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

Abstract

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.

A Constructivist Account of Child Language Acquisition

“…12 The findings of Rowland et al's (2012) priming study suggest that, by 3;8, children's knowledge of the PO-and DO-dative constructions is as abstract as adults', and that young children do not show a lexical boost when the same verb is used in the prime and target sentence. However, this study (unlike Rowland and Noble, 2010) does not address the issue of whether children or adults show better performance when they are potentially able to use a lexical frame such I'm [X]ing the [Y] to [NAME]; indeed, participants hardly ever used pronouns in this study. 13 This study reported a "lexical-boost" effect whereby the youngest children showed priming only when the prime sentence used a slot-and-frame schema -It got [X]ed by it -that could also be used to produce the target sentence.…”

“…For example, Conwell and Demuth (2007: Experiment 2) found that novel verbs taught in the PO-dative were extended to the DO-dative only 8% of the time. Exactly as for the transitive construction, Rowland and Noble (2010) found that children showed significantly better (comprehension) performance for prototypical datives that were consistent with possible slot-and-frame patterns (e.g., I'm [X]ing the [Y] to [NAME]). 12 Finally, via this process of gradual abstraction, children arrive at abstract PO-and DO-dative constructions whose slots exhibit probabilistic semantic and -in some cases -phonological properties.…”

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

“…Frog; see Rowland & Noble, 2011, for evidence that this solves the problem in an analogous task). Thirty-three English-speaking children took part; fourteen 3-year-olds (mean age = 3;7, range = 2;5 to 4;1) and nineteen 4-year-olds (age = 4;5, range = 4;2 to 4;10).…”

Avoiding dative overgeneralisation errors: semantics, statistics or both?

“…There is some suggestion that the DO-dative appears earlier, though this likely largely reflects the use of semi-productive chunks such as Gimme X. A recent forced-choice comprehension study (Rowland & Noble, 2010) found that 3-4 year-olds demonstrated more robust performance with PO-than DO-datives, but could still correctly interpret DO-dative sentences when given additional cues (e.g., when the recipient was a proper noun). 2.…”