Dan I. Slobin

Grammatical transformations and sentence comprehension in childhood and adulthood

Children and adults verified sentences of four grammatical types—“kernel,” passive, negative, and passive negative—with respect to pictures. The pictures presented situations which were either reversible, in that the object of action could also serve as the subject, or nonreversible, in that the object could not normally serve as the subject. Chomskys syntactic competence model correctly predicted that passives would take more time to evaluate than kernels, and passive negatives more time than negatives; but semantic and psychological factors are required to explain the finding that syntactically simple negatives took more time than relatively more complex passives. Making sentences nonreversible largely washed out the difference in syntactic complexity between active and passive sentences, making passives about as easy as kernels, and passive negatives about as easy as negatives. It is argued that nonreversibility facilitates comprehension of passive (both affirmative and negative) sentences in that, although the normal subject-object order is reversed, it is still clear which of the two nouns is subject and which object. The syntactic theory also does not account for an obtained interaction between truth value and affirmation-negation. All of the factors considered—syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic—are important in accounting for the performance of S s as young as six.

Children use canonical sentence schemas: a crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections.

Abstract We propose that children construct a canonical sentence schema as a preliminary organizing structure for language behavior. The canonical sentence embodies the typical features of complete clauses in the input language, and serves as a framework for the application of productive and perceptual strategies. The canonical sentence schema offers a functional explanation of word-order and inflectional strategies based on the childs attempts to quickly master basic communication skills in his or her language. The present research explores sensitivity to the canonical sentence form and to word-order and inflectional perceptual strategies for comprehending simple transitive sentences in monolingual children aged 2;0 to 4;4 in four languages: English (ordered, uninflectional), Italian (weakly ordered, weakly inflectional), Serbo-Croatian (weakly ordered, inflectional), Turkish (minimally ordered, inflectional). The results show that children fail to respond systematically to sequences that violate the canonical sentence form of their particular language. They develop distinct word-order and inflectional strategies appropriate to the regularities of their language. The early behavioral emergence of linguistically appropriate canonical sentences and processing strategies suggests a behavioral foundation for linguistic constraints on the surface form of sentences.

The development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish *

The ability of children between the ages of 2; 0 and 4; 8 to produce locative pre- or postpositions was investigated in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. Across languages, there was a general order of development: (1) ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’, and ‘beside’, (2) ‘between’, ‘back’ and ‘front’ with featured objects, (3) ‘back’ and ‘front’ with non-featured objects. This order of development is discussed in terms of nonlinguistic growth in conceptual ability. Language-specific differences in the general pattern of development are discussed in terms of a number of linguistic factors which may facilitate or retard the childs discovery of the linguistic means for encoding concepts.

RECALL OF FULL AND TRUNCATED PASSIVE SENTENCES IN CONNECTED DISCOURSE.

Ss of ages 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20 retold stories presented in full passive sentences (with mention of actor) and truncated passives (without mention of actor). While there was a general tendency to retell stories in the active voice, this tendency was much more evident in the case of full than truncated passives. It is proposed that the significance attributed to active affirmative declarative sentences by earlier psycholinguistic research be modified, allowing for influence of semantic content upon selection of a particular grammatical form in encoding a sentence. The tendency to retell truncated passives without alteration of syntactic form was most strongly marked in older Ss. Irregular verb forms pose difficulties to young children in attempting to produce passive sentences. Other striking differences between age groups were not noted.

A Case Study of Early Language Awareness

Along with the development of language itself, there emerges a capacity to attend to language and speech as objects of reflection. The development of language awareness is, of course, part of the general development of consciousness and self-consciouness. One can distinguish levels of metalinguistic capacity, from the dimly conscious or preconscious speech monitoring which underlies self-correction, to the concentrated, analytic work of the linguist. Much of this route is traversed in the preschool years. The following aspects of language awareness appear, between the ages of two and six: (1) self-corrections and re-phrasings in the course of ongoing speech; (2) comments on the speech of others (pronunciation, dialect, language, meaning, appropriateness, style, volume, etc.); (3) explicit questions about speech and language; (4) comments on own speech and language; (5) response to direct questions about language.

Aphasia in Turkish: Speech production in Broca's and Wernicke's patients ☆

Turkish speech production was studied in 7 Brocas and 10 Wernickes aphasics. Turkish is an agglutinative language, with few free-standing closed-class morphemes. The speech of Brocas patients was not telegraphic; although nonfluent, noun and verb suffixes were used appropriately. The speech of Wernickes aphasics was fluent, using a wide range of often inappropriate forms. Both groups used appropriate nominal morphology. Brocas patients used a limited set of verb forms in contextually appropriate fashion. Wernickes patients used a wide range of verb forms, all morphosyntactically correct, but often semantically anomalous. Both groups retained canonical subject-object-verb word order and controlled various types of pragmatically appropriate word order variation. It is proposed that aphasic speech patterns reflect retrieval problems rather than impairment of a portion of the language system.

