1
Abstract ... 3
Introduction: aims and topic of the thesis ... 5
Chapter I: General remarks on German grammar ... 13
1.1. Word order and verb position ... 13
1.2. General remarks on German morphology ... 15
1.3. Number information: Plural system and verbal flexion ... 16
1.4. Case marking ... 18
Chapter 2: Acquisition of grammatical categories and syntactic skills in German ... 21
2.1. The development of number ... 22
2.2. The development of the verb flexion and subject-verb agreement ... 23
2.3. The development of case marking ... 24
2.4. The development of syntactic skills: How children come to master sentences ... 26
Chapter 3: Other relevant factors in sentence comprehension ... 29
3.1. Animacy: a lexical-semantic cue to sentence interpretation ... 29
3.2. The role of grammatical skills, working memory and attention inhibition abilities in sentence comprehension ... 31
Chapter 4: The Current study ... 35
4.1. Methods ... 40
4.2. Participants ... 41
4.3. Materials ... 42
4.4. Procedure ... 49
4.5. Testing attention inhibition abilities: Flanker task ... 52
2
4.7. Testing grammatical skills: TROG-D ... 56
Chapter 5: Results ... 59 Chapter 6: Discussion ... 75 Conclusions ... 83 Appendix ... 85 References ... 95 Aknowledgments... 107
3
Abstract
How do children come to master sentences? The key to sentence comprehension is the so-called thematic role assignment, a process that allows us to figure out the “who does what to whom” hiding behind every utterance. Typologically different languages encode this kind of information in various ways. The most visible feature playing an important role in sentence interpretation is word order. Word order though, can sometimes be misleading. What happens for example in those languages that allow various alternative word orders? German for instance is one of those. Besides canonical SVO-structures, it also allows non-canonical OVS-structures, where the direct object comes before the subject. This makes word order a rather unreliable cue for thematic role assignment. Being German a case-marked language, it uses case information to reveal unambiguously the relations between sentential arguments. Case is indeed the most reliable cue for a correct sentence interpretation in German. However, as previous research has shown (e.g. Mills 1977, MacWhinney 1978, Clahsen 1984, Poeppel & Wexler 1993, Schipke et al. 2012), case sensitivity only emerges at later stages in language development. How and when do young German children come to comprehend non-canonical sentences then? Other earlier accessible factors, which have been shown to support correct sentence comprehension in German, are animacy and number information (Brandt & Höhle 2010, Stegenwallner-Schütz & Adani 2017, Adani et al. 2017). The main purpose of the current study is to investigate how animacy and number dissimilarities interact with word order in supporting the correct interpretation of
4 simple transitive sentences by German-speaking preschool children, before they develop a fully-fledged sensitivity to case marking.
5
Introduction: aims and topic of the thesis
The current research is an extension of the study by Adani et al. (2017) on the processing of relative clauses. Our work takes a step back with respect to the previous study by investigating the comprehension of simple transitive sentences instead of complex embedded sentences. Although two different clause types are taken into consideration, both studies aim at figuring out which sentential features support correct sentence interpretation and at which stage in early language development. We conduct this study in view of a possible application of the findings in speech therapy. We think that patients showing difficulties in sentence comprehension may initially profit from the introduction of facilitating factors into their therapy materials. The application of this method may ensure a gradual reintroduction of the problematic structures by first deploying those supporting features, to then move on to more complex structures, where those features do not appear.
There are several steps children have to go through before they develop the ability to comprehend correctly even simple sentences in their native language. The acquisition of the transitive construction is considered a fundamental step in language acquisition, since it is primarily associated with the ability to establish relations between the participants of an action. Long before children actively start producing correct transitive sentences, they first need to figure out the “who does what to whom” conveyed by every utterance. In order to succeed in this fundamental task, children need to carry out the so-called thematic role assignment, a process that allows them to figure out which sentential argument plays which role
6 in the action expressed by a predicate. The comprehension process consists of two steps: firstly, correct syntactic functions need to be recognized (subject and direct object), then, appropriate thematic roles are to be assigned: agent (the one who is performing the action) and patient (the recipient of the action). Natural languages encode the information regarding their sentential arguments in various ways (MacWhinney et al. 1984, Kempe & MacWhinney 1999, Dittmar et al., 2008). To give some examples, non-case-marked languages (like English) predominantly use word order, morphologically richer languages (like German) instead use case marking, while languages with an unambiguous verbal morphology (like Italian) rely more on subject-verb agreement. Table 1 exemplifies which cues are the most relevant ones respectively in English, Italian and German. Being English a language with a very fixed word order, English native speakers predominantly rely on this cue when it comes to sentence interpretation. This means that, when presented with a very unlikely sentence like «The man bite the dogs», where the subject-verb agreement would lead to correct thematic role assignment (notice the absence of the -s suffix), they tend to apply a subject-first strategy and assume that «the man» is the subject and «the dogs» is the object, irrespective of the verb form. The same sentence («L’uomo mordono i cani»), would be understood correctly by native speakers of Italian instead. As mentioned before, Italian is a language with a very unambiguous verb flexion, which makes subject-verb agreement the most relevant feature. Being German a case marked language instead, a sentence where subject-verb agreement is neutralized («Den Hund beißt der Mann», Eng.: «The dog-ACC
7 bites the man-NOM»), would be understood correctly by adult German native speakers, because they would only rely on case marking.
TABLE 1 | Most relevant features in thematic role assignment in English, Italian and German.
Language Linguistic device Example
English Word order The man bite the dogs.
Italian Subject-verb agreement L’uomo mordono i cani.
German Case-marking Den Hund beißt der Mann.
