Children's hypotheses about the animacy of actor and object nouns

Abstract

This experiment investigated whether 3 and 4 year old children show systematic preferences for animate or inanimate nouns to function as actors and objects of simple active and passive voice sentences. The children had to choose a suitable referent for a nonsense word used in a sentence. They made their selection from an array of toys, the names of which were either animate or inanimate nouns. The children were divided into two groups according to their performance on a pretest of their comprehension of passive voice sentences. Children who did not understand the passive on the pretest showed a strong preference for an animate first noun and inanimate second noun regardless of sentence voice. Children who understood the passive showed this preference only on active voice sentences. These results suggest a relationship between the child's syntactic knowledge and semantic expectations.