“You’ve always got to wash your hands before you eat food” – Complex sentences in English
child-directed speech
Young children appear to have difficulty in comprehending and producing complex
sentences (e.g., temporal, causal or conditional sentences). In experimental settings,
children between three and five years misinterpret sentences like “Before the girl jumped
the gate, she patted the horse” to mean that the jumping occurred first (e.g., Clark, 1971).
They also reverse cause and effect in causal sentences (e.g., Emerson, 1979). Different
factors have been suggested to influence children’s performance, such as iconicity (e.g.,
Clark, 1971) or memory limitations (e.g., Blything, Davies, & Cain, 2015). It has also been
claimed that main-subordinate clause orders should be easier to process and to produce in
general (Diessel, 2005).
One potential factor that has received relatively little attention is the language that children
actually hear as they grow up. How often do children encounter these sentences? What are
the properties of those sentences? Do certain clause orders occur more often than others?
Information about the input is necessary to discern the relative contribution of semantic,
syntactic and processing factors to the acquisition process on the one hand and
familiarity/frequency effects on the other.
I extracted all occurrences of the prepositions/conjunctions after, before, because and if in
about 93 hours of child-directed speech (CDS) from two dense (British) English corpora of
parent-child interaction (Lieven, Salomo, & Tomasello, 2009), starting at the third birthday
and covering six weeks.
I found that temporal terms (before, after) were relatively infrequent, and occurred
primarily in other constructions (e.g., in phrasal verbs). For all sentences types, there
appeared to be clear preferences in clause order. I also found that a large number of
complex sentences contained some sort of additional syntactic complexity (e.g., being
embedded in other subordinate clauses). Furthermore, subjects were often either pronouns
or null forms; definite noun phrases, which often feature in experiments with children, were
relatively rare.
In my talk, I will present these and other analyses of the complex sentences in our data set
and discuss the results in connection with existing findings as well as their implications for
experiments that we are currently planning.
References:
Blything, Liam, Davies, Robert, & Cain, Kate. (2015). Young children’s comprehension of
temporal relations in complex sentences: the influence of memory on performance.
Child Development 86(6), 1922-1934.
Clark, Eve V. (1971). On the acquisition of the meaning of before and after. Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior 10(3). 266-275.
Diessel, Holger. (2005). Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial
clauses. Linguistics 43(3). 449-470.
Emerson, Harriet F. (1979). Children’s comprehension of because in reversible and nonreversible sentences. Journal of Child Language 6(2). 279-300.
Lieven, Elena, Salomo, Dorothé, & Tomasello, Michael. (2009). Two-year-old children's
production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics
20(3). 481-507.