According to their age, children take different paths to carry out grammatical role assignment and comprehend sentences correctly. A large body of previous research deals with this matter from a functionalistic point of view. The functionalistic approaches assume that surface forms of natural languages are created and acquired to carry out specific communicative functions, and children are able to detect these form-function correlations from very early on. To mention a well-known example, the Competition Model posited by MacWhinney & Bates (1989) defines language acquisition as a cue-driven process and aims at explaining cross-linguistically which cues are used to understand sentences and when. The stage at which children get the sensitivity to a specific cue depends on its so-called cue-strength. That is the reliability that a certain feature has in conveying a specific meaning. We will focus on both “local cues”, that can be interpreted as soon as they are processed, and “topological cues”, which are distributed across several sentential elements (cf. Ammon & Slobin 1979, Kail & Charvillat 1988). We know for example that, unlike English and Italian, German relies predominantly on “topological” cues, in
8 particular case marking, rather than on word order, that can be processed on the spot. In fact, German makes use of case information to reveal relations between sentential arguments, and, in accordance with this feature, it allows different possible word orders. As far as children are concerned, the processing of these alternative word orders has been shown to require a much bigger effort than their canonical counterparts (e.g. Lindner 2003, Dittmar et al. 2008, Schipke 2012, Schipke et al. 2012). Coming now to the structures that this study focuses on, SVOs and OVSs, the distribution in the input of these two structure types has been observed to be consistent with these findings. Several corpus-studies investigating child-directed-speech (e.g. Dittmar et al. 2008), have shown that OVS-sentences are remarkably less frequent then canonical SVO-sentences. However, when young children are faced with a non-canonical structure, there must be other factors supporting correct sentence comprehension. The purpose of the present study is to compare different approaches to the emergence of children’s early linguistic knowledge, in order to figure out the nature of these supporting factors. In particular, we focused on the predictions made by the input frequency and the structural intervention approaches. We can define the former as a usage-based approach, in the sense that it stresses the importance of environmental aspects in the emergence of children’s early linguistic knowledge (Tomasello 2000, Lieven 2010). In particular, the input frequency approach claims that children’s grammatical knowledge is limited to those structures that appear often in their own input (Diessel and Tomasello 2000). In other words it denies the traditionally generative “continuity hypothesis” (Pinker 1984, Atkinson, 1996), for which
9 children are provided with an adult-like grammatical knowledge, by underlining the importance of the input children are actually exposed to. On the other hand, the structural intervention approach aims at identifying which grammatical mechanisms play a role in the emergence of children’s early linguistic knowledge (Guasti 2002, Hyams and Orfitelli, 2017). In particular, we will focus on the intervention effect arising when syntactical locality constraints are violated. This happens when a sentence has two structurally similar arguments (for example two singular full NPs) and the object crosses the subject by means of syntactic movement (Friedmann et al. 2009). Nevertheless, the intervention effect should not arise when the two arguments have different structural features. To this purpose, we will use sentences with two arguments mismatching in number, where the plural subject unambiguously agrees with the verb in spite of coming after the direct object. In contrast to the input frequency assumption, the structural intervention approach investigates children’s early language development from a nativist perspective. In fact, if we assume that young children are able to deploy structural information in sentence comprehension, we also imply that they are provided with an advanced grammatical knowledge. As contrasting as these two approaches may sound, it has been recently shown that they co-exist in the comprehension of embedded sentences in German (Adani et al. 2017). As an extension of the Adani et al.’s (2017) study, the aim of our study is also to replicate their findings. To this purpose, we tested the predictions made by these two approaches in the same group of preschool children, in order to find out whether they play a combined role also
10 in the comprehension of simple transitive German sentences with variable word order.
The two factors we will focus on are number information and animacy. In order to verify the predictions made by the input frequency approach we will test sentences with two animate NPs and compare them with sentences with two NPs mismatching in animacy, that have been shown by Chan et al. (2009) to be more frequent in the input (see §3.1 for a deeper insight). As for the structural intervention assumption, we will compare sentences with two singular NPs with sentences with two structurally different NPs mismatching in number (that are supposed to be easier to understand). The question we will address is whether number and animacy dissimilarities facilitate the thematic role assignment in German declarative subject-initial (SVO) and object-subject-initial (OVS) clauses. As already mentioned, German is a case-marked language, which makes case information the cue an adult German-speaker relies on in the comprehension of any utterance. However, case sensitivity only emerges at later stages in language acquisition, around 6 years of age (e.g. Mills 1977, MacWhinney 1978, Clahsen 1984, Poeppel & Wexler 1993, Schipke et al. 2012). How do younger children come to comprehend sentences then? Recent research on the comprehension of relative clauses (e.g. Adani et al. 2017) has found out that 3-year-olds can already take advantage of animacy when processing the relations between sentential arguments. In fact, according to theoretical literature on thematic role assignment (Hopper & Thompson 1980, Dowty 1991), it is more likely for an argument to function as an agent when it is animate and as a patient when it is inanimate (see §3.1). This tendency might create an expectation in
11 children, which make them assume that an animate entity is always the agent in the action. However, animacy appears to be a rather weak feature. In fact, it is often the case that an inanimate entity takes up the subject function in a sentence and an animate one maps onto an object. Children can profit from animacy information only at the early stages of language development, until they gain access to more reliable cues.
After these early stages, where differences between SVO and OVS structures with two animate arguments can hardly be perceived (3-year-olds tend to interpret everything as SVO applying a subject-first strategy), children start using morpho-syntactic information in sentence comprehension. Recent psycholinguistic research on the comprehension of embedded sentences in Italian and English has found that structural dissimilarities between two arguments of a sentence can facilitate correct sentence interpretation (Adani et al. 2010, 2014). Especially, between 4 and 5 years of age, when children fine-tune their sensitivity to number information and subject-verb agreement. In fact, it has been shown that 4 and 5-year-olds are significantly more accurate in sentences with two arguments mismatching in number, while 3-year-olds do not appear to take advantage of this cue (Adani et al. 2010, Brandt & Höhle 2010, Stegenwallner-Schütz et al. 2017, Adani et al. 2017).
The main purpose of the present study is to investigate how animacy and number dissimilarities may support correct thematic role assignment, hence the interpretation of simple transitive sentences by German-speaking children, before they actually develop fully-fledged sensitivity to case marking.
13
Chapter I: General remarks on German grammar
In this section, the relevant structural features of German are briefly summarized. We will especially focus on word order and inflectional paradigms, including noun phrase morphology and verb morphology.
1.1. Word order and verb position
German is a language with complex word order rules. Although German allows various possible word orders, the canonical one is the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order. Other possible word orders are derived from it. The derivation of the non-canonical word orders is rule governed, especially as far as the position of the verb is concerned (Mills 1985, Szagun 2008, Kauschke 2012). The finite verb in second position is a fixed rule in declarative sentences. Although the subject appears most of the times in first position, in main clauses elements other than the subject may occur in initial position (the direct object, adverbs, ecc.), given that the verb is then obligatorily in second position followed by the subject (1). In subordinate clauses, the finite verb is generally in clause final position (2). After auxiliary or modal verbs, the main verb is also in final position in main sentences (3). German allows for example topicalization of the direct object, which results in a non-canonical object-first (OVS) structure (Fanselow, 2000; Wunderlich, 1997). Consider examples in (4) for SVO and (5) for OVS sentences.
14 1) Heute hat mein Bruder Geburtstag.
Today has my-NOM brother birthday.
2) Ich gehe spazieren, obwohl das Wetter nicht gut ist. I go for a walk, even if the-NOM weather not good is. 3) Ich will eine neue Wohnung finden.
I want a-ACC new-ACC flat to find. 4) Der Mann kratzt den Jungen.
The-NOM man scratches the-ACC boy.
5) Den Jungen kratzt der-NOM Mann. The-ACC boy-ACC scratches the-NOM man.
