ABSTRACT

THE USE OF WORD ORDER AND DETERMINERS TO MARK INFORMATION STATUS IN ADULT AND CHILD SAUDI ARABIC

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the interaction between word order and determiners to mark information status in adult and child monolingual speakers of Saudi Arabic. It investigates how child and adult native speakers of Saudi Arabic mark new versus old information using word order and determiners in conjoined noun phrases. The methodology is elicited production of old and new information in conjoined noun phrases adapted from the three following studies, Narasimhan & Dimroth (2008), Chen & Narasimhan (2018), and De Ruiter et al. (2018). Three groups of participants were recruited for the elicitation, including 18 male and female monolingual native Arabic- speaking adults, 4-year-old, and 6-year-old children. The results show that children differ significantly from adults in preferring the “new-before-old” word order and older children (6-year-olds) also differ significantly from younger children (4-year-olds) in producing fewer “old-before-new” word order. The results also show that the Arabic determiner was not frequently used to label old referents. Children and adults did not significantly use the Arabic determiner to mark new versus old information.

Mashael Semsem December 2018

THE USE OF WORD ORDER AND DETERMINERS TO MARK INFORMATION STATUS IN ADULT AND CHILD SAUDI ARABIC

by Mashael Semsem

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno December 2018

© 2018 Mashael Semsem APPROVED For the Department of Linguistics:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree.

Mashael Semsem Thesis Author

Jidong Chen (Chair) Linguistics

Brian Agbayani Linguistics

Xinchun Wang Linguistics

For the University Graduate Committee:

Dean, Division of Graduate Studies AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER’S THESIS

I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship.

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Signature of thesis author: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to dedicate this work to my mother, without whom I would not have been here following my dream. Thank you for always being there for me. Thank you for encouraging me to always aim for higher. I would like to give warmth thanks to my brothers and sisters for their continuous support during this time of my life. I am grateful to professor Jidong Chen for her guidance, engorgement, and patience during planning, doing and writing this thesis. Many thanks to my thesis committee members, professor Brian Agbayani and professor Xinchun Wang for their help and guidance to present this work as it should be. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

LIST OF TABLES ...... vii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... viii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 6

2.1. Arabic Word Order and Information Structure ...... 10

2.2. Definite Article as a Marker of Information Status in Saudi Arabic ...... 12

2.3. Information Status Marking in Child Language ...... 13

CHAPTER 3: THE CURRENT STUDY ...... 18

3.1 The Experiment ...... 18

3.2 Results ...... 23

CHAPTER 4: DISCUSSION ...... 33

4.1. Information Structure and Word Order ...... 33

4.2. Information Structure and the Use of Definite Determiner ...... 36

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ...... 38

REFERENCES ...... 40

APPENDICES ...... 46

APPENDIX A: CONSENT FORM (ADULTS)...... 47

APPENDIX B: CONSENT FORM (CHILD) ...... 50

APPENDIX C: BACKGROUNDS SURVEY ...... 53

APPENDIX D: SUMMARY OF RESULTS (4-YEAR-OLDS) ...... 56

APPENDIX E: SUMMARY OF RESULTS (6-YEAR-OLDS) ...... 58

APPENDIX F: SUMMARY OF RESULTS (ADULTS) ...... 60

LIST OF TABLES

Page

Table 1 Labels of Object Pairs Used as Stimuli ...... 20 Table 2 Effects of Age on the Choice of (New-Old) Versus (Old-New) Word Order in 4-Year-Old and 6-Year-Old Children and Adult Native Speakers of Arabic .... 26 Table 3 Effects of Age on Choice of (New-Old) Versus (Old-New) Word Order in 4- Year-Old and 6-Year-Old Native Speakers of Arabic ...... 27 Table 4 Effect of Arabic Determiner on the Use of ‘Old-New’ Versus ‘New-Old’ in Adult and Child Speakers of Arabic ...... 31

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1. Jizan city, Saudi Arabia (Adapted from Alhazmi, 2017, p. 2) ...... 5 Figure 2. Sample stills of a pair of target objects in the two slides from the experiment stimuli ...... 21 Figure 3. The mean proportions of the use of old versus new in adult and child speakers of Saudi Arabic ...... 24 Figure 4. Individual variation in the use of (new-old) and (old-new) word order in adult speakers of Saudi Arabic ...... 24 Figure 5. Individual variation in the use of (new-old) and (old-new) word order in 6- year-olds child speakers Saudi Arabic ...... 25 Figure 6. Individual variation in the use of (new-old) and (old-new) word order in 4- year-old speakers of Saudi Arabic ...... 26 Figure 7. The use of the determiner to mark old-new information in child and adult speakers of Saudi Arabic ...... 28 Figure 8. Individual variation in the use of Arabic determiner to mark old versus new information in 4-year-olds child Saudi Arabic...... 28 Figure 9. Individual variation in the use of Arabic determiner to mark old versus new information in 6-year-olds child of Saudi Arabic ...... 29 Figure 10. Individual variation in the use of Arabic determiner to mark new versus old information in adult speakers of Saudi Arabic...... 30 Figure 11. The interaction of gender and determiners in marking information status in Arabic ...... 31

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Information structure (IS), also called information packaging (Chafe, 1976), is the information included in a conversation between a speaker and a hearer. This information- essential for the speaker and the hearer to understand each other (Birner & Ward, 2006)- is comprised of both old and new information. Old information refers to the information that has been mentioned before in the discourse, so the addressee has had previous access to it. New information, on the other hand, refers to the information that is new to the listener; thus, it has not been mentioned before in the discourse, as shown in Example 1 below. (1) “I was eating an apple. A man who was walking near me asked for half of the apple. I split the apple between me and him.”

