: they may begin with a wh-expression generally linked to an empty position in its clause. In generative approaches, this expression is assumed to have been moved from a clause internal position to a left peripheral position. The three structures differ, however, in thei...

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”),...

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...

Although geolinguistic projects do not usually provide adequate (if any) coverage of syntactic variation, current studies of dialect syntax still may benefit from data that were made available in traditional linguistic atlases. Concomitantly, dialect corpora, as a different kind of linguistic resource for the study of nonstandard syntax, often gran...

This paper reports a study on the acquisition of clitic placement by European Portuguese children aged 5, 6 and 7, using an elicitation task. Contrarily to what has been found for other languages, where children correctly place clitic pronouns from a very early age, our results show that European Portuguese children still misplace clitics at age 7,...

Omission of clitics is often considered a critical marker of language development in children. For this reason, clitic omission in language development has been studied crosslinguistically. Results on clitic production reveal that languages differ with respect to the rates at which clitics are omitted by children, as well as on the duration of the...

The Generalized Minimality approach to comprehension difficulties with non-local dependencies (Grillo 2005, 2008) predicts that in non-local dependencies (e.g. object relatives) a partial match in internal structure between the moved and the intervening DP can generate a minimality effect and lead to comprehension difficulties in several population...

Dans le présent travail, nous nous proposons d’étudier la distribution géographique dans le territoire portugais de trois phénomènes morphosyntaxiques, à partir de deux sources de types différents : les matériaux d’un atlas traditionnel – l’Atlas Linguistique de la Péninsule Ibérique (ALPI) – et un corpus oral obtenu à partir d’enquêtes dialectales...

Several studies reveal an asymmetry between the acquisition of subject and object relative clauses ( [0005], [0020], [0030], [0035], [0040], [0050], [0055], [0070], [0080], [0100], [0105], [0115], [0125], [0120] and [0135]). The goal of this paper is to show that a similar asymmetry is found in the acquisition of European Portuguese. F...

In this paper we argue that clitic omission in European Portuguese speaking children cannot be due to a late acquisition of pragmatics. Based on experimental data from an elicited production task and a truth-value judgement task, we show that children acquiring European Portuguese as a first language know the appropriate pragmatic conditions for pr...

Previous studies have established a correlation beween early clitic omission and the existence of past participle agreement, explainable with a maturational constraint - the UCC. Since Portuguese doesn't show past participle agreement, it is expected that portuguese children will produce clitics early on. I order to find out whether this correlatio...

1. Introdução. É consensual na literatura sobre aquisição de língu a materna que os elementos funcionais se encontram sujeitos a aquisição tardia , embora haja variação interlinguística relativa aos elementos que são pro duzidos tardiamente e às taxas de omissão encontradas para diferentes línguas (ver Ra dford 1994, Guasti 2002 para dados relevant...

This paper is concerned with the structural position occupied by a subset of adjunct clauses, namely those which can occur in final position without a special intonational break. After a definition of the structures to be considered, it will be shown that the classical assumption according to which they are generated as adjuncts is empirically supe...

RESUMO: Neste artigo, são analisados alguns aspectos da sintaxe das orações gerundivas do português europeu. Partindo de contrastes sintácticos e semânticos, estabelece-se uma tipologia de orações gerundivas do português. Dentro do quadro teórico da Teoria de Princípios e Parâmetros, propõe-se que as diferenças de comportamento entre gerundivas adj...

In this work we will be presenting a study based on the diachronic evolution of reason clauses from Medieval Portuguese to Contemporary European Portuguese. Our aim is threefold: to contribute to a better understanding of the processes of complex sentences formation, of the syntax-semantics interface and of the grammatical and lexical status of fun...

Taking into account the distribution of gerunds and infinitives in Old Portuguese and in Contemporary European Portuguese, we argue that the variation may be explained by the different feature specifications of the functional domains. As for the diachronic evolution of the gerund, we argue that there has been a change from an underspecified variabl...

In previous work, we argued that clitic omission in the acquisition of European Portuguese is an overgeneralization of the null object construction. This hypothesis predicts that children will accept null objects in comprehension tasks. In the present paper, following the study of Costa & Lobo (2008) on the comprehension of null objects, we investi...

1. Introdução Este trabalho tem por objectivo contribuir para os estudos que têm sido feitos sobre aquisição de clíticos, averiguando se as crianças portuguesas omitem clíticos acusativos. De acordo com estudos anteriores feitos para outras línguas (cf. Tsakali & Wexler, 2003; Wexler, Gavarró & Torrens, 2003; Babyonyshev & Marin, 2003), a omissão d...