Leaving pragmatics and prosody aside, both the SVO- and OVS-clauses express the same event. Since animacy is neutralized in this case, the German hearer has to deduce the sentence meaning using two structural cues, namely case marking and subject-verb agreement. According to the German grammar rules, the finite verb always agrees with the subject of the sentence for person and number, which bears the nominative (Mills 1985, Szagun 2008, Kauschke 2012). Here we can see a very strong relation between syntactic and morphological development, which is described as follows by Clahsen et al. (1996): at early stages in grammatical development, the subject sits normally before the verb. The position in the sentence marks the function of the sentence element as well. After the verb-second-position has been acquired, the first position in the sentence is seen as a structural position (as opposed to functional). Since this position can be flexibly occupied by both subjects and objects, a marking of the sentence elements is needed, otherwise
15 ambiguity occurs. Topicalization of the object in reversible sentences makes case marking absolutely necessary.
1.2. General remarks on German morphology
German is a language with a very rich morphology. German words are regularly modified through inflection. Inflectional modifications occur through the attachment of inflectional endings and changes in the root vowel and allows us to comprehend which relations connect the elements of a sentence. German marks gender, case, number information on nouns, articles, adjectives and pronouns and person and tense information on verbs. An overview of the inflectional paradigms in German is given in the next sections. Since our current study investigates the impact of number and case information, we are going to leave aside gender and verbal tense.
The word order variation, as well as the morpho-syntactic properties discussed above, are favourable for the language acquisition research. Correspondingly, one can investigate whether any of the cues precedes the others in the course of language development. Furthermore, this research can determine at which age young children effectively start deploying which cues in sentence comprehension of transitive constructions. Finally, it is advantageous to investigate what role they play in the comprehension of non-canonical OVS-sentences and to see whether one of them supports correct interpretation. This latter issue is of particular interest, since a large amount of studies suggests that the non-canonical word order appears to be more demanding for German-learning young children (e.g.: Lindner 2003, Dittmar et al. 2008, Schipke 2012, Schipke et al. 2012).
16
1.3. Number information: Plural system and verbal flexion
The German plural system is a very complex one. The plural is marked on nouns, articles and verbs by means of inflectional processes. The plural marking on the noun displays nine different forms. It is marked through addition of six different suffixes: -n, -en, -e, -s, -er and -ø, three of which (-ø, -e and -er) can appear together with a change of the root vowel (Szagun 2008, Kauschke 2012). Table 2 gives an overview of the different categories with examples.
TABLE 2 | Plural noun marking in German Suffix + change of root vowel Example
-n Blume, Blumen
-e Hund, Hunde
Umlaut + -e Baum, Bäume
-er Kind, Kinder
Umlaut + -er Buch, Bücher
-ø Tiger, Tiger
Umlaut + -ø Apfel, Äpfel
-s Auto, Autos
The German noun plural system is commonly defined as a system with multiple regularities (Szagun 2001, 2008). Some of these regularities are deterministic, that is, they always apply in the presence of given factors, but the vast majority of them is probabilistic, which makes the choice of the right marking neither fully predictable nor fully random. For example feminine and masculine nouns ending with an -e are always marked with an -n in the plural, and words ending with an unstressed vowel always take the -s suffix. On the other hand, although the vast majority of the masculine and neutral nouns generally build the plural in -e (89%),
17 21% of them take the -er ending (Szagun, 2008). The factors influencing this choice are the phonological form of the noun (especially the last phoneme) and its gender. Nevertheless, these factors cannot be always relied on. In fact, it is often the case that the plural form has to be learnt together with the base form.
The plural marking on the article also a tricky one. Table 3 clearly shows one of the peculiarities of the German language, that is the ambiguous correspondence between form and function. The same form can have many different functions and meanings.
TABLE 3 | Plural forms of the definite article
Kasus Plural
Nominative die
Accusative die
Dative den
Genitive der
Number information in German is also marked on the verb in the form of person. Verbal agreement is made clear by means of inflectional processes of suffixation and changes of the root vowel. Table 4 shows the full verb marking of person and number in the present tense. The suffixes of the verbal marking are the same for all full verbs. Although in the second and third person singular a change in the root vowel can also occur, for example the verb tragen becomes du trägst, er trägt in the second and third person singular.
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TABLE 4 | full verb conjugation Suffix Example
-e ich geh-e -st du geh-st -t er, sie, es geh-t -en wir geh-en -t ihr geh-t -en sie, Sie geh-en
Again, as for the plural system, also the verb conjugation is characterized by homonymity. The same ending -t is used for the 3rd person singular and the 2nd plural, and the ending -en is attached both to the 1st and the 3rd person plural.
1.4. Case marking
By means of case marking, German defines the syntactic function of a noun phrase (structural case). That is, the subject normally bears the nominative, the direct object bears the accusative and the indirect object the dative (Kauschke 2012). In German, the case is marked on articles, pronouns, adjectives and less frequently on nouns. Case marking occurs and depends on the gender/number specification of the noun. The following table shows the case marking system in German for determined and undetermined articles.
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TABLE 5 | German case marking
Singular Plural
Masculine Neutral Feminine Nominative der ein das ein die eine die Accusative den einen das ein die eine die Dative dem einem dem einem der einer den Genitive des eines des eines der einer der
As mentioned before there is a class of masculine nouns in German that is marked for case. These nouns belong to the so-called weak declination. In contrast to the strong declination, that do not attach any overt inflection on the stem, weak masculine nouns bear an extra inflection -en or -n in all cases except for the nominative singular (see Table 6).
TABLE 6 | Weak noun declination
singular plural singular plural Nominative der Held die Helden der Neffe die Neffen Accusative den Helden die Helden den Neffen die Neffen Dative dem Helden den Helden den Neffen den Neffen Genitive des Helden der Helden des Neffen der Neffen
As well as for the number marking, also the case marking system does not display a one-to-one relationship between form and function. Some forms cover more than one function. For example, there is no formal difference between nominative and accusative for feminine and neutral articles, which complicates and slows down the acquisition task remarkably. To give another example, the article der can express multiple functions, namely nominative masculine (der Mann, Eng.; the man), but also the dative feminine (der Mann hilft der Frau, Eng.: the man helps the woman)
20 or genitive (das Auto der Frau, Eng.: the woman’s car). Furthermore, even when the contrast is unambiguous, the difference is mostly minimal and therefore not easily perceivable. For example, the difference between the accusative and the dative masculine den vs. dem or the nominative and the accusative masculine ein vs. einen is hard to detect, especially in the spontaneous speech stream. With the indefinite articles, it gets even more difficult, because the phonetic realizations of these forms in the oral language are often shortened. Einen can become ein’n, nen or even be reduced to n. Einem can become ein’m, nem or m (Tracy 1986). Apart from the lack of transparency of the system and the hard perceivability of the endings, case marking in German is necessary to clearly define the role of a noun phrase in a sentence. Compare:
6) Der Mann sieht die Frau. The-NOM man sees the-ACC woman. 7) Den Mann sieht die Frau.
