The development of sentence interpretation in Hungarian

Abstract

We conducted three experiments on sentence understanding by Hungarian preschool children. According to the competition model, the listener uses verbal cues in a probabilistic manner to make judgments concerning the grammatical roles of the different noun phrases in a sentence. The order in which children develop control of these cues is said to depend on cue validity. The cues manipulated in these experiments included case marking, word order, animacy, stress, phonological detectability, and person of the possessor. The studies examined the impact of these cues on the choice of an agent. The results were well predicted by the competition model. Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that ungrammatical sentences are processed in ways similar to comparable grammatical sentences, thus supporting the ecological validity of the experimental method and of previous research based on the use of this method. There was also evidence for the use in Hungarian of (1) a first-noun-as-agent strategy, (2) a preverbal-definite-noun-as-agent strategy, and (3) a strategy of choosing the agent as the noun closest to ego. Although case marking was the strongest cue at all ages, its strength in Experiment 1 at the youngest ages was less than what would be predicted by cue validity alone. Experiments 2 and 3 indicate that this delay in acquisition may result from certain problems with phonological detectability of the accusative suffix in Hungarian. It is proposed that cues cannot be acquired unless they are detectable. Together with cue validity, the notion of cue detectability allows us to account properly for the cross-linguistic data currently available on the development of comprehension strategies for simple sentences. In the discussion section, we consider implications of the competition model for the general theory of cognitive development.