Animacy Constraints on Preschool Children's Acquisition of Syntax

Henrietta Lempert

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Language Development and Disorders Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

LEMPERT, HENRIETrA. Animacy Constraints on Preschool Children's Acquisition of Syntax. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1989, 60, 237-245. In passive sentences such as The cake is being eaten by the clown, the first noun (cake) names the patient (acted-upon) and functions as the subject of the sentence. The present study used passive sentence training to investigate whether patient animacy affects acquisition of the passive construction. In the teaching phase, 32 children ranging in age from 2-6 to 5-3 (mean, 3-8) imitated passive sentence descriptions of pictures and tried to use the form when describing pictures (probes). One group received Animate (A) patient + animate agent passives (The baby is being touched by the frog). A second group received Static Inanimate (SI) patient + animate agent passives (The drum is being touched by the frog). A-patient children produced more passives in the training phase than SI-patient children. In posttraining tests, the former produced more passives to animate patients than the latter and as many passives to inanimate patients as SI-patient children. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the concept of subject is a category that includes animacy as a component.

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References

1975Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories 1988Foundations of Cognitive Grammar 1973Cognitive Development and Acquisition of Language 2009Language Acquisition: The State of the Art 1992Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction 1986Language Learnability and Language Development 1973ON THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF PERCEPTUAL AND SEMANTIC CATEGORIES11This research was supported in part by a grant to the author (under her former name, Eleanor Rosch Heider) from the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry # G67-392, in part by funds made available to the Child Study Center of Brown University from the Grant Foundation and from the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness, National Collaborative Project (Ph-43-68-13), and in part by research funds made available by the University of California at Berkeley (220 Grant #K9PF-429). I wish to thank Karl G. Heider for his help in the field in West Irian (Indonesian New Guinea), Dr. Robert Olton for assistance in carrying out Experiment 3, and Keith Burton, Randy Street, and Peter Lewitt who assisted with Experiment 4. Experiment 4 was performed with Dr. Richard Millward while the author was a research associate at Brown University.1983Language universals and linguistic typology : Syntax and morphology. By Bernard Comrie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Pp. xi, 252. Cloth $25.00, paper $10.00.

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