Begrip van indefiniete directe objecten bij Nederlandstalige kinderen

Abstract

In child language acquisition, it has been observed that Dutch children seem to have difficulty in comprehending the constraint on interpretation of an indefinite scrambled direct object in, for example, a sentence like Anneke heeft een konijn twee keer geknuffeld ‘Anneke has hugged a (certain) rabbit twice’ (Bergsma-Klein, 1996; Krämer, 2000; Philip, 2003; Unsworth, 2005). They allow a non-specific interpretation, i.e. an interpretation in which two different rabbits are hugged instead of the adultlike specific interpretation of hugging one and the same rabbit twice. Results found for child English indicate, however, that children are quite capable of assigning a specific wide-scope interpretation to an indefinite direct object NP when certain changes are made in the methodology (Musolino & Gualmini, 2002; Gualmini, 2003; Miller and Schmitt, 2004). This suggests that the results found for Dutch are probably due to methodological issues, and that the constraint on interpretation of an indefinite scrambeld direct object is probably acquired at an earlier age than expected. In order to find out whether this is in fact true, three studies were replicated: Gualmini (2003), Miller and Schmitt (2004), and Unsworth (2005). In this thesis, which reports on these three replications, it is argued that Dutch children are indeed able to assign a specific interpretation to an indefinite scrambled direct object at an early age. However, they are only able to do this when helped with discourse integration. This provides support for the ‘Non integration Hypothesis’, as proposed by Krämer (2000).