Factors contributing to child scrambling: evidence from Ukrainian

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture description task was used to set appropriate semantic contexts to prompt the production of scrambled structures. The results demonstrate that the children scrambled at higher rates in definite/partitive contexts than in indefinite/non-specific contexts. This suggests that children are susceptible to the same semantic features that are associated with NP scrambling in adult production. However, they differ from adults in pronominal scrambling and approximate adult scrambling behaviour only around four to five years. These findings underline the complex nature of syntax/semantics/phonology correlation in scrambling, and contribute to our understanding of the issue of optionality in child and adult grammar.