Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T12:43:05.668Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Real-time comprehension of gender and number in four- to seven-year-old children: a study of the relationship between Italian clitic pronouns and visual picture referents*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2014

MARCO DISPALDRO ,
ANNA RUGGIERO  and
FRANCESCA SCALI
MARCO DISPALDRO*
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy
ANNA RUGGIERO
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy
FRANCESCA SCALI
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy
*
Address for correspondence: Marco Dispaldro, Department of Development Psychology and Socialization, Università degli Studi di Padova, Via Venezia, 8, Padua 35131, Italy. e-mail: marco.dispaldro@unipd.it
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The gender and number of a direct object clitic pronoun are based on the gender and number of the noun to which it refers. Grammatical gender is an intrinsic property of the lexical item that is independent from the natural sex of referents, whereas number is a non-intrinsic feature of nouns based on the conceptual level of quantity. The aim of this paper is to investigate children's ability in matching Italian direct object clitic pronouns to an inanimate visual referent on the basis of number or gender information. The dependent variables are accuracy and response time. A total of sixty-nine children aged from 4;6 to 7;5 participated. The results show that children are more accurate and faster in selecting the referent when they use number information compared to the condition in which this matching operation is led by gender.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , July 2015 , pp. 917 - 931
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by a grant from the University of Padova (Assegno di Ricerca Senior 2011). We are grateful to the children who participated in the study and their parents who gave their consent. We thank the schools for their cooperation. We are indebted to Beatrice Benelli for her helpful comments.

References

REFERENCES

Adani, F., van der Lely, H. K. J., Forgiarini, M. & Guasti, M. T. (2010). Grammatical feature dissimilarities make relative clauses easier: a comprehension study with Italian children. Lingua 120, 2148–66.Google Scholar
Aikhenvald, A. (2000). Classifiers: a typology of noun categorization devices. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (1997). Guidelines for screening infants and children for outer and middle ear disorders, birth through 18 years. In Guidelines for audiologic screening, 15–22. Rockville, MD: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.Google Scholar
Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S. & Trueswell, J. (2007). Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes 22, 527–65.Google Scholar
Belacchi, C. & Cubelli, R. (2012). Implicit knowledge of grammatical gender in preschool children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 41, 295–310.Google Scholar
Bergmann, C., Paulus, M. & Fikkert, P. (2012). Preschoolers’ comprehension of pronouns and reflexives: the impact of the task. Journal of Child Language 39, 777–803.Google Scholar
Bertelli, B. & Bilancia, G. (2006). Batterie per la Valutazione dell'Attenzione Uditiva e della Memoria di Lavoro Fonologica nell'Età Evolutiva. Firenze: Giunti OS.Google Scholar
Caprin, C. & Guasti, M. T. (2009). The acquisition of morphosyntax in Italian: a cross-sectional study. Applied Psycholinguistics 30, 23–52.Google Scholar
Carminati, M. N. (2005). Processing reflexes of the Feature Hierarchy (Person > Number > Gender) and implications for linguistic theory. Lingua 115, 259–85.Google Scholar
Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Crain, S. & Steedman, M. (1985). On not being led up the garden-path: the use of context by psychological parser. In Dowty, D., Kartunnen, L. & Zwicky, A. (eds), Natural language parsing, 320–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
De Vincenzi, M. (1999). Differences between the morphology of gender and number: evidence from establishing coreferences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 28(5), 537–53.Google Scholar
De Vincenzi, M. & Di Domenico, E. (1999). A distinction among phi-features: the role of gender and number in the retrieval of pronoun antecedents. Italian Journal of Linguistics 11(1), 41–74.Google Scholar
Desrochers, A. & Brabant, M. (1995). Interaction entre facteurs phonologiques et sémantiques dans une épreuve de catégorisation lexicale. Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale 49, 240–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dispaldro, M. (2012). Acquisizione della morfologia grammaticale italiana in bambini con sviluppo tipico: una rassegna sugli articoli determinativi, pronomi clitici oggetto e flessione verbale. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 2, 261–87.Google Scholar
Dispaldro, M. & Benelli, B. (2012). Putting singular and plural morphology in context. Journal of Child Language 39, 863–84.Google Scholar
Dispaldro, M., Caselli, M. C. & Stella, G. (2009). Morfologia grammaticale in bambini di 2 anni e mezzo e 3 anni. Psicologia Clinica dello Sviluppo 1, 161–81.Google Scholar
Dispaldro, M., Leonard, L. B. & Deevy, P. (2013). Real-word and nonword repetition in Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment: a study of diagnostic accuracy. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 56, 323–36.Google Scholar
Feigenson, L. & Halberda, J. (2008). Conceptual knowledge increases infants’ memory capacity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(29), 9926–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gernsbacher, M. A. (1989). Mechanisms that improve referential access. Cognition 32, 99–156.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grice, H. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (eds), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hamburger, H. & Crain, S. (1982). Relative acquisition. In Kuczaj, S. (ed.), Language development, vol. 1: syntax and semantics, 245–74. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Harley, H. & Ritter, E. (2002). Person and number in pronouns: motivating a feature-geometric analysis. Language 78, 482–526.Google Scholar
Jakubowicz, C., Nash, L., Rigaut, C. & Gérard, C. L. (1998). Determiners and clitic pronouns in French-speaking children with SLI. Language Acquisition 7, 113–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kail, R. (1994). A method for studying the generalized slowing hypothesis in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37, 418–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Korzen, I. (2003), Anafora associativa: aspetti lessicali, testuali e contestuali. in Italia linguistica anno Mille Italia linguistica anno Duemila, 597–611. Atti del XXXIV congresso internazionale di studi della Società di linguistica italiana (Firenze, 19–21 ottobre 2000), a cura di N. Maraschio et al., Roma, Bulzoni.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: from intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Li, P., Barner, D., Ogura, T., Yang, S. & Carey, S. (2009). Does the conceptual distinction between singular and plural sets depend on language? Developmental Psychology 45(6), 1644–53.Google Scholar
Meroni, L. (2005). Putting children in context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Mulford, R. (1985). Comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender: semantic versus formal factors. Journal of Child Language 12, 443–53.Google Scholar
Munn, A., Miller, K. & Schmitt, C. (2005). Maximality and plurality in children's interpretation of definite. Paper presented at the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.Google Scholar
Nicol, J. L. (1988). Coreference processing during sentence comprehension. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cambridge, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Orsolini, M., Fanari, R. & Di Giacinto, P. (1994). La comprensione dei pronomi clitici nei bambini. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 5, 733–59.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M. & Logrip, M. L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition 73, 89–134.Google Scholar