scholarly journals Development of Dutch children’s comprehension of subject and object wh-questions

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 129-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris Strangmann ◽  
Anneke Slomp ◽  
Angeliek van Hout
Keyword(s):  
Selection Task ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Referent Selection ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Dutch Children

While Dutch welke ‘which’-questions are structurally ambiguous, number agreement cues can disambiguate them. Despite such agreement cues, children misinterpret object questions as subject questions (Metz et al. 2010, 2012; Schouwenaars et al. 2014). We investigated if adding another cue, specifically, topicality in a discourse context, helps the interpretation of which-questions in two groups of Dutch children (5;5, n = 15 and 8;5, n = 21). Using a referent-selection task, we manipulated number on the verb and postverbal NP to create unambiguous wh-questions. Moreover, the questions were preceded by a discourse which established a topic, relating either to the wh-referent or the postverbal NP referent. Nevertheless, both 5- and 8-year-olds misinterpreted object questions as subject questions, ignoring the number and topicality cues to resolve the (local) ambiguity of which-questions. Our results confirm the effect of a subject-first bias in children’s interpretation of wh-questions. We conclude that topicality, in combination with number agreement, is not strong enough to overrule this subject-first bias.

scholarly journals Resumptive elements aid comprehension of object relative clauses: evidence from Persian

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 937-948 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAMIN RAHMANY ◽  
HAMIDEH MAREFAT ◽  
EVAN KIDD
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Selection Task ◽  
Facilitative Effect ◽  
Thematic Role ◽  
Role Assignment ◽  
Referent Selection ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Object Relative ◽  
Local Cues

ABSTRACTThe current study investigated the role of resumption in the interpretation of object relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Sixty-four (N=64) children aged 3;2–6;0 (M=4;8) completed a referent selection task that tested their comprehension of subject RCs, gapped object RCs, and object RCs containing either a resumptive pronoun or an object clitic. The results showed that the presence of a resumptive element (pronoun or clitic) had a facilitative effect on children's processing of object RCs. In both cases object RCs with resumptive elements were interpreted more accurately than gapped subject and object RCs, suggesting that resumptive elements ease processing burden in syntactically complex contexts because they provide local cues to thematic role assignment.

scholarly journals German children’s processing of morphosyntactic cues in wh-questions

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (6) ◽  
pp. 1279-1318 ◽  
Author(s):  
ATTY SCHOUWENAARS ◽  
PETRA HENDRIKS ◽  
ESTHER RUIGENDIJK
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Selection Task ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Garden Path ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
German Children

ABSTRACTTwo experiments investigated the effects of case and verb agreement cues on the comprehension and production of which-questions in typically developing German children (aged 7–10) and adults. Our aims were to determine (a) whether they make use of morphosyntactic cues (case marking and verb agreement) for the comprehension of which-questions, (b) how these questions are processed, and (c) whether the presence and position of morphosyntactic cues available for the listener influence the speaker’s production of which-questions. Performance on a picture selection task with eye tracking shows that children with low working memory make less use of morphosyntactic cues than children with high working memory and adults when interpreting object questions. Gaze data of both groups reveal garden-path effects and revisions for object and passive questions, which can be explained by a constraint-based account. Furthermore, children’s difficulties with object questions are related to the type of disambiguation cue. In a question elicitation task with patient-initial items, children overall prefer production of passives, whereas adults’ productions depend on the availability of disambiguation cues for the listener.

Subject interpretation of object questions by Dutch 5-year-olds

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 97-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marijke Metz ◽  
Angeliek van Hout ◽  
Heather van der Lely
Keyword(s):  
Number Agreement ◽  
Test Items ◽  
Question Types ◽  
Wh Questions

We investigated the interpretation of Dutch wie ‘who’- and welke ‘which’-questions in Dutch 5-year-olds. In contrast to wh-questions in many languages, Dutch wh-questions are structurally ambiguous between a subject and an object reading. We used test items in which the ambiguity was resolved by number agreement. The participants (N = 20) heard a wh-question and had to choose the corresponding picture out of a set of four; this method revealed their interpretation as either subject or object question. The results show that 5-year-olds interpret all question types as subject questions, independent of the agreement cues. Thus, they effectively do not attend to the agreement mismatch that this interpretation causes for the object questions. These errors suggest an overly strong subject-first bias in 5-year-olds. We argue that number agreement is too weak a cue for children to overcome this tendency.