A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentences☆

The comprehension of sentences expressing instigative causation (e.g., The horse makes the camel run) was investigated in children between the ages of 2;0 and 4;4, speaking English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. Crosslinguistic differences in development reveal the roles of morphological (causative particle, case inflection) and syntactic devices (periphrasis, word order) in guiding children’s processing of such constructions. It is suggested that local cues (inflectional suffixes, particles, specialized causative verb forms) contribute to the more rapid development of sentence processing strategies in Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. The word order systems of English and Italian, which require that the listener hold the entire sentence pattern in mind in order to determine underlying semantic relations, contribute to slower development on this task, Children’s comprehension of causative constructions was studied as one part of a large cross-linguistic investigation conducted in Berkeley, Rome, Dubrovnik and Istanbul (Aksu, 1978; Clancy, Jacobsen and Silva, 1976; Johnston and Slobin, 1977; Radulovic, 1975; Slobin, 1978; Slobin and Bever, 1978). Our overall concern is the effect of grammatical form on the developing ability to express basic concepts in language. The data consists of crosslinguistic differences in the rate and pattern of acquisition of the means for encoding notions of space, time, agency and causation.

Relating Narrative Events in Translation

We must assume that translators strive to maintain or enhance the force and vividness of the source text. Thus the use of translations provides a particularly stringent test of each language’s capacities (within the limits, of course, of the skills of individual translators). The translation task gives us a window into the maximum possibilities of a language, as it strives to adapt to the demands of a source language. Even under these strong demand factors, verb-framed languages apparently are less concerned with the domain of manner of motion than are satellite-framed languages (though with some possibilities of expanded attention to manner using special means). And verb-framed languages break paths up into somewhat different sorts of segments. Nevertheless, each of the translations of The hobbit provides a great and gripping story—the same essential story that Tolkien must have had in mind. The last sentence of Berman and Slobin’s Relating events in narrative is an appropriate conclusion to this little study of translation as well: “We are left, then, with a new respect for the powerful role of each individual language in shaping its own world of expression, while at the same time representing but one variant of a familiar and universally human pattern” (1994: 641).

Sentence comprehension in aphasia in two clear case-marking languages

Studies of aphasia in Indo-European languages point to a selective vulnerability of morphological case marking in sentence comprehension. However, in case-marking languages such as German and Serbo-Croatian, the use of case marking to express formal grammatical gender diminishes the clarity of grammatical role marking. In Hungarian and Turkish, there are simple and reliable markings for the direct object. These markings are not linked to grammatical gender. Compared to Hungarian, the Turkish accusative marking is somewhat lower in availability, but somewhat higher in detectability. The processing of these cues by aphasics was tested using the design of MacWhinney, Pléh, and Bates (1985. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 178-209). Simple sentences with two nouns and one transitive verb were read to Brocas and Wernickes aphasics, anomics, and control subjects in both Turkey and Hungary. The main effect of case marking was extremely strong. However, this was not true for all groups. The aphasics used the case cue far less than the normals, with the Hungarian Wernickes group showing the greatest loss. Word order variations were largely ignored in all groups whenever the case-marking cue was present. When case marking was absent, Turkish subjects had a clear SOV interpretation for NNV sentences and Hungarians had a clear SVO interpretation for NVN sentences, in accord with basic patterns in their languages. When there was a contrast between the animacy of the two nouns, subjects choose the animate nouns significantly more often. The effect of animacy was particularly strong in Turkish, in accord with basic facts of Turkish grammar. In Hungarian, VNN sentences without case marking were interpreted as VOS when the first noun was inanimate. In Turkish, VNN sentences without case marking were often interpreted as VSO. In general, the aphasic subjects showed a clear preservation of virtually all aspects of their native languages, albeit in a much noisier form. Despite the high reliability of the case-marking cue, it was damaged more than the word order cue in English subjects. The near-chance processing of the case cue by the Wernickes aphasics in Hungarian can probably be attributed to the relatively greater difficulty involved in detecting the Hungarian accusative suffix.

FROM ONTOGENESIS TO PHYLOGENESIS: WHAT CAN CHILD LANGUAGE TELL US ABOUT LANGUAGE EVOLUTION?

There seems to be an irrestible tendency for people to take the child as a model of the primordial state of the species. For the past several centuries, philosophers and psychologists and anthropologists have made analogies between children and animals, children and “primitive” peoples, and, inevitably, children and our proto-hominid ancestors. Advances in developmental and comparative psychology, along with anthropology, have made the first two analogies untenable. Human children are not the same as mature monkeys and apes, and preliterate societies are not childlike. But in the current scientific fascination with the origin of the species, it has become fashionable again to propose that human children are in some ways models of mature proto- or pre-hominids. Nowhere has this proposal received more circulation than in discussions about the evolution of language (e.g., Bickerton, 1990; Givon, 1998). I suggest that this recent form of the recapitualitionist argument will fail. In its classical version, the proposal was abandoned on the basis of evidence from embryology and physiological development. The current proposal, by contrast, is not compatible with what we know about the psycholinguistic development of human children and the processes of historical development of existing human languages. There are three longstanding questions about the role of the child in language evolution and diachrony—that is, the processes whereby language arose in our species and the ceaseless changes of human language once it is present in the species. Briefly, the questions are: