Eintrag

Titel

German children use prosody to identify participant roles in transitive sentences

Personen

Thomas Grünloh, Elena Lieven, Michael Tomasello

Jahr

2011

Typ

Aufsatz

Periodikum

Cognitive linguistics

ISSN

0936-5907

Seiten

393 - 419

Band

22

Heft

2

Schlagwörter

Prosodie
Spracherwerb
Wortstellung

Abstract

Most studies examining children's understanding of transitive sentences focus on the morphosyntactic properties of the construction and ignore prosody. But adults use prosody in many different ways to interpret ambiguous sentences. In two studies we investigated whether 5-year-old German children use prosody to determine participant roles in object-first (OVS) sentences with novel verbs (i.e., whether they use prosodic marking to overrule word order as a cue). Results showed that children identify participant roles better in this atypically ordered construction when sentences are realized with the marked, OVS-typical intonational pattern, especially in combination with case marking (Study 1). In a second study, we embedded these sentences into an appropriate discourse context. The results show that, even in the absence of any case marking, children understand participant roles when they are realized with the appropriate intonational pattern. These findings demonstrate that young children can use intonation to help identify participant roles in transitive sentences, at least in marked constructions such as the German object-first (OVS) construction.

https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/bdg/69552