Word order and information status in child language

Abstract

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously mentioned referents ("old" or accessible information) first, before they introduce referents that have not yet been mentioned in the discourse ("new" or inaccessible information) at both sentential and phrasal levels. Here we ask whether a similar principle influences ordering patterns at the phrasal level in children who are in the early stages of combining words productively. Prior research shows that when conveying semantic relations, children reproduce language-specific ordering patterns in the input, suggesting that they do not have a bias for any particular order to describe "who did what to whom". But our findings show that when they label "old" versus "new" referents, 3- to 5-year-old children prefer an ordering pattern opposite to that of adults (Study 1). Children's ordering preference is not derived from input patterns, as "old-before-new" is also the preferred order in caregivers' speech directed to young children (Study 2). Our findings demonstrate that a key principle governing ordering preferences in adults does not originate in early childhood, but develops: from new-to-old to old-to-new.

Learning to order words: A connectionist model of heavy NP shift and accessibility effects in Japanese and English

“…Furthermore, conceptual factors like animacy and referential availability can influence the order of nouns in a conjunction when it is presented in isolation both in adults and children (Byrne & Davidson, 1985;McDonald et al, 1993;Narasimhan & Dimroth, 2008). Another challenge for the theory comes from languages that allow scrambling .…”

“…This information made use of the prominence units, because the order of nouns in conjunctions have been shown to be sensitive to factors related to referential/discourse prominence (Bock & Irwin, 1980;Gleitman, January, Nappa, & Trueswell, 2007;Narasimhan & Dimroth, 2008). Just as the prominence units signaled the order of arguments in transitive and dative structures, the prominence units were also set to signal the order of nouns in conjunctions.…”

Effects of focus and definiteness on children's word order: evidence from German five-year-olds' reproductions of double object constructions

“…This also points to the fact that linearization principles should not be considered independently of prosodic principles in a given language. The fact that the interaction of information status and prosodic structure may not be fully understood so far may also contribute to the heterogeneous picture that arose with respect to the impact of information structure on word order in the previous studies reported in the ‘Introduction’ (de Marneffe et al ., 2012; Hickmann et al , 1996; Narasimhan & Dimroth, 2008; Stephens, 2010). …”

“…Narasimhan and Dimroth (2008) investigated the ordering of given and new information in three- and five-year-old German-speaking children. In their study, productions of coordinated DPs with one new and one given referent were elicited.…”

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

“…Regarding word order, several studies suggest that in contrast to a cross-linguistic tendency to place given before new information in adult language, children aged three to six generally place new before given constituents, although contrasting findings have also been reported (Narasimhan and Dimroth, 2008, and references therein). In a study using the same materials and method as the present study, Sauermann et al (2011) found no general tendency for either given-before-new or new-before-given order in the productions of German 4-year-olds.…”