An experimental investigation of a putative linguistic universal: Marking and the indirect object

Two experiments investigated how children acquire knowledge of the direct and the indirect object in terms of linguistic marking. This was done in order to test experimentally the psychological validity of a putative linguistic universal which holds that children should expect a marked linguistic form to be the indirect object. In the two experiments, an artificial language which marked these forms was used. This language eliminated the preposition “to” as well as word order as cues in learning the experimental forms. One group heard the indirect object as the marked form in the artificial language, and another group heard the direct object as the marked form. The linguistic theory would predict that the former group would be superior in learning the artificial language. However, using error scores, no difference was found between the two groups. This negative result was also independent of whether a child had achieved mastery of the normal English constructions involving direct and indirect object relationships. Reasons for the failure to find any evidence for this universal are discussed.