Comprehension and production of word order by 2-year-old children

This study is an attempt to test the predictions made by Chapman and Miller (1975) that (1) productive control of the subject-object relation exceeds comprehension performance based on syntactic form alone, and (2) less linguistically advanced children decode subject-object relations lacking referential support on the basis of a lexical-semantic strategy that assigns animate nouns to subject status and inanimate nouns to object status. Ten children, divided on the basis of mean length of utterance into two groups (average MLU of 2.45 and 3.75, respectively), participated. Comprehension and production of subject-order in semantically reversible sentences with inanimate or animate subject and object was assessed using an object manipulation format. The results obtained provided partial support for the predictions made by Chapman and Miller (1975). The proposed lexical-semantic strategy for comprehension was not employed by the subjects of the present study; these children appeared to use a probable event strategy in determining subject-object assignment. Although productive control of the ordering of subject and object was found to exceed comprehension performance, the facilitating effect of visual cues available during the production trials likely contributed to the observed differences in performance between the two tasks.