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

Kód výsledku v 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>

Výsledek na webu

<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>

Jazyk výsledku

angličtina

Název v původním jazyce

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

Popis výsledku v původním jazyce

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.

Název v anglickém jazyce

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

Popis výsledku anglicky

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.

Druh

J_imp - Článek v periodiku v databázi Web of Science

CEP obor

—

OECD FORD obor

60203 - Linguistics

Projekt

—

Návaznosti

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Rok uplatnění

2021

Kód důvěrnosti údajů

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

Název periodika

Cognitive Science

ISSN

0364-0213

e-ISSN

—

Svazek periodika

45

Číslo periodika v rámci svazku

9

Stát vydavatele periodika

US - Spojené státy americké

Počet stran výsledku

28

Strana od-do

"e13038"

Kód UT WoS článku

000697527300010

EID výsledku v databázi Scopus

2-s2.0-85115257994