27.128, Diss: Lang Acq, Psycholing: Daniel Bürkle: 'The Acquisition of Sentence Alternations: How Children Understand and Use the English Dative Alternation'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-128. Wed Jan 06 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.128, Diss: Lang Acq, Psycholing: Daniel Bürkle: 'The Acquisition of Sentence Alternations: How Children Understand and Use the English Dative Alternation'

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Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2016 21:38:29
From: Daniel Bürkle [dmburkle at uclan.ac.uk]
Subject: The Acquisition of Sentence Alternations: How Children Understand and Use the English Dative Alternation

 
Institution: University of Canterbury 
Program: Linguistics Department 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2015 

Author: Daniel Bürkle

Dissertation Title: The Acquisition of Sentence Alternations: How Children
Understand and Use the English Dative Alternation 

Dissertation URL:  http://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/11365

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
                     Psycholinguistics


Dissertation Director(s):
Heidi Quinn
Susan Foster-Cohen
Jen Hay

Dissertation Abstract:

Many English verbs expressing transfer can be used in two different
constructions, one with no preposition (''Rick gave Kate a coffee'') and one
with the preposition ''to'' (''Rick gave a coffee to Kate''). Whenever
speakers use such a verb, they have to choose between these two constructions.
This choice is determined in part by some features of the two objects: all
other things being equal, speakers are more likely to use whichever
construction places a shorter object before a longer one, an animate object
before an inanimate one, a plural object before a singular one, and so on.
This system of feature-based choices is established very well for adult
language using language corpora and experiments, but there are fewer corpora
and experimental studies of child language. Because of this dearth of data, it
is unknown how children acquire this choice-making system: do they start
making choices determined by only one of these features and add the others
piecemeal, or do they learn the system wholesale and only tweak which features
win out over others?

The three experiments in this thesis are a first step in answering this
question. They are designed to map out the effects of length, animacy, and
grammatical number on these choices over the course of typical first language
acquisition. Because animacy is less stable a concept than length and number,
the first experiment measures children’s and adults’ conceptions of animacy
more indirectly. The second experiment presents the same participants with
sentences using give where one of the two objects has been replaced by noise,
and measures which of a constrained set of options they gaze at and which they
choose to fill the noise gap. This provides measures of their expectations and
preferences for the length, animacy, and number of the objects in these gaps.
The third experiment has participants reproduce give sentences with different
combinations of animacy, number, and construction. Participants reproduce
sentences that conform to their choice-making system more easily.

The results of these three experiments show that children as young as four
years already prefer the animate-before-inanimate order. The
shorter-before-longer preference is not found in any age group when the
difference in lengths is just one syllable. This evidence adds to a growing
body of literature converging on the finding that choices in ordering
phenomena are affected by the same features wherever these phenomena occur,
throughout language acquisition as well as across languages. Data from the
second experiment also substantiates the common assumption that touchscreen
input and eye gaze are both closely linked to attention. This will allow
researchers in the cognitive sciences to use touchscreens as an alternative to
eyetracking more confidently.




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