Effects of prior discourse on argument realizations in Cantonese-speaking preschool children

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of prior discourse on the choice of referential expressions in Cantonese-speaking preschool children. Participants consisted of 68 Cantonese-speaking children aged 2;6 to 4;11. Twenty adults were recruited as the control group. The experimental design was adopted from the research of Matthew et al. (2006). Child participants were asked to comment on videos with characters performing transitive and intransitive actions. The listener could not see the videos. Referents were prior mentioned in the noun-given condition but not in the null-noun condition. Mean proportion of different response types was calculated. Children aged 3;6 and older used significantly more full nouns and fewer argument omissions in the null-noun condition than in the noun-given condition. The discrepancy increased with age. This differential use of referential expressions reveals child’s early sensitivity to discourse and understanding of discourse effects on referencing. This implies that children are able to learn verb argument structure from parental input in pro-drop languages, like Cantonese, with frequent argument omissions, as they are able to recognize the implicit presence of arguments in discourse omitted for reason of accessibility. No significant effect of sentence construction was found. Further research is warranted to investigate its effect on referential choice.