Department of Asian Studies, Palacký University Olomouc.
Cogn Sci. 2021 Sep;45(9):e13038. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13038.
It has long been believed across languages that the Agent-First strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the number of overt arguments and the presence of case-marking in Korean, an SOV language with case-marking by dedicated markers. To investigate whether and how these cues affect the operation of this strategy, we measure children's comprehension of a transitive construction (with scrambling and omission of sentential components) in a novel experimental setting where arguments and case markers were obscured to varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find that children do not demonstrate the agent-first interpretation strongly in the noun-verb pattern without case-marking, showing their uncertainty about the thematic role of the nominal when it is both the only argument in the sentence and lacks case-marking. They perform significantly better in the patterns with additional cues, the impact of which is asymmetric by age and by the nature of alignment between cues from word order and case-marking. These findings suggest that, for Korean-speaking children's comprehension of a transitive construction, the Agent-First strategy is activated properly only in conjunction with other types of interpretive cues.
长期以来，人们一直认为，“主语优先”策略是一种理解启发式，它将第一个名词映射到主语角色上，这是一种普遍的认知偏见，会自动且忠实地应用于儿童的理解。本研究探讨了这种策略如何与韩语中的语法线索（如显性论元的数量和格标记的存在）相互作用，韩语是一种具有格标记的 SOV 语言，其格标记由专用标记表示。为了研究这些线索是否以及如何影响该策略的运作，我们在一个新颖的实验设置中测量了儿童对及物结构（通过移位和句子成分省略）的理解，在该设置中，通过声学掩蔽在不同程度上掩盖了论元和格标记。我们发现，在没有格标记的名词-动词模式中，儿童并没有强烈地表现出主语优先的解释，这表明他们在名词既没有格标记，又是句子中唯一的论元时，对其主题角色感到不确定。他们在具有额外线索的模式中的表现明显更好，这种影响在年龄和词序与格标记之间的对齐性质方面存在不对称性。这些发现表明，对于韩语儿童对及物结构的理解，“主语优先”策略只有与其他类型的解释线索结合使用才能正确激活。
