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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.
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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.

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

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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

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