21
Chapter 2: Acquisition of grammatical categories and syntactic skills
in German
In language acquisition research there are typically two main contrasting approaches dealing with the matter from two different points of view. On one side, the so-called nativist accounts assume grammatical knowledge to an innate skill that human beings are provided with from birth (Chomsky 1986, 1988, Tracy 2000, Weisseborn 2000, Penner et al. 2006). This approach states that language acquisition is not a learning process, but children have an adult-like grammatical knowledge from the beginning. This though does not explain why young children produce sentences that deviate from the rules of their object-language. Nativists’ explanation to this argument is that the input children are exposed to is too “poor”. Children do not get sufficient input from their environment, and this explains why they do not show an adult-like linguistic performance. Children are capable of having “specific intuitions” though, which help them process the input and figure out specific structures of their object-language thanks to a so-called “bootstrapping” process (Tracy 2000). Nativists assume that children are able to find out regularities in the input they get and to generalize them to new structures.
On the other hand, rather cognitive approaches, among which the so-called constructivist approaches (e.g. Tomasello & Brooks 1999, Tomasello 2000) look at this matter from an input-oriented point of view. They assume that language acquisition is a learning process in which general cognitive skills combined with environmental factors play a fundamental role. In other words, children learn certain structures once they hear them in their input. This explains why children
22 make mistakes until they get a sufficient amount of input, but it does not explain how children start producing correct object-language sentences so early. Cognitivists’ explanation to this question is that children are able to apply early learning mechanisms (like imitation, analogy, among others) that help them find regular patterns in their input until they get a sufficient amount of input from their environment.
The aims of these two approaches could not be more contrasting. While the nativist approach tries to confirm a theory of grammar that defines grammatical knowledge as innate and independent from other cognitive skills and disconnected from the input, the epigenetic approaches aim at finding a connection between cognitive and grammatical skills and give great importance to the role of input. This short summary of the two main approaches to language acquisition should be kept in mind for the following sections. The next two paragraphs will be focused on the acquisition of the relevant grammatical categories and syntactic skills for the current study, namely number, case and canonical vs. non-canonical transitive sentences.
2.1. The development of number
The development of the German plural system begins very early. In a study by Szagun (2008), the first plural forms has been observed in children aged 1;4. Until the age of 5-6 though, children still make a large amount of mistakes (Kauschke et al. 2011). Depending on the plural class, a difference in the pace of acquisition has been found out. The plural classes that are developed the fastest are the -n and the -e plural, while the other forms grow more slowly. This acquisition pattern and the
23 type of mistakes children make are consistent with the frequency of the respective forms in the input (Szagun 2008). A large body of previous research has shown that the mistakes children make are not random, but systematic, and they are based on the phonological ending of the word in its citation form. The most common mistakes are the addition of the endings -n or -s and the partial marking when suffixation and vowel change occur together. These results are consistent with the complexity of the German plural system. As mentioned in §1.3., the German plural system is commonly defined as a system with multiple regularities. Therefore, when acquiring the plural, children are challenged twice. They not only need to find out the rule behind the suffix and the phonological form, but they also need to pay attention to the gender of the noun.
2.2. The development of the verb flexion and subject-verb agreement
For the development of the verb flexion, the grammatical categories person and number are of great importance. As for the number and the case system, also the verb flexion does not have a one-to-one relationship between form and function (see. Tab. 4). Because the verb form matches the subject in number and person, the acquisition of the verb flexion is strongly linked to the syntactic development. The acquisition of the verb flexion occurs together with the first multiple-word-expressions. The developmental sequence observed by Clahsen (1986) has been confirmed by more recent studies (Bittner 2000, Klampfer et al. 2001). The first step consists of stem forms without suffixes or as infinite forms, and sometimes the
24 suffix -t appears. Next, the suffix -e starts being used and overgeneralized. The suffix -st is the last one appearing around 3 years of age.
2.3. The development of case marking
The development of a fully-fledged knowledge of the German case system is a process that takes a long time to German-speaking children (Clahsen 1984, Mills 1985, Tracy 1984, 1986). These long-term difficulties are due to the fact that the German case system is characterized by a very strong syncretism. In other words, there is no one-to-one relationship between form and function, but it is often the case that two different functions are expressed by the same form (see Tab. 5). Moreover, being case marked on articles and pronouns in German, case marking presupposes at least the emergence of a rudimentary syntactic structure (3- or more-words-utterances) and a basic article and pronominal system (Korecky-Kröll & Dressler 2015). Another factor that slows down this process is the hard perceivability of the marking itself. Firstly, because the article sits before the noun and therefore it is unstressed. Moreover, it is sometimes hard to distinguish acoustically between similarly sounding forms. How do children come to master this very complex system then? According to a vast amount of typological literature (e.g. Plank 1980, Malchukov and Spencer 2009), German seems to have the following markedness hierarchy: Nom > Acc > Dat > Gen. This hierarchy has been confirmed by several studies. While German-speaking children do not seem to have difficulties in developing the nominative, the acquisition of the accusative and dative takes longer (Clahsen 1984, Tracy 1986, Szagun 2004, 2008). Clahsen (1984), in a study of spontaneous speech data from three children proposed the existence of various subsequent steps children
25 go through during the acquisition process. Szagun (2004, 2008) confirmed this sequence in a study on spontaneous speech data from 6 children aged 1;4 to 3;8. After a first phase, where case marking is completely absent, because the articles are not expressed follows a phase where children only use articles in the nominative case. The first articles are observed around an age of 1;6 years. After this step, children go through a phase where they mainly produce phonologically neutral forms that do not show a clear suffixation. Only in the next phase clear marking of the object starts appearing, but the accusative is often used also in dative contexts. Lastly, the dative is correctly marked. The long-term confusion between accusative and dative might be due to several factors. First of all, case marking has been shown to be receding in spoken language (Wegener 2007, Roelcke 2011). In several German dialects and in the colloquial use dative is often is replaced by accusative. Moreover, the difference between the accusative and the dative masculine den vs. dem or the nominative and the accusative masculine ein vs. einen is hard to detect, especially in the spontaneous speech. With the indefinite articles, it is even harder, because the phonetic realizations of these forms in the oral language are often shortened. Einen can become ein’n, nen or even be reduced to n. Einem can become ein’m, nem or m (Tracy 1986). This explains why the most frequent source of error found in spontaneous speech data is the replacement of the dative masculine einem through the accusative einen (Szagun 2004, 2008). Summarized, we can conclude that the complexity, the low transparency and the hard acoustical distinguishability of the forms are all factors that tend to slow down the learning process remarkably (Szagun 2008).
