Topic as Starting Point for Syntax

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Abstract
The study of syntactical development has traditionally relied on procedures intended to assess children's existing knowledge of the language they are learning. In contrast, the current work reports the outcomes of three experiments in which children were taught a sentence form that they did not as yet understand. We wanted to find out (i) whether acquisition of word order relations for this form would be affected by pragmatic ordering principles, such as a preference for naming animates before inanimates or for naming a perceptually more salient entity before a less salient one, and (ii) whether referent animacy would be included in children's rules for word order. Sixty children aged 2-10 to 5-0 imitated passive sentence descriptions of pictures (Experiment 1) or enacted events (Experiments 2 and 3), such as "The girl is (being) chased by the boy." Interspersed among the imitation items were pictures or events that the children were asked to describe in the "new way" by themselves (probes). Children produced more passives to probes (a) when animates were affected by inanimates than when animates affected inanimates or other animates and (b) when the acted-upon referent was perceptually more salient than the actor. After training, the children were asked to use passives to describe a new set of pictures in which animates affected either animate, dynamic inanimate, or static inanimate entities. Children who had encountered animate acted-upons in training produced more passives to animates than to inanimates, and more to dynamic than to static inanimates. The results are interpreted as evidence that pragmatic factors play a critical role in the acquisition of word-order knowledge. In addition, they demonstrate that the acquisition of syntax can be subjected to controlled study. As such, the work provides a paradigm that can be extended beyond the demonstration that children's acquisition of a form can be controlled by appropriate contextual manipulations toward studies specifying the linguistic and nonlinguistic variables that can shape the course of syntactical development.

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