A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentences.

The comprehension of sentences expressing instigative causation (e.g., The horse makes the camel run) was investigated in children between the ages of 2;0 and 4;4, speaking English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. Crosslinguistic differences in development reveal the roles of morphological (causative particle, case inflection) and syntactic devices (periphrasis, word order) in guiding children’s processing of such constructions. It is suggested that local cues (inflectional suffixes, particles, specialized causative verb forms) contribute to the more rapid development of sentence processing strategies in Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. The word order systems of English and Italian, which require that the listener hold the entire sentence pattern in mind in order to determine underlying semantic relations, contribute to slower development on this task, Children’s comprehension of causative constructions was studied as one part of a large cross-linguistic investigation conducted in Berkeley, Rome, Dubrovnik and Istanbul (Aksu, 1978; Clancy, Jacobsen and Silva, 1976; Johnston and Slobin, 1977; Radulovic, 1975; Slobin, 1978; Slobin and Bever, 1978). Our overall concern is the effect of grammatical form on the developing ability to express basic concepts in language. The data consists of crosslinguistic differences in the rate and pattern of acquisition of the means for encoding notions of space, time, agency and causation. *This study is part of the Berkeley Cross-Linguistic Acquisition Project (Dan I. Slobin, Principal Investigator), carried out with generous and appreciated support from the William T. Grant Foundation to the Institute of Human Learning and from NIMH to the Language-Behavior Research Laboratory of the University of California. The investigation was designed in collaboration with Ayhan Aksu, Francesco Antinucci, Thomas G. Bever, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Judith R. Johnston and Ljubica Radulovid. We gratefully acknowledge the labors of our testers: Penny Boyes-Braem, Judith R. Johnston and Gail Loewenstein Holland in the United States; Rosanna Bosi and Wanda Gianelli in Italy; Ljubica Radulovid and Emma Zalovic in Yugoslavia; and Ayla Algar and Alev Orhon in Turkey. Reprint requests should be sent to: Dan I. Slobin, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A. 4 Mary Sue Ammon and Dan I. Slobin In the present study we are concerned with forms for the expression of instigative causation-that is, situations in which one agent impels another agent to act. English has a variety of means-lexical, morphological and syntactic-for such expressions. Here we consider the productive expression most accessible to children: the periphrastic construction using make as a causative verb, as in, “You made me do it.” The four languages studied-English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish-have different means for the production of such expressions. The first three, all Indo-European SVO (subject-verb-object) languages, have similar periphrastic constructions, differing in regard to the roles of word order and case inflection. By contrast, Turkish, an agglutinative SOV language, encodes causation by the insertion of one or more causative particles in the verb. Table 1 compares the productive causative expressions in the four languages, using one of the sentences from the investigation. TABLE 1, Comparison of causative constructions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish English The horse makes NOUN VERB causatiue third person Italian I1 cavallo [the horse] NOUN fa [makes] VERB causative third person