26
2.4. The development of syntactic skills: How children come to master sentences
In general, the acquisition of syntactic skills is consequent to the moment in which children start combining words with each other. It has been shown that children start combining words into longer expressions when their vocabulary is sufficiently rich (commonly around 50 words), meaning around 1;6 years of age (Clahsen 1986). A very important step in syntax acquisition is the acquisition of simple transitive sentences, since it is primarily associated with the ability to establish relations between the participants of an action. Previous research on this topic has found that 17-month-old children have a correct receptive knowledge of simple sentence structures (Kauschke 2012). As for the productive part, children start producing correct declarative sentences, once they have acquired the so-called verb-second-rule. Clahsen and collegues (1996) analysed the position of the verb in early children expressions and they found out that, until the verb is not correctly inflected, the vast majority of the verbs were in final position. In the next step, and parallel to the development of the verb flexion (Clahsen 1986), finite verbs appear correctly in second position.
The task children are faced with when acquiring their native language comprises not only the learning of regularities, but also those non-canonical structures that are allowed in that language. Of great interest for the current study is the development of German sentences with a non-canonical word order, in particular those sentences that show a topicalization of the direct object. Sentences with direct objects in first position have been observed from 2-year-old children (Weisseborn 1990). The first
27 OVS examples are sentences from which it is clear which argument is the subject and which one is the object («Ein Loch macht die Mone», Eng.: «Mone makes a hole», example from Weisseborn 1990). On the other hand, semantically reversible sentences need an additional clear case marking, because both arguments could be equally subject and object of the sentence. This suggests a close relationship between syntactic and morphological development. Clahsen (1996) proposed that in the early phases of language development, the subject mostly takes up the first position in the sentence, which means that the position defines the function of the argument. After the acquisition of the verb-second-rule, the first position can be flexibly occupied both by subjects and by objects, given that case marking is present and prevents ambiguity. Correct comprehension of OVS-sentences in German has been tested by Watermeyer (2010) with 3-5-year-old children and Dittmar et al. (2008) with 2;7, 4;10 and 7. The results obtained show that at an age of 5, children start interpreting OVS-sentence correctly. This happens when they start fine-tuning their sensitivity towards case marking. This phase takes remarkably long to be over and it is considered not to be fully concluded before children turn 7.
29
Chapter 3: Other relevant factors in sentence comprehension
Before children are able to deploy structural features to interpret a sentence correctly there are other lexical aspects and general grammatical and cognitive abilities that might support correct sentence comprehension. The animacy of an argument has been shown to be one of those. As for the grammatical and cognitive skills, in the next sections we are going to see how general grammatical competence, attention inhibition abilities and working memory can interact with sentence comprehension.
3.1. Animacy: a lexical-semantic cue to sentence interpretation
The semantic feature animacy can be one of the key disambiguation cues in the transitive construction, since it is primarily associated with the likelihood of an argument to be the subject or the object in a sentence. In the past decades, typologists have observed that this probability is based on a hierarchical system underlying various implicational universals (e.g. Comrie 1981, Croft 1988, 1990). It is largely accepted that an animacy hierarchy should have (at least) the following components: human > animal > inanimate. Hierarchies of this kind have been assumed by typologists to rule several grammatical phenomena. The general idea is that a grammatical phenomenon will follow the hierarchy in the sense that certain generalizations will apply to all cases above or underneath a given point in the hierarchy (Dahl & Fraurud 1996). To give an example, it is well known that objects whose features are high on the animacy hierarchy are more likely to trigger agreement (Comrie 1981, Croft 1988, 1990). Nevertheless, objects that are high on
30 the animacy hierarchy can also be direct objects. This is why direct objects are more likely to be marked if they have a high degree of animacy (like the prepositional accusative with a in Spanish). However, it is unquestionable that arguments that are high on the animacy hierarchy are more likely to become subjects. In this regard, it is worth mentioning the theory of Proto-roles posited by Dowty (1991). His work marks a turning point in the literature about thematic roles. Differently to previous research, Dowty (1991) does not try to define a finite inventory of thematic roles, but he posits the existence of only two Proto-categories, the Proto-agent and the Proto-patient. These cluster-concepts of thematic roles are characterized by various features, called entailments. The arguments of a sentence, depending on the number of entailments they share with the Proto-agent and the Proto-patient, tend to be realized respectively as a subject or an object in a sentence. Crucially for our study, one of the typical entailments for an agent is its animacy. In fact, Dowty (1991) describes the Proto Agent as an active animate “doer” who volitionally controls a certain event and can affect another event participant. On the other hand, the Proto Patient is usually considered to be inanimate and influenced by somebody else. Therefore, in the example «Peter hit the ball», where both the ball and Peter could potentially be the subject of the verb hit, the animacy contrast co-occurs with word order in suggesting how to read the sentence correctly. Animacy entails an agent «Peter», who is deliberately performing an action with an inanimate patient, «the ball». Coming now to the impact of animacy in German language development, several corpus studies, among which Chan and collegues (2009) on German child-directed-speech, found that 80% of the transitive utterances with highly causative
31 verbs had animate agents and inanimate patients. These findings are consistent with the typological arguments previously mentioned. Now, if we assume that children up to 3 years of age only master those structures that occur frequently in their own repertoires (Diessel and Tomasello 2000), we can also claim that highly transitive sentences with two arguments mismatching in animacy should be acquired earlier. In fact, young children have been observed to show a special sensitivity to animacy remarkably early in language development. Adani and collegues (2017), in their study on complex sentence comprehension with 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds, found that the youngest children can already deploy animacy information more reliably than any other cue in sentence comprehension. Nevertheless, the supporting effect of animacy does not increase as a function of age and it is not always reliable. This is why children, as soon as they develop a more advanced sensitivity to other more reliable cues, like subject-verb agreement or case marking later on, tend to deploy those in correct sentence comprehension and leave animacy aside.