Early Understanding of Subject and Object Wh-Questions

Infancy ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Seidl ◽  
George Hollich ◽  
Peter W. Jusczyk
Keyword(s):  
Subject And Object ◽  
Wh Questions

Interference in the production of Italian subject and object wh-questions

2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARIA TERESA GUASTI ◽  
CHIARA BRANCHINI ◽  
FABRIZIO AROSIO
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Verb Phrase ◽  
Avoidance Strategies ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
The Subject

ABSTRACTWe investigate the production of subject and object who- and which-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that different avoidance strategies are attempted by the child to get around this interference, all boiling down to a double checking of agreement: AGREE and Spec-Head. Then, we evaluate our approach from a cross-linguistic perspective and offer an account of the differences observed across early languages. Because our account seems to call both for a grammatical and a processing explanation, we end with a critical discussion of this dichotomy.

scholarly journals Patterns of Mutual Exclusivity and Retention: A Study of Monolingual and Bilingual 2-Year-Olds

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joscelin Rocha-Hidalgo ◽  
Mary Feller ◽  
Olivia A. Blanchfield ◽  
Sarah Kucker ◽  
Rachel Barr
Keyword(s):  
Retention Test ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Forced Choice ◽  
Selection Task ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Mutual Exclusivity ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Referent Selection ◽  
Cognitive Challenge ◽  
As If

When children learn their native language, they tend to treat objects as if they only have one label—a principle known as mutual exclusivity (ME). However, bilingual children are faced with a different cognitive challenge—they need to learn to associate two labels with one object. In the present study, we compared bilingual and monolingual 24-month-olds' performance on a challenging and semi-naturalistic forced-choice referent selection task and retention test. Overall, both language groups used ME at similar rates but differed on retention. Specifically, while monolingual infants showed some retention, bilingual infants performed at chance and significantly worse than their monolingual peers.

scholarly journals Reflexive anaphors and association with focus

2015 ◽  
pp. 376
Author(s):  
Giorgos Spathas
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Wh Questions

This paper investigates the behavior of the reflexive anaphor herself in English in conditions of narrow focus and argues in favor of (i) a theory of focus that is based around the notion of Current Question, and (ii) a theory of association with focus that assumes that some, but not all, focus associating operators exhibit conventional association; i.e. some, but not all, focus associating operators have lexical semantics that directly encode association with focus. The argument is based on the independently motivated observation that there exist asymmetries with regard to disjoint reference effects between subject and object wh-questions.

scholarly journals Children mix direct and indirect speech: evidence from pronoun comprehension

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 843-866 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANZISKA KÖDER ◽  
EMAR MAIER
Keyword(s):  
Selection Task ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Referent Selection ◽  
Third Person

ABSTRACTThis study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, “I get the football”) and indirect speech (Elephant said that he gets the football), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we hypothesize that the direct–indirect distinction is acquired relatively late. We also predict more mistakes for third person pronouns compared to first and second person pronouns. We tested 136 Dutch-speaking children between four and twelve in a referent selection task and found that children interpret pronouns in direct speech predominantly as in indirect speech, supporting our hypothesis about a late acquisition of the direct–indirect distinction. In addition, we found differences between I, you, and he that deviate from a simple first and second vs. third person split. We discuss our results in the light of cross-linguistic findings of direct–indirect mixing.

scholarly journals The advantage of story-telling: children's interpretation of reported speech in narratives

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 541-557
Author(s):  
FRANZISKA KÖDER ◽  
EMAR MAIER
Keyword(s):  
Information Transmission ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Transmission Setting ◽  
Referent Selection ◽  
Processing Effort ◽  
Dutch Children ◽  
Speech Reports

AbstractChildren struggle with the interpretation of pronouns in direct speech (Ann said, “I get a cookie”), but not in indirect speech (Ann said that she gets a cookie) (Köder & Maier, 2016). Yet children's books consistently favor direct over indirect speech (Baker & Freebody, 1989). To reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings, we hypothesize that the poor performance found by Köder and Maier (2016) is due to the information-transmission setting of that experiment, and that a narrative setting facilitates children's processing of direct speech. We tested 42 Dutch children (4;1–7;2) and 20 adults with a modified version of Köder and Maier's referent selection task, where participants interpret speech reports in an interactive story book. Results confirm our hypothesis: children are much better at interpreting pronouns in direct speech in such a narrative setting than they were in an information-transmission setting. This indicates that the pragmatic context of reports affects their processing effort.

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