In Example 1, the first sentence presents new information to the hearer, in which the hearer does not know which specific apple the speaker is talking about. The hearer also does not know which man the speaker is referring to in the second sentence. The last sentence provides old information, in which the apple and the man, referred to as him, has been mentioned in the prior discourse. Information structure and its grammar have been studied since the late 60s

(Chafe, 1976; Halliday, 1967; Vallduví, 1990). Some studies have defined information structure as the information packaging that is related to the mental states of the speaker and the hearer during the conversation (Prince, 1981). In other words, they describe how both the speaker and the hearer draw a mental assumption of what the speaker is talking about during the conversation. Other scholars argue that information structure (IS) is not only related to the mental representation of the referents, but also combines of the mental representation of the information presented to the speaker and the hearer with the lexico- grammatical structure of the information (Lambrecht, 1996). 2 2

“Language form varies as a result of the information being communicated. Some of the ways in which it varies include word order, referential form, morphological marking, and prosody” (Arnold, Kaiser, Kahn, & Kim, 2013, p. 1). IS can be expressed through word order, using “topic-focus,” “topic-comment,” and “theme-rheme” constituents. Each one of those constituents marks either new or given referent. IS can also be identified using morphological markers to mark new-versus-old information. Those markers can be attached to the left or to the right of the noun phrase (NP). IS can also be expressed using prosody, which includes stress, rhyme, and intonation. Those factors are related to the accenting or deaccenting of a word to clarify if that word is old or new information. All the previous factors, including different views of how the information structure works, and their influnce upon word order, prosody and morphology, have led researchers to explore more on how different languages mark information structure. Since this thesis focuses specifically on the use of word order to mark new/given information, it explores how current scholarship investigates IS in languages besides Arabic. Previous studies on how word order is used to mark information structure demonstrate that adults tend to label old-before-new information. Adults typically order old referents (mentioned in prior discourse) before new referents (introduced for the first time) when communicating with their interlocutors (e.g. Arnold, Losongco, Thomas, & Ginstrom, 2000; Bock & Irwin, 1980; Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003). Those studies show that Spanish, German, and English-speaking adults demonstrate the same tendency to produce given-before-new word order, despite using different methodologies (Del Toro, Chen, & Narasimhan, 2016; De Ruiter, Narasimhan, Chen, & Lack, 2018; Narasimhan & Dimroth, 2007). One explanation for this tendency lies in the nature of the languages. For those that allow subject-verb-object (SVO) and subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, 3 3 adults tend to produce the given information before the new information, where the subject of the sentence is always old information (Clark & Clark, 1977).

Recent studies reveal that children have a non-adult-like ordering preference. They prefer to order “new” before “old” referents in languages such as German, English, and Spanish (Del Toro et al., 2016; L. De Ruiter et al., 2018; Narasimhan & Dimroth, 2007). By contrast, a study on children ages 5 to 9 found that children at age 5 start to have a lower preference for the new-before-old word order. By age 9, they are fully adult-like in their preference of labeling old-before-new referents (Dimroth & Narasimhan, 2012). Those studies have given us a better understanding of how the language of children and adults works in English, German, and Spanish. Only one study explores how word order and information structure interact in adult Hijazi Saudi Arabic (Alzaidi, 2014), and this focuses on how adults mark information structure using prosody. This thesis is the first to investigate the use of word order to mark new-versus-old information in children and adult speakers of Saudi Arabic. The lack of studies on IS and word order in Arabic adult and child’s language have raised the question of whether or not Arabic shows the same preference for word order when producing new-versus-old information. They have also questioned whether this preference is a language-specific or language- independent based on cognitive preference. This study extends its investigation to determine if the preference for the old-before-new or new-before-old word order is robust in Arabic-speaking adults and children. Another known linguistic marker that defines new-versus-old information is related to the definiteness and the indefiniteness of the noun phrase. It seems that the use of definite and indefinite articles to mark an NP as either old or new is universal (Clark & Clark, 1977). In all languages, the definite noun phrase is old information and the indefinite noun phrase is the new information presented in the discourse. In Modern 4 4

Standard Arabic (MSA), the use of the definite article gives the noun familiarity and uniqueness, which shows that the noun is representing old information (Jaber, 2014). It is worth mentioning that Arabic has both definite and indefinite noun phrases. However, Arabic has only one definite article al, which is the definite article “the” in English. The noun phrase is always indefinite and new until “al” is attached to it, which makes it old (Al-wardii, 2008). This thesis investigates and analyzes the two following questions: 1. What is the preferred word order in Arabic-speaking adults and children in marking new versus old information in conjoined noun phrases? 2. Do adult speakers of Arabic use determiners to mark old versus new information? Are children also sensitive to the use of determiners?

Saudi Arabic has several varieties. The information structure of only one dialect has been studied before, which is the Hijazi dialect, a dialect spoken in the west part of Saudi Arabia (AlZaidi, 2014). All of the participants in the current study are native speakers of Jizani Arabic (JA). Jizani Arabic is the dialect spoken in the southwest part of Saudi Arabia (see Figure 1). (JA) dialect has some linguistic features similar to the Yamani dialect of Arabic because of its location on the border of Yemen. The number of speakers of this dialect is 1.3 million (Hamdi, 2015). Jizani Arabic is an under-examined dialect of Saudi Arabic. As mentioned, no studies have been conducted on Jizani Arabic word order and its relation to information structure. Jizani Arabic allows different word orders. It allows SVO and VSO, which are the most common ones. It also allows OVS, but it is less common (Abbas, 2018). This freedom of movement allows for the subject and the object to move freely when communicating, where objects and subjects may represents either the old or the new information (Zabrocki, 2016).

5 5

Figure 1. Jizan city, Saudi Arabia (Adapted from Alhazmi, 2017, p. 2)

The remainder of this thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive, up-to-date literature review of the relevant studies of information structure on different languages, Arabic determiner’s relationship with information structure and word order, and information structure in child language. Chapter 3 describes the current study, including the participants, the materials, the procedure and the descriptive and statistical results. The fourth chapter discusses the results. Chapter 5 concludes the study.

