Nola M. Stephens

Animacy in early child and child-directed transitives: a corpus study

Animacy is an important factor in child language acquisition. Previous research has shown that young children expect subjects of transitives to be animate, have difficulty comprehending transitives with inanimate subjects, and produce most of their transitives with animate subjects and inanimate objects. These results are consonant with the cognitive-based hypothesis that children begin producing transitives with animate subjects (the prototypical case for transitives) and only later add inanimate subjects. This prediction, however, has not been tested directly, and virtually nothing has been reported about the timing and nature of inanimate subject transitives in child speech. The current study provides a detailed investigation of early child and child-directed transitives extracted from four American-English corpora in the CHILDES database. The results indicate that even children as young as 2;0 spontaneously produce transitives with inanimate subjects. Although the frequency of these is low, it is not categorically lower than the frequency in the child's input or in the child's later uses of the given verb. This study also reveals that the semantic types of inanimate subjects in early child transitives are the same as those found in the input. Ultimately, the findings run contrary to the predictions of the cognitive hypothesis and suggest that a verb-by-verb input-based account may best capture the distribution of inanimate subject transitives in early child speech.