Ditte Boeg Thomsen

Semantic role assignment in Danish children and adults

In resolving “who did what to whom” in an active transitive clause, language users rely on intrasentential cues like word order, animacy and case marking. Most frequently, these cues will all point towards the same interpretation. For instance, in He kicked the ball, the agent he is both cued by word order (preverbal), animacy and case (the nominative). However, in Danish where word order may be subject to pragmatically motivated variations and thus allow for both subject-before-object and object-before-subject structures, conflicts often occur between the word order cue and other formal cues. Previous experiments in a variety of languages have shown that sentences with conflicting formal cues are habitually miscomprehended by pre-school children. For adults, they continue to be more difficult to read and comprehend, often being shallowly processed on the basis of heuristics. However, most previous experiments have presented sentences in isolation, that is, in situations that render a context-demanding structure with conflicting formal cues decidedly inappropriate. In this study we therefore cross the sentence boundary to investigate the interplay between intra- and extrasentential cues in Danish sentence comprehension. Comparing corpus data with recent act-out and reading experiments involving Danish sentences with conflicting formal cues, we argue that context plays an important role in the resolution of semantic role distribution. Children and adults weigh morphosyntactic cues differently, but we find a striking continuity in attention to context across development: when interpreting conflict clauses with object-before-subject structure, both children and adults systematically integrate intra- and extrasentential cues to assign semantic roles.

Spatial inflection and memory for direction in Acazulco Otomí

Abstract Many languages have developed a specialized tool for coding spatial background aspects of events: associated motion morphology. This sparsely investigated verb inflection allows speakers to specify that the situation described by a verb takes place against the background of a motion event, as in “sing (while coming)”. Associated-motion systems typically include deictic information, and when verb inflection requires distinctions between motion in different directions, a thinking-for-speaking account would predict cognitive consequences in the shape of heightened memory for direction. To evaluate this hypothesis, we compare encoding of and memory for direction in an endangered Otopamean language, Acazulco Otomí (Mexico). First, we examine diversity and frequency in the use of associated-motion inflection in pilgrim narratives. Then, we investigate the potential cognitive correlates with a psycholinguistic recognition-memory experiment measuring change-detection performance. Linguistic encoding of background direction was found to support memory for direction, but the sample size was small, and the experiment further indicated that both the associated-motion inflection and its corresponding attention patterns are in a process of dissolution. This echoes findings in Arrernte and Mojeño Trinitario, and we discuss why associated motion might be an especially vulnerable category in language-endangerment contexts.