German Children’s Comprehension of Word Order and Case Marking in Causative Sentences

Abstract

Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether German children are able to use the grammatical cues of word order and word endings (case markers) to identify agents and patients in a causative sentence and whether they weigh these two cues differently across development. Two-year-olds correctly understood only sentences with both cues supporting each other--the prototypical form. Five-year-olds were able to use word order by itself but not case markers. Only 7-year-olds behaved like adults by relying on case markers over word order when the two cues conflicted. These findings suggest that prototypical instances of linguistic constructions with redundant grammatical marking play a special role in early acquisition, and only later do children isolate and weigh individual grammatical cues appropriately.

Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning

“…the chair pushed the tiger) but that Italians will choose to interpret the sentence according to the animacy cues. Both Competing constructions 5 decisions are consistent with the most reliable cues in the English and Italian language (see also Chan, Lieven & Tomasello, 2009;Dittmar, Abbot-Smith, Lieven & Tomasello, 2008;Ibbotson & Tomasello, 2009). …”

“…In other words, the tasks provided the children with correlated non-structural, as well as structural, cues to meaning. There is substantial evidence that even very young children can use these cues to interpret sentences successfully (see Chan et al, 2009;Dittmar et al, 2008). Children parsing sentences with familiar verbs have a number of advantages over those parsing sentences with Competing constructions 11 novel verbs, including familiarity with typical semantic roles and potential referents, frequency of exposure to particular form-meaning mappings and the availability of wellestablished mappings between word and world knowledge (Bowerman, 1983;Campbell & Tomasello, 2001;Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, Goldberg & Wilson, 1989;Shimpi et al, 2007;Snyder & Stromswold, 1997;Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008).…”

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

“…The processing of the case marking cue is costly for young German children, especially when it is not supported by word order or animacy constraints (cf. Dittmar et al in 2008). Moreover, German relative pronouns have the same form as definite articles, and in our test sentences these two items occur right after one another as den der (who.ACC the.NOM) in object relatives or der den (who.NOM the.ACC) in subject relatives, which further complicates the processing of case marking and the syntactic structure for the German children.…”

“…In object relatives, however, the object precedes the subject. German children have been found to be sensitive to animacy, word order, and case marking as cues for semantic role assignment (e.g., Chan et al 2009;Dittmar et al 2008), and, in the case of object relatives with animate heads, two relevant cues (i.e., animacy and word order) point to the head NP as the agent. When the children encounter the case-marked relative pronoun den 'who.ACC', however, they have to revise their initial analysis.…”

“…In English, only certain pronouns are case-marked, whereas in German, both pronouns and lexical nouns are case-marked. 3 Previous studies have shown that English-speaking children overwhelmingly rely on word order to assign semantic roles, whereas German-speaking children also pay attention to case marking and animacy, and that children are unable to interpret sentences where two cues are put into conflict until they are quite old (e.g., Chan et al 2009;Dittmar et al 2008). It is thus likely that, when processing RCs, the German-speaking children are more sensitive to the constraint of animacy than the English-speaking children, and that they also have more di‰culty with object relatives, where case marking and word order are put into conflict.…”