Language Acquisition in Diverse Linguistic, Social and Cognitive Circumstances

verb root be_located and some placement affixes such as “next to” and “on top of” to encode the axial parts of the Ground entity with which the Figure sets up a spatial relation with. These crosslinguistic differences between HKSL and Cantonese pose Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin. org July 2018 | Volume 9 | Article 1148 190 Tang and Li Acquisition of Classifier Constructions interesting acquisition predictions especially in the context of Deaf children acquiring HKSL in a bilingual fashion. As discussed previously, the basic word order of HKSL is SVO with plain verbs, uninflected spatial and agreement verbs. Child data from Lam (2009) also confirmed an initial SVO order based on plain verbs. As such, it overlaps with the canonical SVO order in Cantonese. Under these circumstances, we predict that the initial word order of constructions involving a classifier predicate in HKSL is SVO, which may actually be doubly enhanced by the “shared” canonical SVO order of Cantonese andHKSL. Language Synthesis will predict that these DHs may initially select those morphosyntactic features pertaining to a SVO order with a lexicalized verb root, but not classifier features or locus features. Under those circumstances, it pertains to a Cantonese or a HKSLbased structure and the latter reflects the word order grammar of plain verbs and sometimes uninflected agreement verbs. As such, Vocabulary Insertion may come from Cantonese and HKSL, or both under code blending conditions. Subsequent acquisition of inflectional morphology for person and spatial agreement with agreement verbs and spatial verbs may trigger Deaf children’s reanalysis of verb morphology, in the sense that HKSL verbs are not totally uninflected, leading to a reformulation of sub-classes of verbs and one of them is classifier constructions constituted by an abstract verb root, classifier features as well as locus features for spatial and subject/object agreement. We predict that classifier features are selected earlier than locus features in the Numeration, because classifier features, said to be akin to gender features in Zwitserlood (2003), are more semantic in nature, unlike locus features which yield R-loci in space for certain formal functions of encoding referential and agreement relations. The selection of such features in the Numeration motivates projections of agreement nodes at Spell-out where the features are merged at the terminal nodes for Spec-Head agreement with the noun referents in the specifier positions, and for spelling out the R-loci of the classifiers for subject/object agreement. In other words, the acquisition of the morphosyntactic properties of classifier constructions, and the schema of the Ground preceding the Figure in classifier constructions trigger Deaf children to develop word order variation, from SVO to OSV or SOV orders. To sum up this section, we examine whether the selection of morphosyntactic features in the Numeration is a potential domain for language interaction to occur in our DHs’ production of HKSL classifier constructions. Lack of inhibition also implies that Vocabulary Insertion as a late phenomenon allows items to come from either Cantonese or HKSL.