Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections

Slobin, Dan I.; Bever, Thomas G.

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(82)90033-6

Cited by 360 publications

(265 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Kim, O'Grady, & Cho, 1995;Y.-j. Kim, 1997;Slobin & Bever, 1982). Native Korean-speaking children start producing Korean case markers at a quite early age.…”

Section: Previous Acquisition Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unveiling linguistic competence by facilitating performance

Kim

2015

Language Acquisition

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This dissertation looks at the question of whether the source of language learners' poor performance is a deficit in knowledge or a performance problem. Two constructions are examined, both being cases in which learners have been reported to show deficits in linguistic competence: (1) Korean OSV (e.g., Elmo-lul Big Bird-ka anayo. 'Elmo, Big Bird is hugging.'), where knowledge of both scrambling and case markers is necessary for target performance; (2) the English tough construction (English TC; e.g., The doll i is easy to see e i ), where knowledge of tough movement is necessary for target performance (i.e., the object interpretation only). If poor performance (operationalized as chance performance or below) is due to a failure to apply knowledge rather than the absence of knowledge, good performance (i.e., significantly-above-chance performance) should emerge with the effective manipulation of non-grammatical factors to facilitate learners' application of knowledge. I experimentally tested this hypothesis in two studies, employing both (a) sentence-internal manipulations and (b) sentence-external manipulations. The Korean OSV study collected data from Korean Heritage children (KHC) (n = 31) as well as two groups of native Korean-speaking children, a younger group (n = 21) and an older group (n = 23). The English TC study collected data from native Korean-speaking adult L2ers of English (n = 49) and native Korean-speaking child L2ers of English (n = 30), along with adult native speaker controls (n = 10). Study 1:Knowledge of scrambling and case in Korean was assessed, first, via picture-selection comprehension tasks that (a) manipulated the prosodic salience of case markers and (b) manipulated context to make the direct object a natural scrambled topic, and, second, via a production task eliciting case markers. The results suggested three possible sources of poor performance. Many participants showed good performance only in the manipulation conditions (vs. the baseline condition), suggesting that their poor performance in the baseline condition could be due to a performance problem (e.g., perception failure or a heavy processing load). Some participants showed absence or errors of case in the production task, which suggests that their poor performance could come from a deficit in knowledge of case or from a mapping problem between a Case feature and case morphology. Comparisons between the Korean and the English TVJT results revealed a strong subject-interpretation bias in both languages for lower proficiency adult and child L2ers but only in Korean for higher proficiency adult L2ers, which suggests that L2ers do transfer their L1 subject interpretation but can subsequently unlearn it--despite an (ostensible) absence of negative evidence. However, (most of) the high proficiency adult L2ers still showed (below) chance performance in the error-inducing conditions, which suggests that non-grammatical factors can conceal knowledge of the English TC that some of them actually have.The two studies show that p...

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“…Kim, O'Grady, & Cho, 1995;Y.-j. Kim, 1997;Slobin & Bever, 1982). Native Korean-speaking children start producing Korean case markers at a quite early age.…”

Section: Previous Acquisition Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unveiling linguistic competence by facilitating performance

Kim

2015

Language Acquisition

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“…Researchers have found that the order in which cues to linguistic roles are initially acquired by children is strongly predicted by overall validity (Bates, MacWhinney, Caselli, Devescovi, Natale, & Venza, 1984;MacWhinney, 1978;MacWhinney, Pleh, & Bates, 1985;McDonald, 1986;Slobin & Bever, 1982;Sokolov, 1988). However, evidence for the importance of conflict validity during later learning has been reported for Dutch (McDonald, 1986), French (Kail, 1989), and Hebrew (Sokolov, 1988).…”

Section: The Competition Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Levels of learning: A comparison of concept formation and language acquisition

McDonald

MacWhinney

1991

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…Some previous work has shown that the rapid and accurate acquisition of the link between a structure and its meaning is facilitated when the structure contains a local cue that is frequent, reliable (regularly associated with the presence of a particular meaning) and/or salient (perceivable in the speech stream, see Bates & MacWhinney, 1987, for a fuller description of reliability, frequency and perceivability). For example, learners of languages that mark semantic roles using a reliable, salient local cue such as a direct object inflection (e.g., Turkish and Serbo-Croatian) seem to learn the links between surface syntactic structure and semantic roles earlier than learners of languages that mark them with distributed cues such as subject-verb agreement and word order (English and Italian; Slobin & Bever, 1982) (for other work on the role of local cues see Dittmar, Abbot-Smith, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2008;Lindner, 2003). More importantly, Fisher (1996) found that 3-and 4-year-old children interpreted the syntactic subject in to datives (e.g., she's blicking it to her) as referring to the more causal or agentive participant in a transfer event more often than in sentences using the preposition from (e.g., she's blicking it from her), even though the only lexical cue to the identity of the agent was the identity of the preposition (see also Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz, & Gleitman, 1994, for a similar finding).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Role of Syntactic Structure in Children's Sentence Comprehension: Evidence From the Dative

Rowland¹,

Noble

2010

Language Learning and Development

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Research has demonstrated that young children quickly acquire knowledge of how the structure of their language encodes meaning. However, this work focused on structurally simple transitives. The present studies investigate childrens' comprehension of the double object dative (e.g., I gave him the box) and the prepositional dative (e.g., I gave the box to him). In Study 1, 3-and 4-year-olds correctly preferred a transfer event reading of prepositional datives with novel verbs (e.g., I'm glorping the rabbit to the duck) but were unable to interpret double object datives (e.g., I'm glorping the duck the rabbit). In Studies 2 and 3, they were able to interpret both dative types when the nouns referring to the theme and recipient were canonically marked (Study 2; I'm glorping the rabbit to Duck) and, to a lesser extent, when they were distinctively but noncanonically marked (Study 3: I'm glorping rabbit to the Duck). Overall, the results suggest that English children have some verb-general knowledge of how dative syntax encodes meaning by 3 years of age, but successful comprehension may require the presence of additional surface cues.

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Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections

Cited by 360 publications

References 12 publications

Unveiling linguistic competence by facilitating performance

Unveiling linguistic competence by facilitating performance

Levels of learning: A comparison of concept formation and language acquisition

The Role of Syntactic Structure in Children's Sentence Comprehension: Evidence From the Dative

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