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This study compares how children and adults describe different types of causation events in French and Italian. We ask children between 3-6 years old and adults to describe the causation events depicted in a series of videos inspired by Rissman et al. (2019, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience) on conceptual accessibility. We examine whether children attend to differences in the presence and type of cause (full body agent, hand agent, inanimate causer, no cause) in a similar way to adults, as revealed by their choice of argument structure encoding (e.g. active transitive, passive transitive, intransitive) and their use of overt linguistic marking. Based on Rissman et al., we expect children to produce active transitive constructions when describing events with body agents, and intransitives or passive constructions when describing changes of state caused by hand agents and inanimate causers; causation events with no external cause or an inanimate causer should be described using intransitive constructions. We furthermore expect younger children to use non-adult-like linguistic marking in descriptions of causation events (e.g. French faire; Martin, Nie et al. 2021, BUCLD) and in passive descriptions (e.g. Italian 'si fare'; Belletti & Manetti 2019, Language Acquisition). |
