Competition between word order and case-marking in interpreting grammatical relations: a case study in multilingual...

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Language Acquisition

Background:

• Multilingual children navigate complex grammatical systems in their primary languages.
• Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri exhibit mixed case-marking and word order strategies for grammatical relations.
• Understanding children's reliance on different linguistic cues is crucial for language acquisition research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the sentence interpretation strategies employed by multilingual children.
• To determine the developmental trajectory of strategy use in acquiring grammatical relations.
• To identify potential cross-linguistic influences on strategy selection.

Main Methods:

• A comprehension task involving animated events and spoken transitive sentences was administered.
• Participants included multilingual children aged 5, 7, and 9, and adults.
• Performance was analyzed based on the strategies (case-marking, word order) used to interpret grammatical relations.

Main Results:

• Adults consistently utilized a case-marking strategy across both languages.
• Children initially employed a combination of case-marking and word order strategies.
• A developmental shift was observed, with older children increasingly favoring case-marking.

Conclusions:

• Multilingual children's interpretation of grammatical relations evolves with age.
• Case-marking emerges as a dominant strategy in the acquisition of these Warlpiri languages.
• Developmental patterns suggest a convergence towards adult-like linguistic processing.