2018 Sat Poster 6438

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

The production of Object Relative clauses in Italian-speaking children: a syntactic priming study
C. Manetti, C. Contemori

For children, Object Relative (OR) clauses with two animate noun phrases are difficult to comprehend and to produce across a number of languages (1). One study investigated the priming of ORs in comprehension (Brandt et al., 2017), showing no priming effect in 6-year-old German-speaking children, and a robust priming effect in 9-year-olds, a result explained as a delayed development of abstract representation of ORs in the younger group.

In the present study, we designed a new production task to explore the effects of syntactic priming on the production of ORs, to test the claim of a lack of abstract representations for ORs in 6-year-olds.

We created a picture description task in which pairs of pictures are presented to the participant, and one of the two pictures is described by the experimenter by using an OR. After hearing the prime sentence, the child is shown another pair of pictures and is prompted to describe the patient in one of the two pictures by starting the sentence with This is (Figure1).

One group of 6-year-old Italian-speaking children (N=17) was primed with twelve ORs (OR-only condition, (1)) and was expected to describe a set of twelve target pictures with no lexical overlap with the primes.

A second group of 6-year-olds (N=17) heard twelve prime sentences, consisting of eight ORs and four subject relative clauses (SRs) with a passive verb (2) presented in random order (OR-and-passive SR condition), and then described twelve target pictures. Passive SRs are an alternative structure to ORs: previous production studies using various elicitation techniques demonstrated an increasing preference in producing passive SRs in children from age 6 (and overwhelmingly in adults) when an OR is expected (Contemori & Belletti, 2013).

The results of the priming task revealed a significant decrease in the number of ORs produced by the group tested with the OR-and-passive SR condition compared to the group tested with the OR-only condition (ß=-1.2, SD=0.4, t=-2.766, p<0.005), and a significant increase in the number of passive SRs produced (ß=2.7, SD=0.7, t=3.864, p<0.0001).

The qualitative analysis of the ORs produced indicates that the majority of the productions contained a resumptive clitic pronoun (The cow that the goats are pushing it-cl): 64% in the OR- only; 77% in the OR-and-passive SR condition, confirming that ORs with a gap are hard to produce for Italian-speaking children at this age.

The results of the study demonstrate that children can be primed to produce ORs, and that they have abstract representations for ORs at age 6, contra Brandt et al. (2017). Furthermore, the presence of passive SRs in the input, compared to the condition in which only ORs were primed, reveals how children adjust their language production to the alternative syntactic structure that they encounter in the input (Fine et al., 2013).

Additional testing is currently ongoing to explore the priming effects for ORs in children younger than 6, and to explore children’s adaptation to the input, by manipulating the amount or ORs and passive SRs used as primes in the experiment.

References

Brandt, S. Nitschke, S. & Kidd, E. (2017) Priming the Comprehension of German Object Relative Clauses, Language Learning and Development, 13:3,241-261.

Contemori C., Belletti, A. (2013). Relatives and Passive Object Relatives in Italian speaking children and adults: Intervention in production and comprehension. Applied Psycholinguistics.

Fine, A. B., Jaeger, T. F., Farmer, T. A, & Qian, T. (2013). Rapid expectation adaptation during syntactic comprehension. PloS One, 8,e77661.