Effects of Event Probability and Animateness on Children's Comprehension of Active and Passive Sentences

Converging and competing cues in the acquisition of syntactic structures: the conjoined agent intransitive

“…In summary, it is clear from our findings that the degree to which children aged three are prepared to accept a conjoined agent intransitive as a description of a non-causal scene is influenced by the animacy of the entities in the conjoined agent and the degree to which they map onto the typical form–function mappings associated with causal and non-causal scenes. This is in line with previous findings that the animacy of participants influences children's interpretations of the simple transitive structure (e.g., Chan et al , 2009; Childers & Echols, 2004; Corrigan, 1988; Koff et al , 1980), suggesting that typical form–function mappings are an important source of information used by children when interpreting sentence structure (see also Brandt, Kidd, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2009, for the role of animacy in interpreting object relatives).…”

“…The low frequency of AN-AN transitives in the input (6·1%; Theakston et al , 2012) coupled with the low frequency of conjoined agent intransitives in the input may mean that the presence of two animate nouns is not specifically associated with either structure, thus providing a less reliable cue to meaning. A previous study by Koff et al (1980) found that children were less able to comprehend and act out transitive sentences with two animate participants than transitive sentences with one animate and one inanimate participant. Perhaps animate–animate structures are more challenging due to the low frequency of such animacy configurations in the input.…”

“…A number of studies have indicated that children are sensitive to animacy as a cue to sentence interpretation, and that particular animacy configurations make structures easier to comprehend. Koff, Kramer, and Fowles (1980) reported that when acting out sentences containing known nouns and verbs, preschool children had more difficulty with sentences containing two animate entities (e.g., The brown cow jumps on the white cow ), than sentences with one animate and one inanimate entity (e.g., The girl pushes the table ). Corrigan (1988) reported a similar finding, that regardless of the animacy of the object, children aged two to four years were better able to locate the actor in a transitive sentence if it was an animate rather than an inanimate entity.…”

“Whatdunit?” Developmental changes in children's syntactically based sentence interpretation abilities and sensitivity to word order

“…Even very young toddlers seem to show sensitivity to a variety of cues as they try to make linguistic sense of what they hear. For example, young toddlers appear to use animate nouns to infer the agent (Bates et al, 1984; Corrigan & Odya-Weis, 1985; Koff, Kramer, & Fowles, 1980; Thal & Flores, 2001) and inanimate nouns to infer the patient (Corrigan & Odya-Weis, 1985) in SVO sentences.…”

Children’s acquisition of word order depends on syntactic/semantic role: Evidence from adjective-noun order

“…That is, a noun preceding a verb in English is almost always the subject of the verb or the agent of the action. In fact, English constructions in which this basic order is not followed are often notoriously difficult for children, such as Object-Verb- er compounds like can opener (Clark, Hecht, & Mulford, 1986) and passive sentences (Koff, Kramer, & Fowles, 1980; Lempert, 1978). Thus, by focusing on verb clauses, it is not clear whether the observed changes in children’s usage between two and four years is due to increasing sensitivity to syntactic frames alone (Mintz, 2003), increasing sensitivity to semantic/syntactic roles (Braine & Brooks, 1995), or both (Tomasello, 2003).…”