Some factors influencing ellipsis in the speech of pre-school children

Sažetak

Two principal schools are current in evolutioary psycholinguistics, the functional and the transformational. The transformationalists (following the theories of Chomsky) explain the forms of children’s speech and the evolution of linguistic categories in terms of in-born physiological substrata, while the functionalists talk about the orientation of the substratum exclusively towards grammatical elaboration. Three factors were considered to influence the appearance of ellipsis in the sentence (in addition to chronological age), viz.: whether the agents and the objects were introduced perceptively in the preceding context, whether the agents and objects were animate, and, finally, whether the sentence element was agent or object. A hypothesis arose from all this that younger children would use ellipsis more frequently than older children of pre-school age. This hypothesis is in conformity with Piaget’s characterization of the speech of »younger« and »older« children. The ultimate aim of the investigation was to construct the ideal prototype of the ellipted element with different ages of pre-school children. In other words: to find which sentence element shows greatest probability of ellipsis. Two hypotheses were put forward: (1) that ellipsis would appear more frequently if the elements were introduced perceptively, (2) that ellipsis would be more frequent with agents than objects of action. Twenty subjects were tested in the course of the experiment, ten of them were between 3 and 4 (M = 3.5) and ten were between 5 and 6 (M = 5.5). The analysis of the variance revealed a significant effect of age, i. e. greater frequency of ellipsis with the younger group. Perceptive introduction had also an important effect, and the same applies to the relation between the agent and the object of the action. The probability ,of ellipsis is greater with the agent of the action as well as with elements that were introduced perceptively. The effect of animateness is also significant and nouns referring to people and animals were ellipted more often than nouns referring to inanimate things. The most important result of the experiment is as follows: the ideal prototype of the ellipted element is the human agent that has been introduced perceptively. With other combinations of factors the probability of ellipsis is much smaller. This is, then, in conforrmity with the functional theory which asserts that the form of language and the development of child’s speech could be explained in terms of, and within the framework of, functional and practical requirements of the communication system.