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This paper explores the learnability of English indefinite any , Dutch modal verb hoeven , and Mandarin Chinese (WH-)indefinite/pronoun shenme . These three expressions, belonging to different syntactic categories in different languages, have been referred to as Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in the literature, as they are all restricted to contexts that in some sense count as negative although there are differences in the types of semantic environment that may license them. By investigating the distribution of these three expressions in both child and child-directed speech recorded in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2009), this paper argues that children in their acquisition of these NPIs employ the same conservative widening learning strategy (Berwick and Weinberg 1986; Manzini and Wexler 1987), which prevents them from overgeneration. A two-stage acquisition process is detected for each of the three NPIs. However, distinct learning pathways are found, which we take as evidence indicating different underlying analyses of these expressions at different stages in child language. Taking into consideration the input characteristics, the distributional patterns of the three expressions in adult grammar, and the children’s lexical development, we hypothesize what the analyses of any , hoeven , and shenme at different acquisition stages look like. This provides us with a different view of the nature, or the reason underlying the restricted distribution of these expressions in adult language.

This study compares ordinal acquisition in Dutch and English, and shows that both groups of learners acquire ordinals via a rule, rather than lexically. Our evidence comes from a Give-X type comprehension task (cf. Wynn 1992, Meyer et al. 2018, under review) which we administered to 70 Dutch L1 learners (2;08–4;11) and 35 learners of American English (3;3–5;3). The data not only offer a replication of the core findings in Meyer et al. (2018), showing that Dutch-speaking children acquire irregular forms (such as 'derde' ‘third’) after they acquire regular synthetic forms (such as 'vierde' ‘fourth’), but also show that (i) children acquire irregular forms after analytic forms (e.g., 'boot zes' ‘boat six’), and (ii) the rule-based pattern that holds for Dutch also holds for English. We argue that children use the ordinal form to acquire its meaning, which implies that ordinals are acquired in a different way than cardinal numerals (which follow a slow, sequential pattern), and also what is typically described for derivation (which initially tends to follow a lexical pattern, i.e., one in which complex forms are stored as wholes before children learn they can be formed productively by means of a rule).

Certain phenomena of interest to linguists mainly occur in low-resource languages, such as contact-induced language change. We show that it is possible to study contact-induced language change computationally in a historical variety of a low-resource language, Early-Modern Frisian, by creating a model using features that were established to be relevant in a closely related language, modern Dutch. This allows us to test two hypotheses on two types of language contact that may have taken place between Frisian and Dutch during this time. Our model shows that Frisian verb cluster word orders are associated with different context features than Dutch verb orders, supporting the ‘learned borrowing’ hypothesis.

Phonological characteristics and frequencies of stems and allomorphs have been explored as possible factors causing differences in production accuracies between allomorphic forms. However, previous findings are not consistent and the relative contributions of these factors are unclear. This study investigated target and erroneous productions of the Dutch diminutive, which has five allomorphs with varying type frequencies and of which the selection depends on the phonological characteristics of the stems. Typically developing children (N = 115, 5;1-10;3) were tested on their production of real and nonce diminutives. Linear mixed effects modelling was used to analyse the data taking nonverbal IQ into account. Type frequencies of the allomorphs and differences in phonological characteristics of the stems were found to be related to differences in production accuracies between the allomorphs. However, phonological characteristics of the stems appeared to have a bigger impact, mainly due to the phonological complexity of these characteristics.

In this article we investigate what the Taalportaal has to offer concerning Dutch word formation. We note that the Taalportaal is not yet able to provide a large group of users with relevant information in an accessible manner. This is partly due to the fact that the Taalportaal has not yet been made suitable for the Internet, for another part the grammatical information makes ample use of scientific jargon so that it is not readable for the layperson. Finally, on the basis of a few case studies, we check to what extent the Taalportaal can function as a ‘scientific grammar’.

