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Acquiring the transitive construction in English: the role of animacy and pronouns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1998

KELLY DODSON  and
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
KELLY DODSON
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
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Abstract

Twenty-four children between 2;5 and 3;1 were taught two nonce verbs. Each verb was used multiple times by an adult experimenter to refer to a highly transitive action involving a mostly animate agent (including the child herself) and a patient of varying animacy. One of the verbs was modelled in the Two-Participants condition in which the experimenter said: ‘Look. Big Bird is dopping the boat’. The other verb was modelled in the No-Participant condition in which the experimenter named the Two-Participants but did not use them as arguments of the novel verb: ‘Look what Big Bird is doing to the boat. It's called keefing’. It was found that whereas many children produced transitive sentences with the Two-Participants verb, only children close to 3;0 produced transitive sentences with the No-Participant verb. This age is somewhat younger than previous studies in which young children were asked to produce transitive sentences with two lexical nouns for the two animate participants. Also, re-analyses of previously published studies in which children learned novel verbs in sentence frames without arguments found that the few transitive sentences produced by children under 2;6 involved either I or me as subject. One hypothesis is thus that as young children in the third year of life begin to construct a more abstract and verb-general transitive construction, this construction initially contains only certain types of participants expressed in only certain kinds of linguistic forms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , October 1998 , pp. 605 - 622
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Thanks to Nameera Akhtar and Patty Brooks for their very helpful ideas and comments on this research; to Amy Futernick, Mary Gabbert, Scott Linacre, Sharon Hutchins, and Byron Robinson for help with data collection, coding, and analysis; to Jane Reinberg for collecting the data for the Russian-speaking children; and to the children, teachers, and directors at Druid Hills Presbyterian Child Care Center, Druid Hills United Methodist Preschool, Clifton Child Care Center, and Georgia Baptist Child Care Center. This research was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation to the second author.