COMPARACIÓN DE VALORES ENTRE EL SISTEMA SIMULADO

The target items in this study consisted of embedded sentences, negative sentences, yes/no questions and wh- questions. The primary purpose of including a variety of syntactic environments was to eliminate a potentially confounding variable and to make the results more generalizable. For instance, if this study were to use only sentences with embedded clauses, then the argument could be made that there is something about this particular environment which is responsible for any observed results. By including a variety of items, any statistically significant results reported in this study hold true across a variety of syntactic environments. As a secondary purpose, the results from the various syntactic environments may be helpful for future research. Therefore, the results of the syntactic environments are presented descriptively below.

Overview for both groups. Table 5.9 below is an overview of the percent correct for each group for each task by syntactic environment (i.e. embedded clause, negation, subject-auxiliary inversion and wh-questions). The two groups performed quite similarly. For the Accepting Grammatical items (AG), the highest scores for both groups were on the negative items and the lowest scores were on the subject-auxiliary inversion items. For the Rejecting Ungrammatical items (RU), the groups, once again, performed most accurately on the negative items with very similar (relatively much lower) scores for the other syntactic environments. Lastly, on the Elicited Imitation (EI), both groups scored very highly on the subject-auxiliary inversion and negative items and seemingly much worse on the embedded and wh- items. While the rankings varied quite a bit across task (e.g. subject-auxiliary inversion being the lowest score for the AG and the highest for the EI), it appears that the two groups performed similarly to one another.

Table 5.9

Overview Syntactic Environments

Low Group AG Low Group RU Low Group EI High Group AG High Group RU High Group EI Neg 83% 85% 95% 95% 95% 100% WH 79% 45% 86% 89% 90% 95% Embedded 75% 51% 71% 94% 82% 93% S-AUX 67% 52% 97% 86% 90% 100%

*Lowest score is bolded

The first observation for the Low Group is that subject-auxiliary inversion is ranked lowest for the AG and that only slightly more than half of the ungrammatical subject-auxiliary inversion items were correctly rejected. Despite this, subject-auxiliary inversion was produced in the EI with the highest rate of accuracy- 97%. With this being the case, an argument could be made that the EI is not a good measurement when the target structure is contained in the first word of the item. It is possible that the unusual level of markedness put on the copula when it is sentence-initial is responsible for the extremely accurate scores for both the Low Group and the High Group in the EI. Despite this discrepancy, the trends for the rest of the syntactic environments are very similar. Negative items were the most accurate environment across both groups and WH and embedded items were the least accurate.

Similarly to the Low Group, the first observation for the High Group from Table 5.9 above is that subject-auxiliary inversion is ranked lowest for the AG, and despite this, subject-auxiliary inversion was produced in the EI with a 100% accuracy rate. This seems to provide further evidence for the argument that the EI may not be a good

measurement when the target structure is contained in the first word of the item due to the markedness of the sentence-initial copula. Also similarly to the Low Group, negative

items were the most accurate environment andwh- and embedded items were the least accurate. The fact that both groups performed better on negative items than any other items and across all tasks may be a good point to further investigate in future research.

Syntactic environments by tense, verb type, and number.

As discussed in the methodology, in order to be able to cover a wide range of potential syntactic environments for copula omission, the ability to run statistical analyses was sacrificed for the syntactic environments. However, it is still worth investigating each environment and its interactions with tense, verb type and number as a potential starting point for future research. Therefore, for each syntactic environment, the mean scores were compared for past/present tense, main/auxiliary verb type, and singular/plural number. For the majority of the results, the means were within ten percentage points of each other. For instance, on the AG, Low Group had a mean of 81% on wh- present tense items, and a mean of 76% on wh- past tense items. Considering the number of participants in this study and the number of items in each syntactic environment, a difference in mean of only a handful of percentage points is likely not suggestive of anything.

Therefore, in order to identify the most worthwhile results, the results below only present conditions in which there was a greater than ten percentage points difference in the means between corresponding items. For instance, if the participants had a mean score of 65% on embedded present tense items, and a mean score of 40% on embedded past tense items, then embedded past tense is listed as a “problematic” environment below, as the discrepancy in means was more than ten percentage points. For the

serves its purpose in allowing us to identify a handful of the most problematic

environments for potential future research. These results are just meant as an indication that within one of the syntactic environments, there was a difference in performance based on either tense, verb type or number, despite the fact that this difference cannot be statistically supported.

Table 5.10 below shows that on the AG, the Low Group scored much more highly on singular items than plural items across three of the syntactic environments. Moreover, in the subject-auxiliary inversion environment, participants scored more than 20

percentage points higher on the auxiliary items than the main verb items. On the RU, the Low Group performed worse on present tense subject-auxiliary inversion and embedded items than past tense items. Moreover, plural wh- items once again proved problematic. On the EI, plural items were once again problematic in the wh- and embedded

environments. In contrast to their performance on the RU, the Low Group scored higher on the main verb embedded items than the auxiliary items on the EI. The important take- aways from this are that for the Low Group, the present tense and plural items were particularly problematic across several syntactic environments, but the results were inconsistent for verb type items.

Table 5.10

Problematic Syntactic Environments by Tense, Verb, and Number

AG RU EI Group 1 Wh- plural SAI plural Embedded plural