Production Of Word Order Research Articles

Production Before Comprehension in the Emergence of Transitive Constructions in Dutch Child Language.

Although 2-year-old English- or Dutch-speaking children tend to use correct subject-object word order in their own utterances, they appear to make a substantial number of word order errors in their comprehension of other people’s utterances. This pattern of adult-like production but poor comprehension is challenging for linguistic theory. While most approaches to language acquisition explain this pattern from extra-linguistic factors such as task demands, the constraint-based approach Optimality Theory predicts this asymmetry between production and comprehension to arise as a result of the linguistic competition between constraints on word order and animacy. This study tests this prediction by investigating how children’s comprehension and production of word order in transitive constructions develop, and to what degree their comprehension and production are influenced by animacy. Two- and three-year-old Dutch speaking children (n = 32) and adult controls (n = 41) were tested on their comprehension and production of simple transitive sentences, in which the animacy of the grammatical subject and object were manipulated. Comprehension was tested in a picture selection task and a preferential looking task, and production was tested in a parallel sentence elicitation task. Children’s comprehension of transitive sentences in the picture selection task was found to be less accurate than their production of the same sentences in the sentence elicitation task. Their eye gaze in the minimally demanding preferential looking task did not reveal a more advanced understanding of these sentences. In comprehension, children’s response accuracy, and to a lesser extent their eye gaze, was influenced by the animacy of subject and object, providing evidence that their poor comprehension is due to the competition between word order and animacy, as predicted by the constraint-based approach. In contrast, animacy may have a facilitating effect on children’s production of transitive sentences. These findings suggest that the mature form and meaning of a transitive construction are not acquired together. Rather, the form-meaning pairings of transitive constructions seem to arise gradually as the by-product of acquiring the constraint ranking of the grammar. This leads to the gradual alignment of forms and meanings in child language and hence to the emergence of linguistic constructions.

The acquisition of compositional meaning.

How do people create meaning from a string of sounds or pattern of dots? Insights into this process can be obtained from the way children acquire sentence meanings. According to the well-known principle of compositionality, the meaning of an expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and the way they are syntactically combined. However, children frequently seem to ignore syntactic structure in their sentence interpretations, suggesting that syntax is merely one of the sources of information constraining meaning and does not have a special status. A fundamental assumption in the argument in favour of compositionality is that speakers and listeners generally agree upon the meanings of sentences. Remarkably, however, children as listeners do not always understand what they are able to produce as speakers, and vice versa. For example, children's production of word order appears to develop ahead of their comprehension of word order in the acquisition of languages like English and Dutch. Such production-comprehension asymmetries are not uncommon in child language and motivate a view of compositionality as a principle pertaining to the result of perspective taking, and of meaning composition as a process of speaker-listener coordination. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition'.

Comprehension and production of word order by 2-year-old children

This study is an attempt to test the predictions made by Chapman and Miller (1975) that (1) productive control of the subject-object relation exceeds comprehension performance based on syntactic form alone, and (2) less linguistically advanced children decode subject-object relations lacking referential support on the basis of a lexical-semantic strategy that assigns animate nouns to subject status and inanimate nouns to object status. Ten children, divided on the basis of mean length of utterance into two groups (average MLU of 2.45 and 3.75, respectively), participated. Comprehension and production of subject-order in semantically reversible sentences with inanimate or animate subject and object was assessed using an object manipulation format. The results obtained provided partial support for the predictions made by Chapman and Miller (1975). The proposed lexical-semantic strategy for comprehension was not employed by the subjects of the present study; these children appeared to use a probable event strategy in determining subject-object assignment. Although productive control of the ordering of subject and object was found to exceed comprehension performance, the facilitating effect of visual cues available during the production trials likely contributed to the observed differences in performance between the two tasks.

Comprehension and Production of Word Order in Stage I

ROBERTS, KENNETH. Comprehension and Production of Word Order in Stage 1. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 443-449. The notion that partial control of full agent-action-patient word order in comprehension may precede its production was examined. 10 children, 8 females and 2 males, ranging in age from 23 to 31 months, carried out actions specified by the verbs kiss, hug, and tickle in reversible active sentences. Sentences were presented to a triad of listeners consisting of a test child, a familiar adult caretaker, and a familiar older child. Latency of responding was the measure of comprehension. Production testing consisted of verbal responses to photographs depicting the comprehension sentences. 6 early Stage I children (MLU = 1.00-1.50) comprehended in the context of only 1 or sometimes 2 verbs but did not correctly produce the sentences in these verb contexts. 3 late Stage I children (MLU = 1.50-2.00) comprehended word order in the context of all test verbs. These results agreed with previous studies of late Stage I children using object manipulation tasks. It appears that (a) word order comprehension is present in early Stage I and is verb specific, gradually expanding verb by verb to apply across a wider scope of verbs; (b) response latency is a valid measure of comprehension; and (c) partial comprehension precedes production.

Comprehension and Production of Word Order in Stage I

Comprehension and Production of Word Order in Stage I