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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 22, 2025

Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking IPL: Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism

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Published on: December 14, 2012

Children Learn Causatives Despite Pervasive Ellipsis: Evidence from Turkish.

Guanghao You¹, Ebru Ger^2,3, Moritz M Daum^2,4

¹Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland.

Journal of Child Language

|May 21, 2025

Summary

Children learn causatives despite pervasive argument ellipsis in speech. Reliable argument expression is not crucial for acquiring morphological and lexical causatives in natural language environments.

Keywords:

Turkish argument structure causative ellipsis

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Area of Science:

Child language acquisition
Linguistics
Developmental psychology

Background:

Causative constructions are vital for expressing cause-and-effect relationships.
Previous research suggests argument structure aids causative learning.
The role of argument expression reliability in causative acquisition remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how children acquire morphological and lexical causatives.
To examine the influence of argument structure and expression reliability on causative learning.
To test the hypothesis that reliable argument expression is key for causative acquisition.

Main Methods:

Longitudinal study of 7 children aged 8-36 months.
Analysis of child-directed speech for argument ellipsis patterns.
Correlation analysis between ellipsis frequency and causative acquisition milestones.

Main Results:

Ellipsis is prevalent in child-directed speech for both lexical and morphological causatives.
Pervasive ellipsis did not impede the children's acquisition of causatives.
No significant correlation found between argument expression reliability and causative learning.

Conclusions:

Argument structure may not be a primary driver for learning causatives in naturalistic settings.
Children can acquire causatives even with frequent argument ellipsis.
Findings challenge the necessity of reliable argument expression for early causative acquisition.