3.2. The role of grammatical skills, working memory and attention inhibition abilities in sentence comprehension
Apart from structural and lexical-semantic features, other general grammatical and cognitive skills might have an impact on sentence comprehension. Firstly, we assume that more robust receptive grammatical skills (tested with the TROG-D, see
§4.7.) support overall correct sentence comprehension (Knoll et al. 2012). As for working memory (tested with the Digit span task, see §4.6.), various published studies (e.g. Gathercole et al. 2004, Montgomery et al. 2008, Arosio et al. 2012) have found a positive correlation between this skill and accuracy in sentence
32 comprehension. This could be due to the fact that children have to retain the whole structure in mind until the end of the sentence before they process its meaning successfully. Lastly, there is a special cognitive skill that we predict to be specifically correlated to OVS-sentences, namely attention inhibition. As previously mentioned, object-initial sentences in German represent a non-canonical construction. Therefore they are more demanding and challenging for children than their subject-initial counterparts (e.g. Dittmar et al. 2008, Lindner 2003, Schipke 2012, Schipke et al. 2012). OVS-sentences are not only acquired later, but they might require the revision of the commonly preferred subject-first strategy young German-speaking children tend to apply, before they develop a fully-fledged sensitivity to other structural cues (e.g. Dittmar et al. 2008, Lindner 2003, Schipke 2012, Schipke at al. 2012). To be able to reanalyse a sentence in favour of the non-canonical construction, children have to be aware of certain contrasting features that define a non-prototypical word order. In addition to the perception of these features, attention inhibition might play a facilitating role because it is primarily associated with how successfully contrasting cues can be processed (Mazuka et al. 2009). In other words, since non-canonical transitive sentences pose a higher computational load and tend to be misinterpreted as the canonical subject-initial clause in the course of sentence processing, the question arises whether more advanced inhibition skills might help children reconsider and suppress an initial incorrect decision (i.e. the subject-first interpretation) and better cope with the comprehension task. Crucial in this regard it the so called “kindergarden path effect” introduced by Trueswell and collegues (1999). This concept is defined as
33 the child’s inability to recover from the first incorrectly chosen sentence processing strategy. Examining the interaction between the child’s inhibition abilities and his/her comprehension of the non-canonical OVS-sentences is useful to shed more light on this phenomenon and might contribute to a better understanding of whether and how cognitive control skills influence the acquisition of the object-initial transitive construction. Taken together, grammatical skills, working memory and attentional inhibition abilities might affect how young German-speaking children comprehend and correctly process simple transitive clauses and are, therefore, worth investigating.
35
Chapter 4: The Current study
As mentioned in the previous chapters, the main purpose of the present study is to investigate how animacy and number dissimilarities may support correct thematic role assignment, hence the interpretation of simple transitive canonical and non-canonical sentences by German-speaking children, before they develop fully-fledged sensitivity to case marking. Starting from this idea, in the following section, we introduce the general hypotheses we tested.
General hypotheses
For the elaboration of our general hypotheses, we considered the following comparisons (the meaning of the signs +/- and numbers 1/2 is explained in note 1): 1. OVS - + 1 vs. OVS + + (cf. Tomasello, 2000, Lieven, 2010, Chan et al. 2009,
Adani et al. 2017)
2. OVS + + vs. OVS 1 2 (Guasti, 2002; Hyams & Orfitelli, 2017, Stegenwallner-Schütz & Adani 2017)
3. OVS 1 2 vs. SVO 1 2 (Dittmar et al. 2008, Schipke et al. 2012) 4. SVO 1 2 vs. SVO + + (cf. structural intervention approach)
Starting from these comparisons, and on the basis of previous research on related topics, we made the following predictions.
1 The signs + and - refer to the animacy of the sentential arguments. The numbers 1 and 2 refer to
number information.
+ stands for animate singular - stands for inanimate singular 1 stands for singular animate 2 stands for plural animate
36 The first two comparisons allow us to test the predictions of two different approaches, namely the input frequency and the structural intervention account. The core question of the input frequency approach is to find out which environmental factors influence the emergence of children’s early linguistic knowledge and its usage (Tomasello 2000, Lieven 2010). The structural intervention approach instead, aims at defining which grammatical mechanisms may hinder or enhance language acquisition in young children (Guasti 2002, Hyams & Orfitelli 2017). These two approaches, previously considered to be exclusive, have been recently observed to have a combined effect on the emergence of children’s early linguistic knowledge. The study by Adani and collegues (2017) showed that both approaches played a fundamental combined role in children’s comprehension of German embedded sentences. Since we also aim at reproducing the results obtained by Adani and collegues (2017) on complex sentences, the first two comparisons may allow us to uncover whether the input frequency approach and the structural intervention approach also co-exist in German simple sentence comprehension.
In particular, the first comparison allows us to test the predictions made by the input frequency account. Namely, that young children’s mastery of certain sentence types is limited to those structures that occur frequently in their own repertoires (Tomasello 2000, Lieven 2010). More specifically, we assume that non-canonical sentences with animacy mismatch (an animate agent and an inanimate patient) are easier to understand and earlier acquired than non-canonical sentences with two animate arguments. This because they appear more frequently in the input children are exposed to (see §3.1.). As already mentioned though, the impact of animacy is
37 very steady and appears not to increase in a manner that is modulated by age (Adani et al. 2017). Therefore, we do not expect an increase in performance between the first and the second age group (respectively 4;6 ± 0;3 and 5;6 ± 0;3).
Our second contrast allows us to test the predictions made by the structural intervention account, namely that object-first sentences with two structurally similar full NPs are acquired later. More specifically, this assumption suggests that sentences with two full arguments mismatching in number (e.g. “the man that the boys are scratching”) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with number-matching NPs (e.g. “the man that the boy is scratching”). Supporting evidence for this hypothesis comes from the study by Stegewallner & Adani (2017), where it was shown that German-speaking children as old as 3, already start taking advantage of number mismatch to correctly interpret non-canonical German sentences. Surprisingly though another recent study by Sorokovska (2017) on declarative sentence comprehension with German children aged 4;6 ± 0;3 months, showed very poor accuracy rates in the number mismatch condition when case marking was neutralized (e.g. OVS: Die Pferde fängt das Zebra, Eng.: The-ACC horses is catching the-NOM zebra). This could mean that number information only supports correct interpretation when it co-occurs with case marking, respectively, that young children can deploy number information in order to glean extra information when it appears redundantly with other cues. These results are broadly consistent with the findings by Dittmar et al. (2008) that German children best comprehend transitive sentences with multiple, redundant cues. In their study, the two cues that reinforcing one another were word order and case marking. In our
38 study, the number feature is always accompanied by unambiguous case marking, which should result in a stronger facilitation. Moreover, differently from animacy, it has been observed that the impact of number strongly increases in a manner that is modulated by age (Adani et al. 2017), that is why we also expect accuracy to increase between the first and the second age group.
Our third comparison allows us to figure out whether young children still apply a subject-first strategy (Lindner 2003, Dittmar et al. 2008, Schipke 2012, Schipke et al. 2012) in sentence interpretation even when other more reliable cues in German (subject-verb agreement and case marking) suggest a different interpretation. In other words, this comparison is fundamental to find out whether word order still plays an important role, or it is overcome as soon as other more reliable features co-occur. If this is the case, we expect canonical sentences with number mismatch not to be significantly more accurate than non-canonical sentences with the same features.
