title: Animacy effects on the production of object-dislocated descriptions by Catalan-speaking children.
abstract: This paper presents an experiment that examined two related questions. First, it examined the effects of animacy on the production of different syntactic structures and word orders by Catalan-speaking children. Secondly, it explored the relationship between age and the production of different syntactic structures by these children. The results of a picture description experiment run with eighty Catalan-speaking children aged 4;11 to 11;11 show that participants tended to produce more object-dislocated descriptions when the patient was animate than when the patient was inanimate. The results also show that while the dislocation of object clauses is a construction already consolidated at 5;0, the passive structure is a construction still not fully acquired at 11;0. A comparison between the results obtained in the present experiment with existing results from similar experiments with English-speaking children shows that there is a cross-language difference in the age at which children start producing passive clauses. We argue that frequency of exposure to a particular syntactic structure is an important factor that contributes to the acquisition of that syntactic structure. We also suggest that the effects of animacy on the production of object-dislocated descriptions can be explained by means of conceptual and lexical accessibility.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Plymouth. M.Prat-Sala@wkac.ac.uk
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Prat-Sala
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Shillcock
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sorace
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*