Hostname: page-component-797576ffbb-lm8cj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2023-12-02T00:11:27.545Z Has data issue: false Feature Flags: { "corePageComponentGetUserInfoFromSharedSession": true, "coreDisableEcommerce": false, "useRatesEcommerce": true } hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cue conflicts in context: interplay between morphosyntax and discourse context in Danish preschoolers' semantic role assignment*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2015

DITTE BOEG THOMSEN  and
MADS POULSEN
DITTE BOEG THOMSEN*
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
MADS POULSEN
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
*
Address for correspondence: Ditte Boeg Thomsen, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 120, 2300 København S, Denmark; e-mail: prosoditte@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first constructions by following a word-order strategy (Chan, Lieven & Tomasello, 2009; Dittmar, Abbot-Smith, Lieven & Tomasello, 2008; Hakuta, 1982; McDonald, 1989; Slobin & Bever, 1982). In an act-out study, we replicated this finding with Danish preschoolers. However, object-first clauses may be context-sensitive structures, which are infelicitous in isolation. In a second act-out study we presented OVS clauses in supportive and unsupportive discourse contexts and in isolation and found that five- to six-year-olds' OVS comprehension was enhanced in discourse-pragmatically felicitous contexts. Our results extend previous findings of preschoolers' sensitivity to discourse-contextual cues in sentence comprehension (Hurewitz, 2001; Song & Fisher, 2005) to the basic task of assigning agent and patient roles.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 1237 - 1266
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

Many thanks to Katrine Lyskov Jensen for coding reliabilities, and to the Center for Child Language, University of Southern Denmark, for access to their CDS data. Our sincere thanks also go to two anonymous reviewers as well as our action editor at JCL for thorough, inspiring feedback and many valuable suggestions. We are grateful to the children, parents, and teachers in Ellesletten kindergarten for their participation and support.

References

REFERENCES

Allen, S., Skarabela, B. & Hughes, M. (2008). Using corpora to examine discourse effects in syntax. In Behrens, H. (ed.), Corpora in language acquisition research: history, methods, perspectives (pp. 99–137). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Altmann, G. & Steedman, M. (1988). Interaction with context during human sentence processing. Cognition 30, 191–238.Google Scholar
Basbøll, H., Bleses, D., Cadierno, T., Jensen, A., Ladegaard, H. J., Madsen, T. O., Millar, S., Sinha, C. & Thomsen, P. (2002). The Odense language acquisition project. Child Language Bulletin 22(1), 11–2.Google Scholar
Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition model. In MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 3–73). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Boeg Thomsen, D. & Kristensen, L. B. (2015). Context needed: semantic role assignment in Danish children and adults. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 46(2), 159–96.Google Scholar
Chan, A., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2009). Children's understanding of the agent–patient relations in the transitive construction: cross-linguistic comparisons between Cantonese, German, and English. Cognitive Linguistics 20(2), 267–300.Google Scholar
Dik, S. (1997). The theory of functional grammar (ed. Hengeveld, Kees). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Dittmar, M., Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2008). German children's comprehension of word order and case marking in causative sentences. Child Development 79(4), 1152–67.Google Scholar
Grünloh, T., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2011). German children use prosody to identify participant roles in transitive sentences. Cognitive Linguistics 22(2), 393–419.Google Scholar
Hakuta, K. (1982). Interaction between particles and word order in the comprehension and production of simple sentences in Japanese children. Developmental Psychology 18(1), 62–76.Google Scholar
Harder, P. & Poulsen, S. (2001). Editing for speaking: first position, foregrounding and object fronting in Danish and English. In Ikonicitet og struktur (pp. 1–22). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Hurewitz, F. (2001). Developing the ability to resolve syntactic ambiguity. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Ibbotson, P., Theakston, A., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2011). The role of pronoun frames in early comprehension of transitive constructions in English. Language Learning and Development 7, 24–39.Google Scholar
Kaan, E. (2001). Effects of NP type on the resolution of word-order ambiguities. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 30(5), 529–47.Google Scholar
Kaiser, E. & Trueswell, J. C. (2004). The role of discourse context in the processing of a flexible word-order language. Cognition 94, 113–47.Google Scholar
Kidd, E. & Bavin, E. L. (2005). Lexical and referential cues to sentence interpretation: an investigation of children's interpretations of ambiguous sentences. Journal of Child Language 32, 855–76.Google Scholar
Kristensen, L. B., Engberg-Pedersen, E. & Poulsen, M. (2014). Context improves comprehension of fronted objects. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 43(2), 125–40.Google Scholar
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston, A. & Tomasello, M. (2006). The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions. Applied Psycholinguistics 27(3), 403–22.Google Scholar
McDonald, J. (1989). The acquisition of cue-category mappings. In MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 375–396). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Savage, C., Lieven, E., Theakston, A. & Tomasello, M. (2003). Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations: lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children. Developmental Science 6(5), 557–67.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. & Bever, T. G. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: a crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition 12, 229–65.Google Scholar
Song, H. & Fisher, C. (2005). Who's ‘she’? Discourse prominence influences preschoolers' comprehension of pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language 52, 29–57.Google Scholar
Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M. & Logrip, M. L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition 73, 89–134.Google Scholar