Production Before Comprehension in the Emergence of Transitive Constructions in Dutch Child Language

Cannizzaro, Gisi; Hendriks, Petra

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.546495

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Crucially, effects of animacy are not only present in adult speakers but they are operative from early on in language acquisition [ 20 – 24 ]. For instance, when children were taught passive constructions with animate patients such as The baby is being picked up by the girl , they were better able to produce and comprehend passives than children who were taught passives with inanimate patients such as The flower is being picked up by the girl [ 22 , 23 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic

Dolscheid,

Schlenter,

Penke

2024

PLoS ONE

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Animacy plays a key role for human cognition, which is also reflected in the way humans process language. However, while experiments on sentence processing show reliable effects of animacy on word order and grammatical function assignment, effects of animacy on conjoined noun phrases (e.g., fish and shoe vs. shoe and fish) have yielded inconsistent results. In the present study, we tested the possibility that effects of animacy are outranked by reading and writing habits. We examined adult speakers of German (left-to-right script) and speakers of Arabic (right-to-left script), as well as German preschool children who do not yet know how to read and write. Participants were tested in a picture naming task that presented an animate and an inanimate entity next to one another. On half of the trials, the animate entity was located on the left and, on the other half, it was located on the right side of the screen. We found that adult German and Arabic speakers differed in their order of naming. Whereas German speakers were much more likely to mention the animate entity first when it was presented on the left than on the right, a reverse tendency was observed for speakers of Arabic. Thus, in literate adults, the ordering of conjoined noun phrases was influenced by reading and writing habits rather than by the animacy status of an entity. By contrast, pre-literate children preferred to start their utterances with the animate entity regardless of position, suggesting that effects of animacy in adults have been overwritten by effects of literacy.

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