TY - GEN A1 - Adani, Flavia A1 - Stegenwallner-Schütz, Maja Henny Katherine A1 - Haendler, Yair A1 - Zukowski, Andrea T1 - Elicited production of relative clauses in German BT - evidence from typically developing children and children with specific language impairment T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - We elicited the production of various types of relative clauses in a group of German-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in order to test the movement optionality account of grammatical difficulty in SLI. The results show that German-speaking children with SLI are impaired in relative clause production compared to typically developing children. The alternative structures that they produce consist of simple main clauses, as well as nominal and prepositional phrases produced in isolation, sometimes contextually appropriate, and sometimes not. Crucially for evaluating the movement optionality account, children with SLI produce very few instances of embedded clauses where the relative clause head noun is pronounced in situ; in fact, such responses are more common among the typically developing child controls. These results underscore the difficulty German-speaking children with SLI have with structures involving movement, but provide no specific support for the movement optionality account. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 409 KW - elicited production KW - first language acquisition KW - German KW - relative clauses KW - specific language impairment Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-405149 IS - 409 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Richter, Michael A1 - van Hout, Roeland T1 - Interpreting resultative sentences in German BT - stages in L1 acquisition T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe N2 - This article presents the results of a study on the interpretation and acceptance of adjectival resultatives of German children between 6 and 9 years of age and adults. These results brought to light significant differences, due to age, in the interpretation and acceptance of these resultatives, that is to say, sentences with an adjective in the final position. The youngest participants were prone to accept ungrammatical sentences by assigning a resultative meaning. The ungrammaticality of the sentences in question was not due to semantic inconsistencies but to violations of the selectional properties of verbs, as for instance in *die Kinder erschrecken die Katze ängstlich ‘the children frighten the cat scared’. In contrast, the adults rejected or amended those sentences. The conclusion is (a) that the children seemed to rely on the sentence structure as a primary cue to compute the meaning of an utterance and (b) that, in contrast with adults, the youngest children in particular had not yet learned the relevant semantic properties of verbs that determine the selectional restrictions and thus the syntactic options of verbs. This means that differences in interpretation and acceptance of sentences are due to differences in knowledge of semantic verb properties between adults and children. The relevant semantic knowledge increases in gradual stages during language acquisition. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe - 111 KW - first language acquisition KW - frame compliance KW - grammatical judgments KW - verb classes KW - resultative sentences Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-93974 SN - 1866-8380 IS - 111 ER -