2018 Sat Poster 6533

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

The status of the SVO word order in Czech children’s productions
F. Smolík

Czech is a language with SVO as the basic, canonical word order pattern but it allows for all possible permutations under certain pragmatic conditions. Children thus must learn the basic word order pattern while being exposed to considerable variation in the input. At the same time, there is evidence that children acquiring some languages with variable word orders have problems understanding the non-canonical word orders (Dittmar et al., 2008; Schaner-Wolles, 1989). This raises the question of whether the special status of the nominative-initial SVO orders is reflected in children’s productions as well.

The key study described in this paper examined the use of various word orders in spontaneous language transcripts from 54 children aged 2;5 to 2;7 that were collected during a laboratory visit. All multi-word utterances containing a transitive verb were extracted, using only complete and intelligible utterances, and excluding utterances with periphrastic verb forms. A total of 280 utterances were identified and coded coded for verb transitivity, word order, and whether the arguments were realized by pronouns or full nouns. Results are summarized in Table 1. Children rarely use full transitive sentences with subjects and objects. If they do so, they use the canonical word order and avoid the inverted object-initial OVS order. However, there are numerous examples of utterances with the object argument only (as Czech is a pro-drop language), and with subject arguments only (in utterances with intransitive verbs). In these utterances, there are numerous examples of OV and VS word order not conforming to the basic SVO pattern. Children thus show word order flexibility and rely primarily on case marking in third-year productions, even though their comprehension of noncanonical word orders is delayed.

Two subsequent syntactic priming experiments (N=31 and 21, respectively, ages 3 to 5) were used to elicit picture descriptions in children and test their use of non-canonical word orders. In these experiments, children repeated picture descriptions after the examiner. The descriptions were either SVO or OVS sentences. After each repetition, children described subsequent pictures of transitive actions. Experiment 1 involved between-subject priming manipulation (same child imitated both SVO and OVS primes), Experiment 2 varied the primes between-subjects (each child only heard primes of one type, SVO or OVS). Children did not produce OVS sentences in picture descriptions even after they produced accurate imitations of OVS sentences as primes (see Table 2). However, they were sensitive to the prime word order, as shown by the greater number of non-SVO productions after OVS primes.

Overall, the results suggest that children do not acquire word order in Czech by initially sticking to one word order: the use of word orders is quite flexible well before 3 years of age. At the same time, there is a clear preference for using the SVO word order if both arguments are expressed, and when the objects are not pronouns. This suggests children have abstract representation of the SVO word order, but also know the inflectional means of expressing subject and object arguments.

References

Dittmar, M., Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2008). German Children’s Comprehension of Word Order and Case Marking in Causative Sentences Child Development, 79, 1152 – 1167.

Schaner-Wolles, C. (1989). Strategies in acquiring grammatical relations in German: word order or case marking? Folia Linguistica, 23, 131-156.