The Role of Syntactic Structure in Children's Sentence Comprehension: Evidence From the Dative

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that young children quickly acquire knowledge of how the structure of their language encodes meaning. However, this work focused on structurally simple transitives. The present studies investigate childrens' comprehension of the double object dative (e.g., I gave him the box) and the prepositional dative (e.g., I gave the box to him). In Study 1, 3- and 4-year-olds correctly preferred a transfer event reading of prepositional datives with novel verbs (e.g., I'm glorping the rabbit to the duck) but were unable to interpret double object datives (e.g., I'm glorping the duck the rabbit). In Studies 2 and 3, they were able to interpret both dative types when the nouns referring to the theme and recipient were canonically marked (Study 2; I'm glorping the rabbit to Duck) and, to a lesser extent, when they were distinctively but noncanonically marked (Study 3: I'm glorping rabbit to the Duck). Overall, the results suggest that English children have some verb-general knowledge of how dative syntax encodes meaning by 3 years of age, but successful comprehension may require the presence of additional surface cues.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful thanks go to the children who took part in the research reported here and their parents and teachers. Thanks are also due to Ben Ambridge, Sonia Mariscal, Julian Pine, and the anonymous reviewers who provided comments on a previous draft. Portions of this paper were presented at the School of Psychology at the University of Lancaster, the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, the Centre for Research in Language at the University of California in San Diego, and the 2009 Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting.

Notes

¹There are probably subtle differences between the meanings of double object and prepositional datives (Pinker, 1989). However, the present study uses transfer of possession actions which are prototypically ditransitive and occur freely in both forms.

² Gropen et al. (1989) also report an elicitation study with novel verbs but with much older children (6–8 years old).

³Target side was included because there was a significant effect in Study 1.