Skip to main content
×
×
Home

Real-time comprehension of gender and number in four- to seven-year-old children: a study of the relationship between Italian clitic pronouns and visual picture referents*

  • MARCO DISPALDRO (a1), ANNA RUGGIERO (a1) and FRANCESCA SCALI (a1)
Abstract

The gender and number of a direct object clitic pronoun are based on the gender and number of the noun to which it refers. Grammatical gender is an intrinsic property of the lexical item that is independent from the natural sex of referents, whereas number is a non-intrinsic feature of nouns based on the conceptual level of quantity. The aim of this paper is to investigate children's ability in matching Italian direct object clitic pronouns to an inanimate visual referent on the basis of number or gender information. The dependent variables are accuracy and response time. A total of sixty-nine children aged from 4;6 to 7;5 participated. The results show that children are more accurate and faster in selecting the referent when they use number information compared to the condition in which this matching operation is led by gender.

Copyright
Corresponding author
Address for correspondence: Marco Dispaldro, Department of Development Psychology and Socialization, Università degli Studi di Padova, Via Venezia, 8, Padua 35131, Italy. e-mail: marco.dispaldro@unipd.it
Footnotes
Hide All
[*]

This work was supported by a grant from the University of Padova (Assegno di Ricerca Senior 2011). We are grateful to the children who participated in the study and their parents who gave their consent. We thank the schools for their cooperation. We are indebted to Beatrice Benelli for her helpful comments.

Footnotes
References
Hide All
Adani, F., van der Lely, H. K. J., Forgiarini, M. & Guasti, M. T. (2010). Grammatical feature dissimilarities make relative clauses easier: a comprehension study with Italian children. Lingua 120, 2148–66.
Aikhenvald, A. (2000). Classifiers: a typology of noun categorization devices. New York: Oxford University Press.
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (1997). Guidelines for screening infants and children for outer and middle ear disorders, birth through 18 years. In Guidelines for audiologic screening, 1522. Rockville, MD: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S. & Trueswell, J. (2007). Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes 22, 527–65.
Belacchi, C. & Cubelli, R. (2012). Implicit knowledge of grammatical gender in preschool children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 41, 295310.
Bergmann, C., Paulus, M. & Fikkert, P. (2012). Preschoolers’ comprehension of pronouns and reflexives: the impact of the task. Journal of Child Language 39, 777803.
Bertelli, B. & Bilancia, G. (2006). Batterie per la Valutazione dell'Attenzione Uditiva e della Memoria di Lavoro Fonologica nell'Età Evolutiva. Firenze: Giunti OS.
Caprin, C. & Guasti, M. T. (2009). The acquisition of morphosyntax in Italian: a cross-sectional study. Applied Psycholinguistics 30, 2352.
Carminati, M. N. (2005). Processing reflexes of the Feature Hierarchy (Person > Number > Gender) and implications for linguistic theory. Lingua 115, 259–85.
Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crain, S. & Steedman, M. (1985). On not being led up the garden-path: the use of context by psychological parser. In Dowty, D., Kartunnen, L. & Zwicky, A. (eds), Natural language parsing, 320–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Vincenzi, M. (1999). Differences between the morphology of gender and number: evidence from establishing coreferences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 28(5), 537–53.
De Vincenzi, M. & Di Domenico, E. (1999). A distinction among phi-features: the role of gender and number in the retrieval of pronoun antecedents. Italian Journal of Linguistics 11(1), 4174.
Desrochers, A. & Brabant, M. (1995). Interaction entre facteurs phonologiques et sémantiques dans une épreuve de catégorisation lexicale. Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale 49, 240–62.
Dispaldro, M. (2012). Acquisizione della morfologia grammaticale italiana in bambini con sviluppo tipico: una rassegna sugli articoli determinativi, pronomi clitici oggetto e flessione verbale. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 2, 261–87.
Dispaldro, M. & Benelli, B. (2012). Putting singular and plural morphology in context. Journal of Child Language 39, 863–84.
Dispaldro, M., Caselli, M. C. & Stella, G. (2009). Morfologia grammaticale in bambini di 2 anni e mezzo e 3 anni. Psicologia Clinica dello Sviluppo 1, 161–81.
Dispaldro, M., Leonard, L. B. & Deevy, P. (2013). Real-word and nonword repetition in Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment: a study of diagnostic accuracy. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 56, 323–36.
Feigenson, L. & Halberda, J. (2008). Conceptual knowledge increases infants’ memory capacity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(29), 9926–30.
Gernsbacher, M. A. (1989). Mechanisms that improve referential access. Cognition 32, 99156.
Grice, H. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (eds), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3. New York: Academic Press.
Hamburger, H. & Crain, S. (1982). Relative acquisition. In Kuczaj, S. (ed.), Language development, vol. 1: syntax and semantics, 245–74. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Harley, H. & Ritter, E. (2002). Person and number in pronouns: motivating a feature-geometric analysis. Language 78, 482526.
Jakubowicz, C., Nash, L., Rigaut, C. & Gérard, C. L. (1998). Determiners and clitic pronouns in French-speaking children with SLI. Language Acquisition 7, 113–60.
Kail, R. (1994). A method for studying the generalized slowing hypothesis in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37, 418–21.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Korzen, I. (2003), Anafora associativa: aspetti lessicali, testuali e contestuali. in Italia linguistica anno Mille Italia linguistica anno Duemila, 597611. Atti del XXXIV congresso internazionale di studi della Società di linguistica italiana (Firenze, 19–21 ottobre 2000), a cura di N. Maraschio et al., Roma, Bulzoni.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: from intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Li, P., Barner, D., Ogura, T., Yang, S. & Carey, S. (2009). Does the conceptual distinction between singular and plural sets depend on language? Developmental Psychology 45(6), 1644–53.
Meroni, L. (2005). Putting children in context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland.
Mulford, R. (1985). Comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender: semantic versus formal factors. Journal of Child Language 12, 443–53.
Munn, A., Miller, K. & Schmitt, C. (2005). Maximality and plurality in children's interpretation of definite. Paper presented at the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
Nicol, J. L. (1988). Coreference processing during sentence comprehension. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cambridge, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Orsolini, M., Fanari, R. & Di Giacinto, P. (1994). La comprensione dei pronomi clitici nei bambini. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 5, 733–59.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
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, 89134.
Recommend this journal

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this journal to your organisation's collection.

Journal of Child Language
  • ISSN: 0305-0009
  • EISSN: 1469-7602
  • URL: /core/journals/journal-of-child-language
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to? *
×

Metrics

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 5
Total number of PDF views: 48 *
Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 259 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between September 2016 - 13th June 2018. This data will be updated every 24 hours.