Semantic role assignment in Danish children and adults
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Semantic role assignment in Danish children and adults. / Boeg Thomsen, Ditte; Kristensen, Line Burholt.
In: Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International Journal of Linguistics , Vol. 46, No. 2, 2014, p. 159-198.Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Semantic role assignment in Danish children and adults
AU - Boeg Thomsen, Ditte
AU - Kristensen, Line Burholt
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - In resolving “who did what to whom” in an active transitive clause, language users rely on intrasentential cues like word order, animacy and case marking. Most frequently, these cues will all point towards the same interpretation. For instance, in he kicked the ball, the agent he is both cued by word order (preverbal), animacy and case (the nominative). However, in Danish where word order may be subject to pragmatically motivated variations and thus allow for both subject-before-object and object-before-subject structures, conflicts often occur between the word order cue and other formal cues.Previous experiments in a variety of languages have shown that sentences with conflicting formal cues are habitually miscomprehended by preschool children. For adults, they continue to be more difficult to read and comprehend, often being shallowly processed on the basis of heuristics. However, most previous experiments have presented sentences in isolation, that is, in situations that render a context-demanding structure with conflicting formal cues decidedly inappropriate.In this study we therefore cross the sentence boundary to investigate the interplay between intra- and extrasentential cues in Danish sentence comprehension. Comparing corpus data with recent act-out and reading experiments involving Danish sentences with conflicting formal cues, we argue that context plays an important role in the resolution of semantic role distribution. Children and adults weigh morphosyntactic cues differently, but we find a striking continuity in attention to context across development: when interpreting conflict clauses with object-before-subject structure, both children and adults systematically integrate intra- and extrasentential cues to assign semantic roles.
AB - In resolving “who did what to whom” in an active transitive clause, language users rely on intrasentential cues like word order, animacy and case marking. Most frequently, these cues will all point towards the same interpretation. For instance, in he kicked the ball, the agent he is both cued by word order (preverbal), animacy and case (the nominative). However, in Danish where word order may be subject to pragmatically motivated variations and thus allow for both subject-before-object and object-before-subject structures, conflicts often occur between the word order cue and other formal cues.Previous experiments in a variety of languages have shown that sentences with conflicting formal cues are habitually miscomprehended by preschool children. For adults, they continue to be more difficult to read and comprehend, often being shallowly processed on the basis of heuristics. However, most previous experiments have presented sentences in isolation, that is, in situations that render a context-demanding structure with conflicting formal cues decidedly inappropriate.In this study we therefore cross the sentence boundary to investigate the interplay between intra- and extrasentential cues in Danish sentence comprehension. Comparing corpus data with recent act-out and reading experiments involving Danish sentences with conflicting formal cues, we argue that context plays an important role in the resolution of semantic role distribution. Children and adults weigh morphosyntactic cues differently, but we find a striking continuity in attention to context across development: when interpreting conflict clauses with object-before-subject structure, both children and adults systematically integrate intra- and extrasentential cues to assign semantic roles.
KW - Faculty of Humanities
KW - sentence processing
KW - L1 acquisition
KW - word order
KW - case
KW - context
KW - cue conflicts
U2 - 10.1080/03740463.2014.990291
DO - 10.1080/03740463.2014.990291
M3 - Journal article
VL - 46
SP - 159
EP - 198
JO - Acta Linguistica Hafniensia
JF - Acta Linguistica Hafniensia
SN - 0374-0463
IS - 2
ER -
ID: 117622435