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

Information structure helps to explain why people say things in different ways (Arnold et al., 2013). There is a substantial amount of literature that explains and defines the different dimensions of the information status of an NP or referent. Those dimensions of information structure are related to newness and givenness of the discourse information structure. The starting point for understanding IS is with the two basic concepts of IS “topic” and “comment,” which are described in the literature as the most common word order markers of IS. Topic refers to what the sentence is about, and it is the part of the sentence that shows familiarity (Gundel, 1988). Comment means what is said about the topic (Narasimhan & Dimroth, 2008). There are two types of topic introduced in the literature “sentence topic, S-topic” and “discourse topic, T-topic”. Consider Examples 2 and 3: (2) “Sara ate the apple.”

(3) “Sara ate the apple. She said the apple was delicious. The color of the apple she ate was red. She bought the apple from her local grocery store …..” S-topic is related to the semantics and pragmatics of the sentence. In Example 2, Sara is the topic of the sentence, because Sara is who the sentence is about. We can also use the classical view of information structure, which states that the subject of the sentence is the topic of the sentence. Van Dijk (1977) gives a straightforward definition for S-topicality: “each expression is assigned Topic-value if its semantic value (referent) is identical with that of an expression in one of the previous sentences of the discourse” (Van Dijk, 1977, p. 51). We, then, assume (2) to answer the questions “What did Sara do?” or, “What did Sara eat?” Sara has been mentioned during a prior conversation. The 7 7 rest of the sentence (2) “ate the apple” is the comment of the sentence because it provides information about the topic of the sentence, Sara.

Text-topicality is in some ways similar to S-topicality. Let us take the story in (3) as an example. How does one determine what the topic is in this context? In T-topic, it is based on both the speaker and the audience’s intuition about what is the most important element in the context is, hence, what the discourse is about (Van Dijk, 1977). Is it about Sara or is it about the apple? If the speaker and the hearer think that the story is about Sara, then, Sara is the T-topic of the sentence and all referents in the text (her, she) is refer to Sara. In the case where Sara is the topic, the rest of the sentence, excluding the referents, is the comment of the sentence. Other important concepts related to information structure are theme and rheme, which are similar to the background information of the speaker and the audience. It is hard to distinguish between topic/theme and comment/rheme concepts because both concepts share elements of newness and givenness (Firbas, 1964; Steedman, 2000;

Vallduví, 1990; Van Dijk, 1977). However, what both terms undoubtedly communicate is that every clause should consist of theme-topic or rheme-comment (Halliday, 1970). An entity of a clause is considered thematic when both the speaker and the listener know what that thematic information is referring to (Erteschik-Shir, 2007; Jones, 2015). An entity is considered rhematic when it is introduced for the first time in the discourse. Since IS can be marked acoustically, theme and rheme are known to be the elements of IS that can be signaled acoustically (Steedman, 2000), as explained later in this chapter. Focus is another element that clarifies the information status of a word. Focus is related to theme/rheme elements because it shows the relationship between new and old information. Focus is the complement of topic, which means that focus is the new information that is conveyed about the topic (Lambrecht, 1994). A word in the discourse is focused because the speaker and the hearer do not share knowledge of the information 8 8 produced, so it can be marked using the sentence fronting. Consider the example, “I like apples, but I don't like oranges.” In this sentence, the pronoun “I” is both the topic and the subject, but the object can be focused, as in, “APPLES, I like, but oranges I do not.” Focus can also be marked semantically using focus particles, such as “only,” “even,” and “also.” Consider the example, “Sara only ate the apples.” In this example, if Sara only ate is new information, then, the sentence means Sara only ATE the apples, but she did not help cook the apple pies. But, if the “apples” is the new information, then the APPLES are the only fruit Sara ate, she did not eat the oranges (Arnold et al., 2013). The topic-theme and comment-rheme concepts of IS are related to the two terms “accessibility” and “aboutness” (Narasimhan et al., 2015). Accessible information is the information that the speaker and the hearer both have access to, because it is old information that has been introduced in a prior discourse. Such information is considered old because it has been activated during the grammatical encoding (Arnold et al., 2013). That information, then, is more easily retrieved and remembered. New information means that the information is new to both the speaker and the addressee, and it is harder to retrieve because it is deactivated and has not been mentioned before in the discourse. “Aboutness” means what the sentence is talking about. Information structure can be linguistically marked by the use of word order variation (Birner & Ward, 1998). A single event might be described in various ways with using different word order choices, including active voice, passive voice, topicalization, prepositional dative, double object dative and clefting (Firbas, 1966; Halliday, 1967; Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Those different non-canonical word orders in English are related to the pragmatics and organization of the discourse, not the syntax. English canonical word order is SVO, and this word order in English is rigid. The speaker uses a different non-canonical word order for the sake of discourse information. The variations of word order highlight which information is familiar, and thus is presented first before 9 9 being linked to a previous referent. This statement is based on the generalization that old accessible information always comes before new less accessible information. It has also been demonstrated that the complexity of the phrase and IS affects the word order (Arnold, Losongco, Wasow, & Ginstrom, 2000). Short phrases, usually the topic in the utterance, always comes first in the utterance compared to long complex phrases. Freer word order languages, such as Arabic can show even more word order variations than languages such as English, German and Spanish. Definiteness and indefiniteness of a word are also the classical essential linguistic markers that indicate information structure, old-versus-new entities (Chafe, 1994). In English, for example, the speaker uses the definite article “the” to refer to an entity that is familiar to both the speaker and the hearer in a discourse. For example, a speaker might say, “The book is interesting.” The book in this example is referring to a book that the addressee is supposed to know. When the speaker refers to a new entity, he/she uses the indefinite articles “a” and “an” to mark newness. For example, when the speaker says, “I read a book,” then the speaker refers to a book that has not been mentioned in prior discourse. The same principles of using definiteness and indefiniteness to mark IS occurs in Arabic, so this thesis discusses in-depth how they operate in Arabic. Information structure can also be linguistically marked using morphology. Morphological markings of IS are used to mark the subject or the object which indicates the topic or the comment of the sentence (Gundel, 1988). In Korean, for example, the topic marker occurs at the topic entity to show what the sentence is about (Arnold et al., 2013). Take the question, “What happened to Sumi?” The answer in Korean would be, “Sumi-nun” “Sumi is sick,” where “-nun” is the topic marker that is attached to the subject to indicate topicality. Languages that have topic markers include Burmese, Hmong, Hua, Lisu, Japanese and Korean. Languages that have only comment markers are Duala, Marathi, Tamil, and Yukaghir. There are languages that have both topic and 10 10 comment markers, such are Quechua and Mongolian. Arabic, on the other hand, has neither topic nor comment morphological markers (Gundel, 1988).

