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 -