Publications [#351663] of Michael Tomasello

Journal Articles

1. Graf, E; Theakston, A; Lieven, E; Tomasello, M (2013). Subject and object omission in children's early transitive constructions: A discourse-pragmatic approach. Applied Psycholinguistics, 36(3), 701-727. [doi]
   (last updated on 2025/06/16)

   Abstract:
   This paper investigates discourse effects on the provision of both subjects and objects and investigates whether pragmatic discourse features govern the realization/omission of both constituents alike. In an elicitation study, we examined how the discourse-pragmatic feature contrast, as applied to the subject, verb, or object of a transitive utterance affected the provision of elements in the remainder of the sentence when all elements were previously introduced. The results showed that 3.5-year-old children were more likely to realize a contrasted argument with a lexical noun but more likely to omit the argument when it was not part of a contrast, regardless of its subject or object status. This suggests that contrast presents a unifying discourse feature for argument omission in language development.