Information structure can also be marked phonologically. The phonological markers of IS include intonation, stress, duration and rhythmic structure of the utterance (Arnold et al., 2013; Selkirk, 2008). Those cues can be used to show the accent and deaccent of a word (Selkirk, 2008). Accenting in an utterance means that a particular word of the utterance sounds more acoustically prominent than the other words in the utterance. When the word is accented, then it is acoustically emphasized by pitch excursion and extended duration. Accenting is related to the new-ness and old-ness notions, as in Example 4. (4) “She had a BIKE (new) before she bought a car. The bike (given) is now broken. So, she bought a SCOOTER (new).” The example above (Arnold et al., 2013, p. 406) contains the words that are accented with focus, “SCOOTER” and “BIKE.” The focused elements in the context are new information. The given information, the bike in the second sentence, is deaccented and not marked with focus. The speaker and the addressee are sensitive to those cues. Usually, the speaker uses those cues to mark new-old information when speaking, so that the listener can easily interpret what that word is being referred to.

2.1. Arabic Word Order and Information Structure Many studies have proposed an explanation of the information structure in Arabic. Arabic uses free word order, in which different constituents of the clause can be dislocated by the speaker for communicative purposes, hence, to indicate a specific referent. This works as long as the meaning of the information presented does not change (Abdul-Raof, 1998). In the various word orders of Arabic, one constituent of the sentence is moved into a front position. That constituent can be either a subject, object, or adjunct. 11 11

That constituent can also retain its case marker (Marked case), without leaving any referential pronoun to refer back to the constituent moved, or it can also have an

(Unmarked case) (Abdul-Raof, 1998). “The use of word order in Arabic is to differentiate what is known (old) and what is not-known (new)” (Thompson,1978, p. 20). Based upon freedom of word order in Arabic, two basic elements of IS are proposed: theme and rheme. In MSA the thematic constituent of the clause is the constituent that is already placed on or has been moved to the left side of the phrase in order to focus the most important element in the discourse. When an element is moved to sentence-initial position, the element becomes the most salient information in the discourse. The degree of movement, however, is indicated by the degree to which that information is important for both the speaker and the hearer. Given this point, theme in spoken Arabic has been defined by using four different aspects. Theme is always definite, carries nominative case, occurs sentence-initially, and shows given information. Theme communicates what the conversation is about and what is known in the situation. Theme is also the topic of the discourse and the departure point of the talk. Following the topic comes rheme, which is the rest of the talk (see Moutaouakil, 2014). Jizani Arabic word order and its relationship to information structure has not been studied before. Based on my own intuition as a native speaker of Jizani Arabic, the constituents can freely move to mark new-versus-old, in a similar manner to what occurs in MSA. All elements in a noun phrase (subject and object) can freely move to an initial position in the clause in order to mark information status, as shown in (5a-c). (5) a. ali akal al-tufahah. ali ate the-apple ‘Ali ate the apple’ b. akal ali al-tufahah. 12 12

ate ali the-apple ‘Ali ate the apple’

c. al-tufaha akalha ali. the-apple was eaten ali ‘The apple was eaten by Ali/ Ali ate the apple’ The above three examples share the same meaning, but the speaker can start with any constituent to mark information status. The initial constituent of the clause is usually the most important part of the sentence.

