Comprehension of three word orders in Kuwaiti Arabic child language

The present project is a case study of 68 Kuwaiti children (aged between 4 and 8) who acted out their interpretation of verbal stimuli involving three word orders in Kuwaiti Arabic Subject Verb Object (SVO), Verb Subject Object (VSO) and Topic-Comment (T-C) by using a set of props. The purpose is to...

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Publicado en:Language Sciences Vol. 31; no. 4; pp. 494 - 507
Autores principales: Aljenaie, Khawla, Farghal, Mohammad
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Elsevier B.V. Jul2009
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Jul2009
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      pub: Elsevier B.V.
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        10.1016/j.langsci.2007.10.003
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        atl: Comprehension of three word orders in Kuwaiti Arabic child language
      aug:
        au:
          Aljenaie, Khawla
          Farghal, Mohammad
        affil:
          Department of Communication Science and Languages, College for Women, Kuwait University, Kuwait
          Department of English Language and Literature, College of Arts, Kuwait University, Kuwait
      su:
        Language & languages
        Language acquisition
        Interpersonal communication in children
        Language transfer (Language learning)
        Language awareness in children
        Kuwaitis
        Arabic language -- Terms & phrases
        Arabic language -- Syntax
        Arabic language -- Grammar
        Listening comprehension
      sug:
        subj:
          Language & languages
          Language acquisition
          Interpersonal communication in children
          Language transfer (Language learning)
          Language awareness in children
          Kuwaitis
          Arabic language -- Terms & phrases
          Arabic language -- Syntax
          Arabic language -- Grammar
          Listening comprehension
      keyword: Acquisition of Kuwaiti Arabic
      ab: The present project is a case study of 68 Kuwaiti children (aged between 4 and 8) who acted out their interpretation of verbal stimuli involving three word orders in Kuwaiti Arabic Subject Verb Object (SVO), Verb Subject Object (VSO) and Topic-Comment (T-C) by using a set of props. The purpose is to investigate the way Kuwaiti children comprehend various word orders, and empirically check the acquisitional order of SVO, VSO, and T-C sentences. The general assumption is that Kuwaiti children will manifest higher comprehension of the unmarked word order SVO than the marked VSO, and even more so than the supposedly more marked T-C sentences, where the comment must include a resumptive pronoun that is co-referential with the topic, which is the patient in the T-C sentence. In both marked word orders, children must ignore the word order cue and recover thematic roles from agreement and, possibly, from other semantic, pragmatic and prosodic cues. The results show that younger children show a preference for the SVO order while older ones exhibit a strong preference for both SVO and VSO orders. The increasing discrepancy in performance on the three word orders by all subjects reflects improvement on T-C, which implies the acquisition of SVO and VSO before T-C. Further, older subjects rely on gender agreement to interpret reversible sentences, which suggests that it is a cue in the assignment of the actor role.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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          year: 2009
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