Morphophonological processing involves the phonological analysis of morphemes. Item-specific phonological characteristics have been shown to influence morphophonological skills in children. This study investigates the relative contributions of broad phonological skills and vocabulary to production and judgement accuracies of the Dutch past tense and diminutive, two morphophonological processes. Typically developing children (age 5;0-10;0, N = 114) were asked to produce and judge real and nonce diminutives and regular past tenses. Phonological processing skills were measured using a phonological awareness, digit span and nonword repetition task; vocabulary using the PPVT. Phonological skills and vocabulary contributed significantly to the production and judgement of the past tense and diminutive. The results underline the relation between phonological skills and the lexicon and the processing of morphophonology. These findings go further than showing the importance of the item-specific phonological context of the stem and suffix: they indicate that more general skills in the domain of phonology and vocabulary are involved.

This study argues that the pattern and timing of ordinal acquisition differs substantially from that of cardinals and is influenced by different language-specific factors, such as (ir)regular ordinal morphology, superlative morphology, and the singular-plural distinction. We discuss data from a Give X task (Wynn 1992) administered to 77 Dutch monolinguals (2;11-6;04) that support a so-called knower-level acquisition pattern (e.g., Le Corre & Carey 2007) for Dutch cardinals but show a more complex picture for ordinals, which are acquired around the time a child masters the necessary counting principles and becomes a CP (cardinal principle) knower. Not only is the tiered pattern absent in regular low ordinals, we also see that it takes time for children to link drie 'three' to irregular derde 'third.' We take this as evidence that ordinals are acquired via rules, rather than being stored lexically one by one.

The present paper empirically investigates the relation between diachronic change and synchronic variation in the word order of Dutch two-verb clusters. Synchronically, these clusters occur both in the order auxiliary – participle (1-2) and in the order participle – auxiliary (2-1). Diachronic studies have reported increasing use of the 1-2 order starting as early as the fifteenth century. As diachronic change typically leads to synchronic variation, we hypothesize that the synchronic order variation can be related to this diachronic development. On the basis of an apparent-time study of spontaneous spoken language data from the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands, we show that younger speakers indeed use the 1-2 order more frequently.

ABSTRACT This article aims to investigate how Dutch children may eventually converge on a targetlike distribution of hoeven ‘need,’ a modal verbal NPI (Negative Polarity Item), based on its appearance in the scope of merely some but not all of its possible licensers in the language input (i.e., the induction problem). Imitation performance was obtained from 106 monolingual Dutch children (2;09–5;10; mean = 4;04; SD = 8.5 months) using an elicited imitation task. Results suggest that before age 3, children only accept hoeven to appear with either the sentential negation niet ‘not’ or the negative quantifier geen ‘no.’ After age 3, children start developing their knowledge of the licensing of hoeven in other negative expressions as well—namely niemand ‘nobody,’ weinig ‘few,’ and alleen ‘only’—and eventually allow hoeven in the scope of these negative words after age 5. Based on these developmental patterns, we assume that children initially analyze hoeven as bearing a lexical dependency with either niet or geen, represented by two lexical frames [hoef niet] ‘need not’ and [hoef geen] ‘need no’ and that they develop a dependency relationship between the NPI and an abstract negator neg later on, which is realized by an abstract analysis [hoef neg] ‘need neg.’ Adopting a distribution-based learning approach, we show that the two lexical frames are established based on hoeven’s overwhelming occurrence with either niet or geen in the input. As for the development of the abstract analysis, we argue that children’s knowledge of syntactic decomposition of negation is of crucial importance. Since [hoef neg] turns out to be the representation of the NPI in late child grammar, we moreover argue that hoeven is an NPI, due to its lexical dependency with the abstract negator neg

In this paper, we argue that ascending verb cluster orders (1-2 and 1-2-3, e.g. moet eten ‘must eat’ and moet hebben gegeten ‘must have eaten’) are not only the default verb cluster orders in Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands, but also play a crucial role in the acquisition of verb clusters. We administered a series of three sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) to a total of 120 children (2;8–5;6), and found that children, in contrast to what previous literature might predict, are much more likely to produce 1-2 orders than 2-1 orders. We propose an acquisition pathway in which we assume an OV stage (Vfin-final) and a 1-2 stage before children completely fine-tune their preferences toward adult-like behavior. We further argue that this pathway first applies to bipartite modal-infinitive clusters but is quickly expanded to include all cluster types. We believe our proposal has three advantages: it answers an important learnability question, explains the differences attested between the way children of different ages handle verb clusters, and strongly suggests that verb clusters follow one general rule, rather than several separate construction-specific ones.