2.2. Definite Article as a Marker of Information Status in Saudi Arabic Previous research demonstrates that Arabic, behaving similarly to English, uses the definite determiner al “the” to distinguish between the old and the new referents. Theme is always definite, whether it is a subject or an object (Abdul-Raof, 1998). The definite theme is that “which the speaker assumes the hearer can identify uniquely, is familiar with, within his file and thus available for a quick retrieval” (Givón, 1983, p. 10). When a constituent occurs sentence-initially to represent old information, that constituent must be definite, a proper noun, or generic, because in Arabic, an indefinite noun is not allowed to be sentence-initial (Al-Khuli, 1979). An NP with no article at all is always indefinite until the speaker wants to deliver old information to the audience, and then the definite article has to be attached to the noun. Jizani Arabic also has a definite article. Even though it is phonologically different from MSA (see Hamdi, 2015), it works similarly to MSA in referring to old referents. To my knowledge, there is no study in the literature that links the use of the definite article to the new-versus-old referents in Arabic spoken by children. This study further investigates how children and adult speakers of Arabic use the determiner as a linguistic marker to mark old information in noun phrase conjuncts. 13 13 2.3. Information Status Marking in Child Language A study conducted by Narasimhan and Dimroth (2008), focused on the interactions between word order and information status in children (spanning three to five years of age) and adults who are acquiring German. The participants were shown 12 pairs of inanimate objects in a container that the experimenter could not see. They were told that they had to describe to the experimenter what they had seen because the experimenter needed to match it to a picture in a book. They were shown one object first (i.e. apple) and they were asked “What’s in there?” When the participants responded, the experimenter then repeated what they had said and identified the picture in the book. Then they were shown the old object with a new object (i.e. apple and egg) and asked the same question. The experimenter then repeated what they had said and identified the objects. The study concludes that children acquiring German prefer the word order of new-before-old opposite to adults who preferred old-before-new when describing the objects. The second experiment in this study investigated the effect of the input on the children’s preference of word order. The adult participants (24 adult speakers of German, the caregivers of children 2 to 6-year-olds) were asked to help the children with a picture- matching task. They were shown the same objects as were previously shown to the children; they were then asked to describe them to the child. The child was asked to point to the object that the adult participant described. The second experiment finds that adult participants prefer old-before-new word order when describing the objects to the children. It therefore shows that the children’s preference for new-before-old does not stem from the input. Children still favored the use of new-before-old even with the old- before-new input. They attribute this preference of ordering in adults as related to the accessibility of information where the old information is more accessible to retrieve and then produced first. Children, on the other hand, are not sensitive to the accessibility of information as adults do, but their sensitivity developed when the child grows older. They 14 14 also proposed that the children’s preference for new-before-old might be related to the novelty of objects. The child prefers to first produce the most salient and important information. Some recent studies have adapted the same methodology from Narasimhan and Dimroth (2008). It focuses on the use of word order and prosody to mark information structure in different languages, exploring how children and adult speakers of different languages use word order to mark old-versus-new information. Children tend to produce new-before-old word order, as opposed to adults who prefer old-before-new word order (de Ruiter, Narasimhan, Chen, & Lack, 2018; Chen & Narasimhan, 2018). De Ruiter, Narasimhan, Chen, & Lack (2018) focuses on the use of prosody and word order to mark old-new information in conjoined noun phrases in both adult and child speakers of English. Fourteen children (3-5-year-olds) and 15 adult monolingual speakers of English were recruited in an elicited production task. The participants were shown pictures of inanimate common objects on a laptop screen and asked, “What do you see on the screen?” Then, they were shown the previous old object with a new object on the following slide and asked the same question. This study demonstrates that adults prefer using the old-before-new word order, unlike children who produce more new-before-old word order. The study also demonstrates that children are less likely than adults to use prosody to mark information status, because their development stage is not advanced enough for them to be able to do this. Both studies confirm that children and adults do not maintain similar preferences of new-old information. There are several proposed explanations for why adults prefer the order of old- before-new and for why children produce new-before-old in different languages. The processing load in relation to the ease of access to information might be one possibility (Narasimhan, Duffield, & Kim, 2015). In this proposal, adults use old-before-new because it is easy to process because it is more accessible to them, hence, it has been seen 15 15 or heard before. However, this does not explain why this tendency does not affect children. It is logical that children will acquire this as an input, but children prefer the opposite, and this might be related to the reason that new-before-old is easier for children to produce. This view is supported by evidence that adults do not always prefer the old- before-new word order because it is harder to produce than the new-before-old (Clifton & Frazier, 2004). These authors argue that, in many languages, the VP follows the subject in the sentence, the subject, in this case, is the topic which carries old information. In addition to the investigation of the use of morphosyntactic, prior studies also explored if and how prosody is used to mark information status (Arnhold, Chen, & Järvikivi, 2016; MacWhinney & Bates, 1978; Alzaidi, 2014). MacWhinney and Bates (1978) compared the use of prosody in 3 to 5-year-old children who speak Italian, English, and Hungarian. The children were asked to describe a set of three pictures in which one of the three pictures changes every time. They found that those who speak English tend to accent the new information and deaccent the old. However, those who speak Italian and Hungarian did not significantly use prosody to mark new-old- information. Arnhold et al. (2016) conducted a study to investigate the interaction of word order and prosody in Finnish, in which 16 4-year-olds Finnish-learning children and adult Finnish speakers were recruited for a production task. They used a game between the children and a robot to elicit different word orders sentences. The robot was shown a picture of an action in progress, for example, a boy washing a shirt. The experimental then asked the robot about what the boy is doing while children were watching. The robot answered the question in SVO and OVS sentences and his answers lacked any level of prosody. Some answers also were inappropriate in their use. In each answer, the robot focused on either the subject or the object. Then, the experimenter asked the participant the same question using proper word order in order to teach the robot how he should 16 16 speak. The experimenter expected the answers of the questions to be in SVO and OVS depending on the narrow focus of the syntactic position (e.g. S versus O). This study finds that the use of word order to mark information status in children (output) is influenced by the word order produced by the robot (input). It also shows that children acquiring Finnish use prosody to mark information structure, specifically using accent, duration and pause; despite the robot’s influence, they are not yet adult-like when using prosody. There are very few studies in Arabic that discuss the use of word order and prosody to mark information status, but one investigates this use in adult speakers of Saudi Arabic (Alzaidi, 2014). Alzaidi focused on the information structure in Hijazi Arabic, a dialect spoken in the east side of Saudi Arabia and investigated how intonation is used to encode the different kinds of focus in different kinds of sentences in Hijazi Arabic, both phonetically and phonologically. He gave participants different declarative sentences; each sentence was preceded by a question that triggers the participants to focus on a certain word. Alzaidi’s study demonstrates that intonation, rather than word order, is the key to identifying the different kinds of focus in Hijazi Arabic sentences. However, his study includes only adult participants, so it does not show how child speakers of HA mark information structure using prosody. Hellmuth (2005) investigated whether or not the given information is deaccented. She conducted an experiment on two male and four female adult speakers of Cairene Arabic. In the experiment, two-word phrases and three sentences were inserted in a context and evoked old information. Her experiment demonstrates that given information, old information is not deaccented, contrary to the claims of other studies. Studies on information structure and word order in different languages have shown that children prefer the non-adult-like word order of new-before-old when labeling referents. Studies have also shown that the Arabic determiner is one common marker to 17 17 mark old versus new information. To my knowledge, there is no developmental study of the use of word order and determiner to indicate information status in Arabic. The current study investigates how child and adult speakers of Arabic use word order and determiners to mark information status.

CHAPTER 3: THE CURRENT STUDY

The aim of the study is to investigate the use of word order and the definite article to mark new-versus-old referents in Saudi Arabic adult and child speech by adopting the methodology of Narasimhan and Dimroth (2008), Chen and Narasimhan (2017), and De Ruiter, Narasimhan, and Chen (2018). I conducted an experiment by using an elicited production task in which children and adult participants were shown pictures of inanimate objects on a laptop screen and were asked to describe what they had seen. To see potential differences and development in using linguistic devices to mark information status, two groups of children, 4- and 6-year-olds, are included in the current study. Based on the literature review and the study questions, the hypotheses of this study are: 1. Adult native speakers of Saudi Arabic prefer the word order of old-before-new information. 2. The younger 4-year-old children of Saudi Arabic prefer the word order of the new information before the old. The older 6-year-old children may be more adult-like and

prefer the old-before-new word order. 3. The information status affects the use of definite article in both adult and child speakers of Arabic.

