S.V.O. a linguistic universal? A study in developmental psycholinguistics☆

Abstract Sixty-eight French-speaking children between the ages of 2 years, 10 months and 7 years were asked to guess the meaning of 30 deviant three-word utterances, resembling utterances spontaneously produced by very young children. Utterances consisted of two nouns (without articles) and a verb (in the infinitive), or one noun and two verbs. Verbs were either transitive or intransitive; the two Ns plus transitive V combinations transpose into either reversible (boy pushes girl) or irreversible (boy opens box) sentences. All the three-word combinations were presented in the six possible word orders. According to age, children chose different strategies to interpret the utterances: the developmental trend was clearly towards the strategy by which the relative position of the two nouns determined the interpretation: the first noun was taken to be the subject; the second noun the object.