The influence of discourse context on children’s ordering of “new” and “old” information
-
Bhuvana Narasimhan
and
Christine Dimroth
Abstract
Adult speakers typically order referents that have been previously mentioned in the discourse (“old” referents) before newly introduced referents (“new” referents). But 3–5-year-olds acquiring German exhibit a “new-old” preference in a task involving question-answer sequences (Narasimhan, Bhuvana and Christine Dimroth. 2008. Word order and information status in child language. Cognition 107. 317–329). Here we ask whether we can change 4–5-year-olds’ new-old preference by manipulating the context in order to encourage connected discourse. Findings show that discourse context changes children’s new-old preference. Children produce the new-old order in fluent utterances and the old-new order in non-fluent utterances. Adult controls overwhelmingly prefer the old-new order, even more so when the weight (number of syllables) of the old referent label is greater than that of the new referent label. Our study demonstrates that although cognitive and communicative biases may influence children’s ordering patterns in non-adult-like ways, such patterns are not categorical, but are flexibly influenced by factors such as discourse context.
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Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Contrast relations in the early aber-clauses of German-speaking infants
- Four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch
- Effects of exposure and information structure in native and non-native pronoun resolution in French
- Special Collection in Linguistics Vanguard: “The acquisition of information structure”
- The influence of discourse context on children’s ordering of “new” and “old” information
- Information structure in canonical and scrambled dative orders in L2 Korean
- The roles of givenness and type of referring expression in the comprehension of word order in Russian-speaking children
