Signs of early social cognition in children's syntax: The case of joint attention in argument realization in child Inuktitut

Abstract

This study empirically explores the relationship between social cognition and early syntactic productions. It assesses the hypothesis that children's involvement in joint attention influences their choices of argument forms as a result of speakers’ sensitivity to the interlocutor's joint-attentional focus. First, children were predicted to omit more arguments in the presence of joint attention and produce overt arguments in the absence of joint attention. Second, they were predicted to omit arguments or to use demonstratives in the presence of joint attention and to use lexical nouns in the absence of joint attention. The hypotheses were tested against spontaneous speech data from four children acquiring Inuktitut (2;0–3;6). While the first hypothesis was not confirmed, the second hypothesis was supported by a significant interaction between joint attention and the distribution of omitted arguments, demonstratives, and lexical nouns. The results suggest that joint attention is one of the factors that contribute to children's choices of argument form. It is argued that the choices of arguments in the context of joint attention reflect children's ability to evaluate a target referent's accessibility based on the listener's attentional state.