Kein subjects are hard: Exploring German-speaking children's behavior with negative indefinites.
In this article, we present converging results from three studies investigating children's production or comprehension of the negative indefinite kein in German. An elicited production study found that 3- to 6-year-old children and adults exhibit different patterns with respect to the production of...
| Publicado en: | Language Acquisition Vol. 32; no. 4; pp. 484 - 517 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Oct-Dec2025
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=188316664&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 188316664 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 10489223 7MI jtl: Language Acquisition issn: 10489223 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Oct-Dec2025 vid: 32 iid: 4 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 188316664 10.1080/10489223.2024.2354219 ppf: 484 ppct: 33 formats: tig: atl: Kein subjects are hard: Exploring German-speaking children's behavior with negative indefinites. aug: au: Bill, Cory Driemel, Imke Yatsushiro, Kazuko Hein, Johannes Sauerland, Uli affil: Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin su: Language acquisition Semantics School children German language Cognitive psychology Syntax (Grammar) sug: subj: Language acquisition Semantics School children German language Cognitive psychology Syntax (Grammar) ab: In this article, we present converging results from three studies investigating children's production or comprehension of the negative indefinite kein in German. An elicited production study found that 3- to 6-year-old children and adults exhibit different patterns with respect to the production of kein: children, but not adults, exhibit an asymmetry with respect to the position where they produce negative indefinites, in that they use negative indefinites more frequently in object position than in subject position. A corpus study investigating spontaneous speech replicated this asymmetry for children but this time found it also present for adults. Finally, the asymmetry is corroborated by a comprehension study indicating a processing cost for negative indefinite subjects relative to negative indefinite objects. We argue that these patterns are most straightforwardly captured by an explanation that assumes the decomposition approach to the German negative indefinite kein: rather than a single semantic unit (i.e. negative quantifier), kein is decomposed into a negative part and an indefinite part. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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