Generally speaking, it is hard to establish the exact moment when children are considered to have a fully-fledge knowledge of object-initial sentences. The experimental design itself can have an impact on the results of a study, and the performance of the participants also depends on the complexity of the task. To give an example, in an act-out study by Dittmar et al. (2008) was found that children were not able to correctly interpret OVS-sentences until the age of 7. On the other hand, from a study by Watermeyer and Kauschke (2013), involving a picture-matching task, emerged that 5-year-olds already show a high accuracy rate in the same condition. As reported in more detail in § 4.1, the task chosen for the present
39 study is a colour-naming task embedded in a picture-matching task. Given the complexity of this task and considering our two age groups (4;6 ± 0;3 and 5;6 ± 0;3) we do not expect a perfect performance on non-canonical sentences from either of the groups. Furthermore, as already mentioned in the introduction, a relatively lower performance on OVS-sentences would also be consistent with frequency data. In a corpus study by Dittmar et al. (2008), a large amount of child-directed utterances taken from the CHILDES corpus was analysed. What they observed is that 79% of the transitive utterances including highly causative verbs and with expressed subject and object display a canonical word order, while only 21% of them were non-canonical OVS-utterances. As previously mentioned, this frequency effect produces a so-called “regularity effect”, which makes that the sentence-initial noun is generally assumed to be the subject of a sentence (MacDonald and Christiansen 2002).
Our fourth comparison should enable us to verify further the prediction of the structural intervention approach. More precisely, it is useful to find out whether the facilitation provided by number information is specific for non-canonical sentences or it applies across the board.
Apart from the previous predictions, the present study also tests three hypothesis regarding general grammatical and cognitive skills by means of assessment material for testing working memory (Digit span task), attention inhibition (Flanker task) and receptive grammatical skills (TROG-D).
First of all, we hypothesise that a more advanced grammatical knowledge and more robust working memory skills should support correct sentence comprehension
40 across the board (Kidd 2013). Working memory plays a decisive role in sentence processing because the sentence has to be retained in memory until the auditory stimuli is over (e.g. Gathercole et al. 2004, Montgomery et al. 2008, Arosio et al. 2012). Furthermore, we predict that more advanced attention inhibition abilities enhance the comprehension of non-canonical sentences, where a reinterpretation of the first incorrect assumption is needed, once the auditory stimuli is over (Höhle et al. 2016, Sorokovska 2017). In the OVS-condition in fact, after hearing a mismatching cue at the verb (in the OVS 1 2 condition) or at the NP2 (in the OVS + + condition), the child still has to wait for the stimulus to be over to check respectively the argument number or case and interpret it as the sentential subject. Assuming that 4-year-olds still use the subject-first strategy, children with less advanced inhibition skills face more difficulties when revising the incorrect decision and avoid the so-called “kindergarten-path effect” (Trueswell et al. 1999).
4.1. Methods
The comprehension of canonical vs. non-canonical sentences was tested by means of a colour naming task. In addition to that, we administered a standardized non-word repetition task (e.g. Gathercole 1994, Gathercole et al. 2004), testing working memory skills, the flanker task, testing attention inhibition abilities, modelled by Höhle at al. (2016) after the attentional network test for children by Rueda and colleagues (Rueda et al. 2004). Furthermore, we tested grammatical skills using the TROG-D, a standardised grammatical comprehension test for German (cf. Bishop 2003, Fox 2009). Each participant was tested individually within one session in a quiet room of a university laboratory. The entire testing session took place in front
41 of a computer screen and it lasted about 50 min for each participant depending on the individual pace and motivation. Breaks were taken when needed. Children were generally engaged and happy to participate, and received a small book as a reward.
4.2. Participants
A total of 57 children participated in the study (28 4-year-olds and 29 5-year-olds). 51 of them were included for the main analysis (26 4-year-olds and 25 5-year-olds). Another 6 children were excluded when they fail to match the inclusion criteria. The children belonged to two different age groups. The first age group included children aged 4;6 ± 0;3 months (mean age in months: 52.96, min: 51, max: 56). The second age group comprised children aged 5;6 ± 0;3 months (mean age in months: 65.21, min: 63, max: 86) All of the children were raised monolingually in a German-speaking environment. None of them had been diagnosed any developmental deficits or was born prematurely. Prior to participation, informed parental consent was sent per e-mail to the families. It had to be signed by both parents and handed in at the beginning of the session. During the testing, parents were asked to fill in a questionnaire about the child’s general development (see Supplementary Material), which was attained at the end of the session. The current study was reviewed and approved by the ethics committee at the University of Potsdam (61/2016) and was carried out with written parental informed consent from all participants. The parents were reimbursed for the travel costs to the lab.
42
4.3. Materials
The test sentences were simple transitive semantically reversible declarative SVO- and OVS-clauses (e.g. 1-5), for a total of 20 trials (four items per condition). In addition to the test sentences, 16 simple clauses with intransitive verbs, e.g., (6), and prepositional phrases, e.g., (7), were included as fillers, for a total of 36 trials per list. To neutralize order effects, two lists were created (list A and B): the stimuli were administered in one order to half of the participants and in the reversed order to the other half. The test sentences differed in terms of word order, number and animacy of the sentential arguments. Through the manipulation of these variables, we obtained five conditions: (1) canonical sentences with two animate arguments, (2) canonical sentences with number mismatch, (3) non-canonical sentences with two animate arguments, (4) non-canonical sentences with animacy mismatch and (5) non-canonical sentences with number mismatch. A complete list of the test sentences is provided in Appendix.
1) SVO + +
Der Mann kratzt den Jungen. The man-NOM is scratching the boy-ACC. 2) SVO 1 2
Der Mann kratzt die Jungen. The man-NOM is scratching the boys-ACC.
43 3) OVS + +
Den Mann kratzt der Junge. The man-ACC is scratching the boy-NOM. 4) OVS - +
Den Pulli kratzt der Mann. The pullover-ACC is scratching the man-NOM. 5) OVS 1 2
Den Mann kratzen die Jungen. The man-ACC are scratching the boys-NOM. 6) Filler, intransitive
Der Mann trinkt. The man-NOM is drinking. 7) Filler, prepositional
Der Pulli hängt an der Wäscheleine. The pullover-NOM is hanging on the clothesline.
All of the sentences were obtained transforming the subject- and object-relative clauses (SRC and ORC) used in the study by Adani et al. (2017) into simple declaratives, as in the following examples:
44
TABLE 7 | Transformation of relative clauses into declarative sentences
Old stimulus New stimulus
SRC + +
Der Mann, der
The man-NOM, that-NOM den Jungen kratzt.
the boy-ACC is scratching.
