Universal and Language-Specific Patterns in the Acquisition of Verb Argument Structures in German

ABSTRACT

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical (The sheep goes.) and ungrammatical (*The sheep goes the horse.) sentences. Similar to English, German speakers changed the verb meaning depending on the number of sentence NPs which was more evident in younger than older participants. However, the effect was generally smaller in German than in English. This result indicates that learners of case marked languages as German rely less on the number of sentence NPs when learning and interpreting verb argument structures. Much more relevant seems to be the case marking cue for learners of these languages.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all the parents and children for participating in our study as well as the schools and kindergartens for their permission to run the experiments in their buildings. Further, we thank Josefine Hohloch and Kirsten Heeren for their support in collecting and coding the data, Joe Emonds for comments on an earlier draft, and Henry and Lila Gleitman for helping to launch this line of research.

Notes

1. For clarification: By the number of NPs it is meant the number of argument NPs, because not every NP is required by the verb’s semantics (as adjunct NPs) and, thus, will not help the child to focus on the core participants of the referent event.

2. Lacking published empirical data, we are not able to say how frequently the omission of subject-NPs occurs in German as compared to Turkish.

3. We also presented object-first sentences (Den Esel trägt das Schwein. The-MASCULINE-ACC donkey carries the-NEUTER-NOM pig) to the German speakers, but even adults struggled to comprehend this sentence structure correctly. So we excluded this data from later analysis. See results in paragraph German data-Grammatical sentences.

4. We asked 30 adult native speakers of German (16 female) to rate each verb in its grammatical and ungrammatical sentence frame. Adults rated the use of each verb in an ungrammatical sentence frame as significantly less acceptable, that is, more ungrammatical, than its use in a grammatical sentence frame, all ts ≥ 6.56, all ps < .001. Furthermore, we found that sentences like *The cow brings were more acceptable for adults than sentences like *The cow comes the donkey, F(1, 29) = 60.14, p < .001.

5. For all subject ANOVAs in the current and in the following sections item analyses were performed. These yielded generally similar findings, albeit with somewhat lower levels of significance, because of the smaller number of items.

6. For example, the sentence *The giraffe takes (the chicken) next to the tiger can be interpreted (a) locative: The giraffe takes the chicken which is located next to the tiger, or (b) directional: The giraffe takes the chicken to the place next to the tiger. (see Naigles et al., 1992: 421f.).