3.1 The Experiment

3.1.1 Participants The participants in this study were 54 male and female native speakers of Saudi Arabic. Three different age groups of participants were recruited (18 participants per group), 4-year-olds (mean age 4;7, age range 4;6-5;11), 6-year-olds (mean age 6;4, age range 6;0-7;5) and a control group of adults (mean age 28, age range 22-24). The 4-year- olds were children of friends and family and students of The Donia Al-Tufulah 19 19

Kindergarten in Jizan city. The 6-year-olds were my mother’s students at The Abo-Arish Elementary School in Jizan city. The experiment was conducted during Ramadan and

Eid-Elfiter holiday and the summer term in The Donia Al-Tufulah kindergarten lasted one month, which gave enough time to collect the data.

3.1.2 Materials I conducted an elicited production study based on Narasimhan and Dimroth (2008), Chen and Narasimhan (2017), and De Ruiter, Narasimhan, and Chen (2018). A total of 32 trials were presented to the participants, including 6 warmups, 12 target trials, and 14 fillers. All trials contained inanimate objects from daily life. To collect the conventional names for the target inanimate object pictures used in the elicitation. I first conducted an online norming survey via Google forms. The survey contains 24 pictures of inanimate daily objects that Saudi Arabic children are familiar with. Each participate was asked to answer, ‘what do you see in the picture?’. This survey was sent to 38 adult speakers who are my family members and friends. All 24 target pictures received high agreement among the 38 speakers (mean proportion agreement of 20 nouns 100%, 3 nouns 97.36% and 1 noun 94.73%) and thus included and used in the elicited production task. Each pair of the objects in the 12 target pairs (see Table 1) was matched in physical properties, such as color and shape, to avoid potential bias during the experiment. The nouns for the target objects contained the number of syllables, ease of pronunciation, and gender (see Table 1). The nouns for the target trial objects were checked for frequency in an Arabic child corpus, Kuwaiti Arabic (Alqattan, 2015) in The CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000). The 70 participants in this corpus were subdivided into 7 gender-balanced subgroups. The age of the children in this corpus ranged from 1;4 years old to 3;7. The data in this corpus was cross-sectional spontaneous speech of the children. I looked 20 20

Table 1

Labels of Object Pairs Used as Stimuli Object Gender English Object Gender English Label 1 Gloss Label 2 Gloss tufahah Feminine apple jubanah Feminine cheese kurah Feminine ball saɁah Feminine clock kursi Masculine chair jawal Masculine mobilephone baab Masculine door kupz Masculine bread baidah Feminine egg muzah Feminine banana saboon Masculine soap shurab Masculine sock sahan Masculine plate fustan Masculine dress milɁaqah Feminine spoon mikadah Feminine pillow wardah Feminine flower shukah Feminine fork sayarah Feminine car shajarah Feminine tree saikal Masculine bicycle sakiin Masculine knife tawilah Feminine table tayarah Feminine airplane through all the files in this corpus and extracted all the word forms using the CLAN program (MacWhinney, 2000). Then I identified and selected 24 nouns from the most frequently used by the children. I also double-checked those nouns for the target objects in the kindergarten Arabic book (Mousa, 2007), which the child participants in my study are familiar with as the children in my study are older than the children in the CHILDES database. This book includes the most common words in the child’s daily life and all the 24 target nouns are among the common words. I also consulted the teacher in The Donia Al-Tufulah kindergarten to confirm that these objects are familiar to 4-year-old children.

The popular kid’s cartoon character Mickey Mouse was chosen to present the objects for two reasons: (1) to engage the children during the experiment, and (2) to encourage all the participants to produce full sentences in their descriptions in order to elicit the use of definite articles. In every target trail, Mickey Mouse always holds the first (i.e. old) object with both hands in the middle to control any spatial bias. In the following slide where a new object is shown, Mickey Mouse holds both the old and new objects simultaneously with each in one of Mickey’s hands, right or left hand were counterbalanced to avoid space bias (see Figure 2). 21 21

Figure 2. Sample stills of a pair of target objects in the two slides from the experiment stimuli

There were eight different randomized versions of the trial to avoid children’s potential space bias and fixed-order bias. They were randomized using the Excel randomization tool. I first created four versions of the trials: A1A, A2A, A1B and A2B. The other four trials reversed the order of the elements from the first 4 trails, including all target trials, warmups and fillers in a reverse order. In all eight versions, the new objects appear in the right hand of Mickey Mouse in half of the trials and the old objects appear in his right hand in the other half. The same randomization procedure was conducted for all versions of the trial to control the space bias.

3.1.3 Procedure All the adult participants and the parents/guardians of the participating children were first asked for their consent to participate in the experiment. Consent forms (see Appendices A and B) were given to each participant to read and sign. The adults and the parents/guardians of the children were informed of the experiment procedure and that the whole experiment was going to be audio recorded. The background information of the children and the adults was also collected with a survey that includes personal information (e.g. name, age, gender), parent’s background (e.g. name, age, education, professions) and linguistic background of the adult and child 22 22 participants (e.g. the proficiency of English) (see Appendix C). In Saudi Arabia, English was not a required academic subject in kindergarten until recent years, so children were exposed to English in kindergarten while the adult speakers were not. I aimed for participants with low English proficiency so as to focus on monolingual speakers of Saudi Arabic. The children were tested in their school in one of the empty classrooms. The whole procedure was audio recorded using a MacBook laptop, a microphone, and the Audacity program. All of the recordings were securely saved in a locked file in a MacBook laptop. The experimental procedure was similar for the adults and the children, each participant was asked to tell what they saw on the computer screen. With children, I made it more child-friendly by rewarding the child with stickers after 4-5 trails. I first introduced myself and my helper, Bashear, who was trained to act as my confederate before the experiment. Then, I told the child that we were going to play a game with Mickey Mouse and Bashear, pointing to Bashear and showing a picture of

