Experimental evidence for agent–patient categories in child language

Abstract

ABSTRACTEvidence provided by contrastive word order for agent and patient semantic categories in young children's spontaneous speech is confounded. Agents (effectors of the action) tend to be animate; patients (entities acted upon) tend to be inanimate. In an experiment designed to circumvent this confounding and to test young children's linguistic sensitivity to the role an entity plays in the action, nine children (2; 4·0–2; 11·5) described actions involving animate and inanimate entities playing both agent and patient roles. Four linguistic measures were observed. On every measure agents were treated differently from patients. For the most part, these agent–patient differences persisted when animate and inanimate entities were examined separately. These results provide evidence for the child's intention to talk about the role an entity plays, independent of its animateness, and also suggest that the child uses role-defined linguistic categories like AGENT and PATIENT to communicate these relational intentions.