Surface cues and the development of given/new interpretation

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs children develop language, they also acquire strategies to utilize surface forms to interpret the meaning and functions of sentences. This study investigated how Chinese-speaking children (aged 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13) and adults utilize structural and prosodic cues to interpret the pragmatic function of given and new information intrasententially. The results revealed that: (a) children did not utilize word order cues effectively in NVN sentences with normal stress; (b) children utilized the marked grammatical structure of passives and pseudoclefts more effectively than clefts; (c) when stress converged or competed with word order or syntactic structures, children responded nonuniformly; and (d) animacy was a factor that affected children's interpretation of given versus new. Interaction effects are discussed in light of the Competition Model.