The development of object shift in North Germanic child language

This project will map the acquisition of object shift in Icelandic and Swedish, using longitudinal corpora and elicited production studies.

In the first part of the project, we will study object shift in longitudinal corpora and outline the development of object placement in child language in the two languages.

A second goal of the corpus study is to better understand the role of the frequency of the construction, its distribution, and various types of complexity, which can affect the acquisition process, by a careful study of the input. The second part of the project is experimental.

Elicited production studies with children ages 3–7 will be used to compare the acquisition processes in Icelandic and Swedish to that in Norwegian, where in-depth studies have already been carried out, showing a prolonged delay in acquisition (Anderssen, Bentzen & Rodina 2012).Preliminary results indicate that Icelandic children acquire object shift earlier than Norwegian children (Lindahl & Sigurjónsdóttir 2021), whereas a pilot study of Swedish children (Josefsson 1996) suggests that they acquire it about as late.

Thus, a micro-comparative study like the one proposed in this project can shed light on the contributing factors involved in the acquisition processes of object shift.The results of the project will be of interest for acquisition research and for the linguistics research community more broadly, since they will be of importance for theories of syntax.