Production Before Comprehension in the Emergence of Transitive Constructions in Dutch Child Language

Frontiers in Psychology
Gisi Cannizzaro, Petra Hendriks

Abstract

Although 2-year-old English- or Dutch-speaking children tend to use correct subject-object word order in their own utterances, they appear to make a substantial number of word order errors in their comprehension of other people's utterances. This pattern of adult-like production but poor comprehension is challenging for linguistic theory. While most approaches to language acquisition explain this pattern from extra-linguistic factors such as task demands, the constraint-based approach Optimality Theory predicts this asymmetry between production and comprehension to arise as a result of the linguistic competition between constraints on word order and animacy. This study tests this prediction by investigating how children's comprehension and production of word order in transitive constructions develop, and to what degree their comprehension and production are influenced by animacy. Two- and three-year-old Dutch speaking children (n = 32) and adult controls (n = 41) were tested on their comprehension and production of simple transitive sentences, in which the animacy of the grammatical subject and object were manipulated. Comprehension was tested in a picture selection task and a preferential looking task, and production was teste...Continue Reading

References

Mar 29, 2001·Psychological Science·Z M Griffin, K Bock
Apr 28, 2006·Psychological Review·Franklin ChangKathryn Bock
Aug 18, 2006·Psychological Science·Yael GertnerJulie Eisengart
Dec 1, 1973·Journal of Psycholinguistic Research·J G de Villiers, P A de Villiers
Jun 26, 2020·Frontiers in Psychology·Mark J KorandaMaryellen C MacDonald

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