Limits on the Agent-First strategy: Evidence from children’s comprehension of a transitive construction in Korean

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F61989592%3A15210%2F21%3A73608071" target="_blank" >RIV/61989592:15210/21:73608071 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://obd.upol.cz/id_publ/333187957" target="_blank" >https://obd.upol.cz/id_publ/333187957</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13038" target="_blank" >10.1111/cogs.13038</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Limits on the Agent-First strategy: Evidence from children’s comprehension of a transitive construction in Korean

Original language description

It has long been believed across languages that the Agent-First strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children’s comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the number of overt arguments and the presence of case-marking in Korean, an SOV language with case-marking by dedicated markers. To investigate whether and how these cues affect the operation of this strategy, we measure children’s comprehension of a transitive construc- tion (with scrambling and omission of sentential components) in a novel experimental setting where arguments and case markers were obscured to varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find that children do not demonstrate the agent-first interpretation strongly in the noun–verb pattern without case-marking, showing their uncertainty about the thematic role of the nominal when it is both the only argument in the sentence and lacks case-marking. They perform significantly better in the pat- terns with additional cues, the impact of which is asymmetric by age and by the nature of alignment between cues from word order and case-marking. These findings suggest that, for Korean-speaking children’s comprehension of a transitive construction, the Agent-First strategy is activated properly only in conjunction with other types of interpretive cues.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60203 - Linguistics

Project

—

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2021

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Cognitive Science

ISSN

0364-0213

e-ISSN

—

Volume of the periodical

45

Issue of the periodical within the volume

9

Country of publishing house

US - UNITED STATES

Number of pages

28

Pages from-to

"e13038"

UT code for WoS article

000697527300010

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85115257994