Thematic role interpretation and morphosyntactic transfer in Dutch-speaking children using pseudowords

This study examined how first-language knowledge influences children’s comprehension of morphosyntactic cues for thematic role assignment. Twenty Dutch-speaking children (aged 10;0–12;0) completed a picture-selection task testing their interpretation of subject- and object-initial sentences constructed with pseudowords and the morphosyntax of either Dutch ( N = 6), German ( N = 7), or French ( N = 7). Dutch and French share comparable plural-noun marking, whereas Dutch and German share verb morphology. Children exposed to Dutch and French stimuli selected target images accurately in subject-initial structures. In object-initial sentences they selected the reversed image, indicating that they interpreted these sentences as SVO. These children rely on canonical word order cues over cues of subject-verb agreement. No consistent pattern emerged in the German condition. These results suggest that noun morphology (French) is transferred, but no evidence is found for transfer of verb morphology (German). These findings highlight the importance of further research into how morphosyntactic transfer operates across language families.