SVO + +
Der Mann kratzt
The man-NOM is scratching den Jungen.
the boy-ACC. SRC 1 2
Der Mann, der
The man-NOM, that-NOM die Jungen kratzt. the boys-ACC is scratching.
SVO 1 2
Der Mann kratzt
The man-NOM is scratching die Jungen.
the boys-ACC. ORC + +
Der Mann, den The man-NOM, that-ACC der Junge kratzt. the boy-NOM is scratching.
OVS + +
Den Mann kratzt The man-ACC is scratching der Junge.
the boy-NOM. ORC - +
Der Pulli, den The pullover-NOM, that-ACC der Mann kratzt.
the man-NOM is scratching.
OVS - +
Den Pulli kratzt
The pullover-ACC is scratching der Mann.
the man-NOM. ORC 1 2
Der Mann, den The man-NOM, that-ACC die Jungen kratzen.
the boys-NOM are scratching.
OVS 1 2
Den Mann kratzen The man-ACC are scratching die Jungen.
the boys-NOM. Filler, intransitive
Der Mann, der trinkt. The Man-NOM, that is drinking.
Filler, intransitive der Junge trinkt. The man-NOM is drinking.
45 Filler, prepositional
Der Pulli an der Wäscheleine. The pullover on the clothesline.
Filler, prepositional Der Pulli hängt The pullover-NOM is hanging an der Wäscheleine.
on the clothesline.
The nouns of the test sentences comprised animate and inanimate masculine nouns: Mann (man), Gurt (belt), Schuh (shoe), Pulli (pullover), Baumstamm (trunk) and Junge (boy), the last one belonging to the German weak declination (see §1.4 on case marking). The masculine was chosen to avoid ambiguity. In fact it is the only gender in German being unambiguously marked for case in the nominative and accusative (see Tab. 5). Therefore, the correct interpretation of a sentence was always supported by case information.
The impact of number on sentence comprehension was tested both for canonical, e.g. (2) and for non-canonical sentences, e.g. (5). In the number mismatch condition the arguments were both animate (Mann and Junge) and counterbalanced with respect to NP1 and NP2 position. Only Junge always appeared in the plural form (die Jungen), while Mann was always singular. Therefore, the correct interpretation of the sentences was always supported, not only by case information, but also by subject-verb agreement. In fact, the verb form, unambiguously agreeing with only one of the arguments, always led to correct interpretation.
The impact of animacy mismatch on sentence comprehension was only tested for non-canonical sentences, e.g. (4). In this condition the arguments were both singular, NP1 was always an inanimate object (Gurt, Pulli, Schuh or Baumstamm)
46 and NP2 always Mann. Each NP1 appeared only once, so that each of the 4 sentences had a different object.
The verbs used in the test sentences were also taken from the study by Adani et al. (2017): drücken (to squeeze, to hug), halten (to carry, to hold), kratzen (to scratch), tragen (to carry, to hold). They were counterbalanced across argument pairs and selected in accordance to early age of acquisition and a good depictability. All verbs appeared equally often. The verbs were chosen in such a way that either an animate or an inanimate noun could be a plausible subject.
The test comprised 20 experimental items, 12 of which appeared in the OVS word order and 8 in the SVO word order.
All trials were pseudo-randomized, with one filler after maximally three test sentences. Furthermore it was never the case that two declarative clauses of the same type followed each other and that the same colour was the target more than twice in a row. One stimulus list is reported in the supplementary material.
Visual stimuli
The visual stimuli were taken from the study by Adani et al. (2017) and adapted to the procedure of the current study. To this purpose, the original stimuli were decoloured using Photoshop and a coloured frame was drawn around every picture using OpenSesame. The size and visual saliency of the pictures were controlled: their frame resolution was 448 x 320px. The position of the target on the screen was also controlled and counter-balanced across conditions. The pictures were displayed in the middle of a 1920 x 1080px computer screen. Figure 1 provides an example of three visual displays used for testing each of the five conditions. Each
47 visual display contained four pictures with frames of different colours. The frame colours where maintained in the same position throughout the whole task. Only one picture displayed the target action expressed by the verb, e.g., scratching being performed by the correct argument. Each four-picture configuration was used to test one SVO- and one OVS-sentence as well as two filler sentences, except in the animacy contrast, where canonical declaratives were not tested. The remaining three non-target pictures corresponded to three different error-types. Opposite to the target appeared the reversal picture, depicting the same action as the target, but with switched arguments. On both other sides, opposite to each other, appeared the agent and the patient pictures, respectively showing either the agent or the patient performing a certain action or being in a certain state (a complete list of the picture that were combined to form the 4-picture-configurations can be found in Appendix).
FIGURE 1 | Example of a 4-picture-configuration used for testing OVS + + and SVO + +
OVS + +
Den Mann trägt The man-ACC is carrying der Junge.
the boy-NOM. → green
SVO + +
Der Mann trägt The man-NOM is carrying the boy-ACC.
48
FIGURE 2 | Example of a 4-picture-configuration testing OVS 1 2 and SVO 1 2
OVS 1 2
Den Mann tragen The man-ACC are carrying die Jungen.
the boys-NOM. → green
SVO 1 2
Der Mann trägt The man-NOM is carrying die Jungen.
the boys-ACC. → yellow
FIGURE 3 | Example of a 4-picture-configuration testing OVS - +
OVS - +
Den Pulli kratzt The pullover-ACC is scratching der Mann.
49 Auditory stimuli
The auditory stimuli consisted of recorded versions of the test sentences. They were recorded by a trained female native speaker of German in a sound-proof room in a child-directed manner. The prosodic contour of the sentences was maintained as neutral and constant as possible. After the recording session the sentences were cut using the software Praat and digitalized. Intensity, pitch and duration were analysed.
4.4. Procedure
The comprehension of SVO- vs. OVS-sentences was tested using a colour-naming task. To motivate the participants, they were asked to help a snail puppet named Bala learning the colours. The testing session started with a pre-test to ensure that children were familiar with the colours used in the experiment: rot (red), grün (green), gelb (yellow) and blau (blue), as well as the lexical items (nouns and verbs). Children first saw four coloured balloons on the screen and they were asked to name the colours. After that, they were presented with three four-picture configurations depicting the lexical items surrounded by the usual coloured frame. Children heard the voice of Bala pronouncing the lexical items to be tested and were instructed to name the frame colour of the right picture. By means of this pre-test on the lexical items it was also possible to familiarize the participants with the colour-naming procedure. After the pre-test, the interaction between the experimenter and the child was mediated by the snail puppet Bala, who introduced the sentence-picture-matching task in the form of a color-naming game, inspired by Arnon (2010). The precise task instructions are reported in the Appendix. Before
