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Download fileThe Development of Sentence Interpretation in Hungarian
journal contribution
posted on 1985-04-01, 00:00 authored by Brian MacwhinneyBrian Macwhinney, Csaba Pléh, Elizabeth BatesIn order to test certain assumptions of the "competition model" of B.
MacWhinney, E. Bates, and R. Kliegl (1984 Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior, 23, 127-150), we conducted three experiments on sentence
understanding by Hungarian preschool children. According to the competition
model, the listener uses verbal cues in a probabilistic manner to make judgments
concerning the grammatical roles of the different noun phrases in a sentence. The
order in which children develop control of these cues is said to depend on cue
validity. The cues manipulated in these experiments included case marking, word
order, animacy, stress, phonological detectability, and person of the possessor.
The studies examined the impact of these cues on the choice of an agent. The
results were well predicted by the competition model. Experiments 2 and 3 indicated
that ungrammatical sentences are processed in ways similar to comparable
grammatical sentences, thus supporting the ecological validity of the experimental
method and of previous research based on the use of this method.
There was also evidence for the use in Hungarian of (1) a first-noun-as-agent