Members of our department are making poster presentations at this year’s BU Conference on Language Development (November 7-10): Deborah Foucault, Angelica Hill and Tom Roeper. You can find the website here: BUCLD 49.

Romanian-English bilingual adults are more recursive with adjectives in L1 than in L2 (Deborah Foucault, Tom Roeper and Adina Camelia Bleotu)

We investigate experimentally how bilingual adults (Romanian L1-English L2) interpret recursive adjectivemodified sequences in contexts involving (sub)set contrasts in both languages (”flori mici roşii”, lit. ‘flowers small red’ in Romanian L1, red small flowers in English L2). We ask whether the UG Recursive Set-Subset Ordering (RSSO) Constraint is observed equally in Romanian L1 and English L2, such that the adjective closer to the noun picks the set and the adjective further away picks the subset. We consider two theories: a full access to UG theory of bilingualism predicts that bilinguals should observe RSSO in both L1 and L2, a theory of transfer predicts bilinguals should struggle more with recursion in L2 English since Romanian L1 uses a mirror adjectival order of English L1. We find that bilinguals are recursive in both languages, but less so in L2, where RSSO seems to interact with language-specific differences (word order, (in)flexible cognitive AORs).

Children’s acquisition of circumstantial modals: Do they know where necessity can come from?
Chui Yi Lee and Angelica Hill

Already 3 y.o. children produce deontic necessity modals, e.g., has to. However, although children use them, it’s not clear whether they fully know what they mean. Adult speakers know necessity can originate from an external source or from within the subject to achieve some goal, yet prefer to interpret deontic necessity as originating from an external source. We are curious about the following question(1) Are L1 English-acquiring children are sensitive to the source of necessity when interpreting ”has to”, and(2) if so, do they also show an external necessity preference as English speaking adults do? We tested 3-8 y.o.children (n=28; Mage=5;05; SD=1;03) and adults (n=15) in a between-subject picture selection task. Our results support previous work suggesting that although children produce deontic modals, they struggle to understand their meaning. Yet our results offer novel insight into how children struggle to understand has to, one factor being the source of necessity.