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Animacy effects on the production of object-dislocated descriptions by Catalan-speaking children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2000

MERCÉ PRAT-SALA ,
RICHARD SHILLCOCK  and
ANTONELLA SORACE
MERCÉ PRAT-SALA
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Plymouth
RICHARD SHILLCOCK
Affiliation:
Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh
ANTONELLA SORACE
Affiliation:
Department of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh
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Abstract

This paper presents an experiment that examined two related questions. First, it examined the effects of animacy on the production of different syntactic structures and word orders by Catalan-speaking children. Secondly, it explored the relationship between age and the production of different syntactic structures by these children. The results of a picture description experiment run with eighty Catalan-speaking children aged 4; 11 to 11; 11 show that participants tended to produce more object- dislocated descriptions when the patient was animate than when the patient was inanimate. The results also show that while the dislocation of object clauses is a construction already consolidated at 5; 0, the passive structure is a construction still not fully acquired at 11; 0. A comparison between the results obtained in the present experiment with existing results from similar experiments with English-speaking children shows that there is a cross-language difference in the age at which children start producing passive clauses. We argue that frequency of exposure to a particular syntactic structure is an important factor that contributes to the acquisition of that syntactic structure. We also suggest that the effects of animacy on the production of object-dislocated descriptions can be explained by means of conceptual and lexical accessibility.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , February 2000 , pp. 97 - 117
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are very grateful to the staff and children of the primary school ‘Sagrat Cor’ in Monistrol de Montserrat (Barcelona) for their collaboration in this study. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous version of this article. The first author acknowledges the ESRC grant No. R00429434261. A preliminary version of some of the experimental results presented in this paper was presented at the 3rd GALA Conference on ‘Language acquisition: knowledge representation and processing’, Edinburgh, 1997.