Mickey Mouse waving, “Hi”, on the screen. Bashear was sitting on a chair behind the laptop. I told the child that he/she were going to see things with Mickey Mouse that Bashear could not see and that they needed to use a full sentence to describe exactly what they had seen on the screen. I then asked the child, “Do you want to play?” When the child responded with approval, I then started the experiment. I started to record the experiment and played the PowerPoint slides by showing the six warm-up slides. For each warm up, I showed Mickey Mouse holding one object by his two hands (see Figure 2) and asked, “What do you see on the screen?” After each participant described what he/she had seen, the helper repeated exactly what the participant said only once. Stickers were used as rewards during the experiment to engage the children to continue the task. For the children participants, I stopped every five to six 23 23 trials and rewarded the child with stickers. After finishing the experiment, I stopped the recording and rewarded the child with a candy bar as a prize for his/her participation.

3.2 Results

3.2.1 The Effect of Age on Word Order The mean proportion of the use of word order to mark information status is shown in Figure 3. It presents the production of new-versus-old word order in all three groups of participants. Figure 3 shows that all three groups of participants differ from each other in their preferred production of new-old versus old-new word order. The 4-year-olds preferred the new-before-old word order with a mean proportion of 75.2%, which contrasts sharply to the 6-year-olds (32.1%) and the adults (20.4%). Adult participants prefer ‘old-before- new’ word order with a mean proportion of 79.63%. Adults show a higher preference for the old-before-new word order compared to 6-year-olds. The use of old-before-new word order increases as the child grows older. Figure 4 shows the individual variation in the use of old-versus-new word order in adult speakers of Saudi Arabic. It shows that only 5 participants produced 100% old- before-new word order and the rest of the participants still favor old-before-new, but the preference varies from 48% - 92%. Figure 5 shows the use of different word orders to mark information status by each 6-year-old speakers of Arabic. The graph reveals individual differences in the use of word order. All 6-year-olds favored the old-before-new order, ranging from 50% to 83% and there is one child who produced 100% old-before-new. Their production of new- before-old exhibited great variance from as low as 16% to 50%. Only one child produced 100% old-before-new.

24 24

Figure 3. The mean proportions of the use of old versus new in adult and child speakers of Saudi Arabic

Figure 4. Individual variation in the use of (new-old) and (old-new) word order in adult speakers of Saudi Arabic

25 25

Figure 5. Individual variation in the use of (new-old) and (old-new) word order in 6-year- olds child speakers Saudi Arabic

Figure 6 shows the individual differences in the use of new-old and old-new word order by each 4-year-old speakers of Arabic. The graph presents the individual differences in the use of word order. Some children (1, 2 and 3) entirely preferred the production of new-before-old, with a 100% mean proportion. Other children produced new-before-old order, varying from 50% to 91%.

The data were further analyzed using a mixed-effect logistic regression model (Baayen, 2008). The outcome variable was the use of ‘new-before-old’ and ‘old-before- new’ word order. Age (4-5-year-olds, 6-7-year-olds, and adults) was tested as the main predictive variable and participants, gender, item number, and condition as random effects.

The results of the data analysis show that there is a significant effect of age on the word order preference (see Table 2). Supporting the prior studies, adult speakers of Arabic prefer the word order of old-before-new (β = 0, Z = 8.77, p < 0.005). The two children’s groups, both the 4-year-olds and the 6-year-olds are significantly different from the adults in preferring the new-before-old word order significantly (β = -1.365, Z = 11.739, p < 0.005). The 4- and 6-year-olds also differ significantly from each other (β = - 0.672, Z = 21.849, p < 0.000, see Table 3). The results also show that the age factor does not interact with any other variable; gender, item number, condition, and participant. 26 26

Figure 6. Individual variation in the use of (new-old) and (old-new) word order in 4-year- old speakers of Saudi Arabic

Table 2

Effects of Age on the Choice of (New-Old) Versus (Old-New) Word Order in 4-Year-Old and 6-Year-Old Children and Adult Native Speakers of Arabic Variables Estimate HPD intervals Std.Error Z Value P Value lower upper Intercept 2.880 0.972 8.771 0.003** Participant -0.042 0.926 0.993 0.018 5.430 0.020* Gender 0.270 0.912 1.883 0.185 2.131 0.144 Condition 0.016 0.933 1.107 0.044 0.141 0.708 Item number -0.009 0.970 1.013 0.011 0.665 0.415 Age: Four -3.934 0.005 0.077 0.700 31.601 0.000*** Age: Six -1.365 0.117 0.558 0.398 11.739 0.001*** Adult 0

27 27

Table 3

Effects of Age on Choice of (New-Old) Versus (Old-New) Word Order in 4-Year-Old and 6-Year-Old Native Speakers of Arabic Variables Estimate HPD intervals Std.Error Z Value P Value lower upper Intercept -0.672 0.144 21.849 0.000*** Age=4years 1.746 3.782 8.694 0.212 67.653 0.000*** Age=6years 0

Regarding the use of word order to mark old-versus-new referents, the descriptive and the statistical results show that each group significantly differs from the others (see Appendices D, E, and F). Adults preferred to use the word order of old referents before new referents and even though the 6-year-olds preferred old-before-new, they differ significantly from the adults in the degree of preference. The 4-year-olds, in contrast to the 6-year-olds and the adults, preferred new-before-old word order. Younger children differ significantly from older children.

3.2.2 The Use of the Definite Article to Mark Old Versus New Referents The following results show the use of the determiner to mark new-versus-old information status. Adult and child participants were asked to produce a full sentence to track the use of the determiner and they all produced full sentences when labeling the objects. The data analysis shows that both the child and adult speakers of Saudi Arabic did not use the definite article al to mark new-versus-old information (see Figure 7). As shown in Figure 7, the total use of no determiner is higher compared to the use of the determiner (93.52% 4-year-olds, 88.90% 6-year-olds, and 83% adults). Between all the three groups, 4-year-olds use the definite article less compared with the other two groups. 6-year-olds use the determiner slightly more often than the 4-year-olds, and the adults use more articles than both groups of children. The total use of the Arabic determiner increases when the child grows older. 28 28

Figure 7. The use of the determiner to mark old-new information in child and adult speakers of Saudi Arabic

Figures 8, 9, and 10 show the individual differences in the use of the Arabic determiner to mark new-versus-old information in all three groups of participants.

