Children's identification of actors and patients in prototypical and nonprototypical sentence types

This research examined if children organize language categories around a prototype. Based on previous research with adults, the hypothesis held that the prototypical transitive sentence contains an animate actor and patient and a highly prototypical verb. The question of interest was if factors that contribute to adult judgments of sentence prototypicality (such as actor-patient animacy and verb prototypicality) affect young childrens' accuracy in correctly identifying sentence actors and patients. That is, are children more likely to make correct identifications in prototypical sentences? Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-old children were trained to to ntify sentence actors and patients in prototypical or nonprototypical sentences and then tested for generalization to sentences of other types. Two factors, verb prototypicality and animacy of sentence participants, combined to influence children's accuracy in actor/patient identification. Regardless of training condition, children produced more correct responses to sentences with animate actors than to sentences with inanimate actors. There was an interaction with verb prototypicality such that it was more typical for inanimate actors to act upon animate patients with what are otherwise low prototype verbs (e.g., low in action, low in intentionality). The results of the study are consistent with the view that similar cognitive mechanisms operate in language and in other nonlinguistic cognitive domains.