The present study investigates the Dutch comprehension and production of reflexives and pronouns by young Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (4;3-6;8), as compared to young monolingual Dutch children (4;1-6;4), and it explores the Turkish comprehension of reflexives and pronouns by older Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (6;7-9;10). On the one hand, young bilingual children were examined in order to determine whether they performed differently from their older bilingual peers, who were tested in a previous study (van Koert et al., 2013). On the other hand, older Turkish-Dutch bilingual children were investigated on their Turkish comprehension, so that they could be compared to the older Turkish-Dutch bilingual children, who were tested previously in Dutch (van Koert et al., 2013). The Dutch results revealed that the young Turkish-Dutch bilingual children behaved similarly to their monolingual Dutch peers on their comprehension of reflexives and pronouns; however, they produced more omissions than their monolingual peers, which could either suggest a stage of Dutch (cf. Thrift, 2003) or reflect cross-linguistic influence (cf. Muller & Hulk, 2001). The Turkish findings showed that the Turkish-Dutch bilingual children behaved similarly on reflexives and pronouns, which has been found for monolingual Turkish children previously (Aarssen & Bos, 1999), too.

Dutch modal verb hoeven ‘need’ is a negative polarity item (NPI) (Zwarts 1981, Hoeksema 2000), which survives in all anti-additive, and some but not all downward entailing (DE) contexts. The aim of the paper is to explore the reason why Dutch hoeven is not allowed in all DE-contexts – as observed for NPIs such as any-terms. We answer this question by looking at acquisition. The reasoning is straightforward: the analysis underlying a linguistic phenomenon is a product of children’s acquisition of it. Data collected from a total of 132 monolingual Dutch children (2;09–5;10; M = 4;04; SD = 9.3 months) in an elicited imitation task demonstrate a learning path of hoeven in which children start with two lexical frames [HOEF NIET] ‘NEED NOT’ and [HOEF GEEN] ‘NEED NO’ and switch to an abstract analysis of it later on: [HOEF NEG] ‘NEED NEG’. Given this abstract analysis, emerging as a result of language acquisition, we argue that hoeven is an NPI because of its lexical dependency with the abstract negation NEG (cf. Postal 2000). This in turn explains the distribution of the Dutch NPI restricted to some but not all DEcontexts: hoeven is only allowed in those DE-contexts that incorporate the abstract negation NEG.

We examine a case of word order variation where speakers choose between two near-synonymous constructions partly on the basis of the processing complexity of the construction and its context. When producing two-verb clusters in Dutch, a speaker can choose between two word orders. Previous corpus studies have shown that a wide range of factors are associated with this word order variation. We conducted a large-scale corpus study in order to discover what these factors have in common. The underlying generalization appears to be processing complexity: we show that a variety of factors that are related to verbal cluster word order, can also be related to the processing complexity of the cluster's context. This implies that one of the word orders might be easier to process — when processing load is high, speakers will go for the easier option. Therefore, we also investigate which of the two word orders might be easier to process. By testing for associations with factors indicating a higher or lower processing complexity of the verb and its context, we find evidence for the hypothesis that the word order where the main verb comes last is easier to process.

Dutch modal verb hoeven 'need' is a Negative Polarity Item (NPI) because of its restricted distribution to certain negative contexts only. By investigating the distribution of this NPI in child Dutch, the paper explores a solution to a learnability problem raised by the existence of NPIs: how can a child acquire the limited distribution of an NPI in the absence of both direct and indirect negative evidence? Corpus data collected through CHILDES confirm children's employment of a conservative widening learning strategy to solve the learnability problem. This strategy entails that children start out with the strictest assumption of hoeven, exhibiting a lexical dependency with the negative marker niet 'not', and weaken the assumption down to a less rigid reanalysis of this NPI, associated with an abstract negation in its underlying syntactic representation. The initial learning process turns out to be distribution-based only, i.e., without presuming any innate knowledge of NPIs and their restricted occurrences. However, distributional properties alone are not sufficient for children to reanalyze the NPI. Children's linguistic knowledge of negative indefinites as exhibiting a decomposable negation plays a crucial role in the subsequent reanalyzing process. The reanalysis emerging shortly after age four signifies exactly how adult speakers analyze the NPI, also explaining hoeven's strength as a polarity item.