Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sentence production relies on the activation of both semanticinformation (e.g. noun animacy) and syntactic frames thatspecify an order for grammatical functions (e.g. subjectbefore object; Levelt, Roelofs & Meyers, 1999). However, itis unclear whether these semantic and syntactic processesinteract (Gámez & Vasilyeva, 2015), and if this changesdevelopmentally. We thus examined the extent to whichanimacy-semantic role mappings in dative prime sentencesand target scenes influenced choice of syntactic structure. 143participants (47 three year olds, 48 five year olds and 48adults) alternated with the experimenter in describinganimations. Animacy mappings for themes and goals wereeither prototypical or non-prototypical and either matched ormismatched across the experimenter’s prime scenes andparticipants’ target elicitation scenes. Prime sentences wereeither double-object datives (e.g. the girl brought the monkeya ball) or prepositional datives (e.g. the girl brought the ballto the monkey). Participants’ target sentences were coded forsyntactic form. All age groups showed a main structuralpriming effect. For the youngest group, animacy-semanticrole mappings facilitated prepositional dative priming. Noanimacy facilitation was found for the older groups. Ourresults demonstrate the changing influence of animacy cueson sentence production through interactions with syntacticstructure over the course of development. The theoreticalimplications of our findings are discussed.