Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-zzw9c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-04-17T17:07:51.575Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The effect of animacy on children's noun order in verb-final sequences*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Henrietta Lempert
Henrietta Lempert*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1A1, Canada.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examined whether pragmatic ordering factors account for the apparent preference for ANIMATE-INANIMATE (AI) order in passive and active sentences. If so, learning noun order relations in NNV sequences with an INANIMATE PATIENT + ANIMATE AGENT (It's the drum the boy plays) should be more difficult than with an ANIMATE PATIENT + ANIMATE AGENT (It's the girl the boy chases). Seventy children aged 3;0 to 5;3 were trained with either AAV or IAV exemplars, and then tested for their noun order in NNV utterances when describing animate agent + animate patient and animate agent + inanimate patient pictures. As judged by post-training performance, AAV and AIV training had comparable effects at age three, but IAV resulted in better learning at ages four and five. It was argued that the latter benefited from the correlation between animacy and subject in English sentences.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , October 1988 , pp. 551 - 566
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Grant No. 410–85–0068. I would like to thank the staff of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute Early Learning Center, George Brown College Early Learning Center, Seneca College Early Learning Center, Shaughnessy Day Care Center, and Margaret Fletcher Day Care Center. Thanks are due to Rosa Villani and Rochelle Muller for their assistance with data collection, the anonymous reviewers for their many constructive comments, and most of all, our young participants and their parents.

References

REFERENCES

Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1979). The functionalist approach to the acquisition of grammar. In Ochs, E. & Schiefflin, B. (eds), Developmental pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1982). Functionalist approaches to grammar. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art. New York: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Bates, E., MacWhinney, B., Caselli, C., Devescovi, A., Natale, F. & Venza, V. (1984). A crosslinguistic study of the development of sentence interpretation strategies. Child Development 55. 341–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloom, L., Lightbown, P. & Hood, L. (1975). Structure and variation in child language. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. No. 160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18. 355–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. K. & Warren, R. K. (1985). Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation. Cognition 21. 47–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carroll, J. B. (1958). Process and content in psycholinguistics. In Glaser, R. (ed.), Current trends in the description and analysis of behavior. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1981). Language universals and language typology: syntax and morpholgy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Costerman, J. & Hupet, M. (1977). The other side of Johnson-Laird's interpretation of the passive voice. British Journal of Psychology 68. 107–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Villiers, J. G. (1980). The process of rule learning in child speech: a new look. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language. Vol. 2. New York: Gardner.Google Scholar
Dewart, M. H. (1979). Role of animate and inanimate nouns in determining sentence voice. British Journal of Psychology 70. 135–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flores d'Arcais, G. B. (1975). Some perceptual determinants of sentence construction. In Flores d'Arcais, G. B. (ed)., Studies in perception. Milan: Martelli-Guinti.Google Scholar
Givon, T. (1984). Syntax. A functional-typological introduction. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Greenspan, S. L. & Segal, E. M. (1984). Reference and comprehension: a topic-comment analysis of sentence-picture verification. Cognitive Psychology 16. 556–604.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harris, M. (1978). Noun animacy and the passive: a developmental approach. Quarterly Journal of Psychology 39. 495–504.Google Scholar
Hinton, G. E. (1981). Implementing semantic networks in parallel hardware. In Hinton, G. E. & Anderson, J. A. (eds), Parallel models of associative memory. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hupet, M. & Le Bouedec, B. (1975). Definiteness and voice in the interpretation of active and passive sentences. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 27. 323–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, C. T., Thompson, J. G. & Baldwin, J. H. (1973). The reconstructive process in sentence memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12. 205–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1968). The choice of the passive voice. British Journal of Psychology 59. 7–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lempert, H. (1978). Extrasyntactic factors affecting passive sentence comprehension by young children. Child Development 49. 694–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lempert, H. (1984). Topic as starting point for syntax. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 49. No. 209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lempert, H. (1987). Learning passive sentences: The role of animacy, salience, givenness, and transitivity. Paper presented at the 12th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Acquisition, Boston MA.Google Scholar
Lempert, H. & Kinsbourne, M. (1978). Children's comprehension of word order: a developmental investigation. Child Development 49. 1235–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lempert, H. & Kinsbourne, M. (1980). Preschool children's sentence comprehension strategies with respect to word order. Journal of Child Language 7. 371–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Luszcz, M. A. & Bacharach, V. R. (1983). The emergence of communicative competence: development of conversational topics. Journal of Child Language 10. 623–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. (1982). The child's construction of grammatical categories. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Olson, D. R. & Filby, N. (1972). On the comprehension of active and passive sentences. Cognitive Psychology 3. 361–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1981). The origin of grammatical encoding. In Deutsch, W. (ed.), The child's construction of language. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Strohner, H. & Nelson, K. E. (1974). The young child's development of sentence comprehension: influence of event probability, nonverbal context, syntactic form and strategies. Child Development 45. 567–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tannenbaum, P. H. & Williams, F. (1968). Generation of active and passive sentences as a function of subject or object focus. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 7. 246–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, E. A. & Rommetveit, R. (1967). Experimental manipulation of the production of the active and passive voice in children. Language and Speech 10. 169–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tversky, B. & Hemenway, K. (1984). Objects, parts, and categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113. 169–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed