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Local and topological processing in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Michèle Kail  and
Agnès Charvillat
Michèle Kail*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale associé au C.N.R.S., Paris
Agnès Charvillat*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale associé au C.N.R.S., Paris
*
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, 28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris, France.
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, 28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris, France.
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Abstract

This cross-linguistic study investigates the relative importance of validity in terms of the strengths of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children (4; 6–6; 6). The notion of cue cost refers to the distinction between local and topological processing types. Choices of the agent (cue strength) and latencies (cue cost) were collected through the acting out of sentences containing different syntactic cues. These cues (word order, clitic pronoun, verbal agreement plus accusative preposition a in Spanish) are ordered on a continuum from the most topological (word order) to the most local (preposition a). The analysis of cue strengths reveals that, while for French children a linguistic cue is all the stronger the more topological it is (verbal agreement < clitic pronoun < word order), for Spanish children a cue is all the stronger the more local it is (word order < clitic pronoun < verbal agreement < preposition a). The fact that Spanish children's latencies are always shorter (2150 msec) than those of French children (3110 msec) must be related to the effect of the preposition a which permits efficient role assignments with minimal cost. These results stress the importance of locality in sentence processing. On the other hand, a comparison with our similar adult cross-linguistic data demonstrates that the impact of cue cost changes over time.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , October 1988 , pp. 637 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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Footnotes

*

The authors wish to thank the teachers and children of kindergarten and primary schools Emile Bouton in Paris and Principe de Asturias in Madrid. We would also like to thank M. Léveillé and Inès Sanchez y Lopez for their valuable help in constructing the linguistic material and collecting the data. We are grateful to B. MacWhinney for his careful reading and criticism of this manuscript.

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