Figure 8. Individual variation in the use of Arabic determiner to mark old versus new information in 4-year-olds child Saudi Arabic

Figure 8 shows the individual variation in the use of the Arabic determiner to mark old-versus-new information in 4-year-olds speakers of Arabic. Only three children (4-year-olds) used the determiner to mark information status. All three used the 29 29 determiner to mark both old and new information. One child (9) used the Arabic determiner to mark all 12 target trials old and new (100% mean proportion). Two children (4 & 8) used the determiner only once, and when they used it, they marked both old and new information (8.33% mean proportion). The other 15 participants did not use the determiner to mark IS. Figure 9 shows the individual variation of the use of the Arabic determiner to mark new-versus-old information in 6-year-old speakers of Arabic. Only two children used the Arabic determiner. They used it to mark both new and old information with a 100% mean proportion. The other 16 participants did not use the determiner to mark either old or new information status.

Figure 9. Individual variation in the use of Arabic determiner to mark old versus new information in 6-year-olds child of Saudi Arabic

Figure 10 shows the individual variation of the use of the Arabic determiner to mark new-versus-old information status in adult speakers of Arabic. Only three adult participants (1, 16 & 17) used the determiner. They used it to mark both old and new 30 30 information (100% mean proportion). The other 15 participants did not use the determiner to mark old information.

Figure 10. Individual variation in the use of Arabic determiner to mark new versus old information in adult speakers of Saudi Arabic

Figure 11 shows the interaction of gender and determiner to mark information status in all three groups. It shows that female speakers of Arabic, children and adults, use the definite article to mark old referents more frequently than males do. Male participants use the determiner 50 times compared to female participants, who use the determiner 97 times. However, the definite article was used to mark both old and new referents. The mixed-effect logistic regression model (Baayen, 2008) was also used to analyze the effect of the Arabic determiner ‘al’ on the use of old versus new. The results show that only gender affects the use of determiner to mark information status. The other variables, condition, age, item number, and participant do not affect the use of determiner (see Table 4). The results show that females produced more determiners comparing to males (see Figure 11). The use of determiner in all three groups of participants show 31 31 gender effect (β = -0.808, Z = 18.149, p < 0.001). However, only 8 participants used the determiner across all three groups, so this finding cannot be generalized.

Figure 11. The interaction of gender and determiners in marking information status in Arabic

Table 4

Effect of Arabic Determiner on the Use of ‘Old-New’ Versus ‘New-Old’ in Adult and Child Speakers of Arabic Variables Estimate HPD intervals Std.Error Z Value P Value lower upper Intercept 2.187 0.942 5.391 0.020* Participant 0.016 0.981 1.051 0.018 0.776 0.378 Gender -0.808 0.307 0.646 0.190 18.194 0.000*** Info=male 0.000 0.599 1.669 0.261 0.000 1.000 Item number -0.001 0.978 1.020 0.011 0.010 0.922 Age: 4 1.629 1.265 20.557 0.711 5.247 0.022* Age: 6 0.727 0.874 4.900 0.440 2.733 0.098 Adult 0

The results also show that age of participant does not affect the use of determiner in all three groups of participants (4 years: β = 1.629, Z = 5.247, p < 0.005; 6 years: β = 0.727, Z = 2.733, p > 0.005). 32 32

When using the determiner to mark old-versus-new referents, the descriptive and the statistical analyses show that child and adult speakers of Arabic do not use the definite determiner to mark old information. And the statistical analysis shows that females used significantly more determiners as compared to the males. However, the number of participants across the three groups who used the determiner totaled only eight and when they used the definite determiner, they used 100% on both the old and the new referents, so we cannot generalize this finding to conclude that gender plays a significant role in the use of the definite determiner to mark old versus new referents.

CHAPTER 4: DISCUSSION

This study finds that children and adult speakers of Saudi Arabic differ significantly in their ordering preference of new versus old referents, similar to conclusions reached on the studies of German, English, and Spanish speakers. This study also shows that both child and adult speakers of Saudi Arabic did not use the determiner to mark old-versus-new information.

4.1. Information Structure and Word Order Despite the methodological differences between this study and the previous studies on IS in English, German, and Spanish, young 4-year-olds Arabic children in the current study show strong preferences for new-before-old word order. This preference significantly declines with age, mirroring the results of German and Spanish children but differing from the English children (see Dimroth & Narasimhan, 2008; Chen & Narasimhan, 2017; Chen, De Ruiter, & Narasimhan, 2018). Adult speakers of Saudi

Arabic prefer to label first the old referent that has been introduced as opposed to labeling first the new referent that has been introduced to them for the first time. Children are significantly not adult-like, even at age 6, in their preference for using word order to convey old-versus-new referents. The shift from new-before-old preference to old-before- new preference starts around age 6 in child speakers of Arabic as the 6-year-olds already differ from the 4-year-olds in less likely to use the new-before-old word order. Since no previous study compares the use of old-new referents in 6-year-olds and adults, I suggest that the findings in this study show the developmental changes in children in using word order to mark information status. Children who are 6-year-olds are more linguistically-developed and more adult-like when compared with younger children. However, even though they are more linguistically developed, they are not yet adult-like in their mastery of the language. In the child’s language, the grammatical knowledge lags 34 34 in development until after age 6 when the child starts to master the grammatical components of the language, including information structure (Gleason, 2001). Children at age 6 begin to master the use of anaphora to refer to a specific person or object, and they can also comprehend and produce complex grammatical rules in their language (Gleason, 2001). Arabic is a free word order language with basic word order SVO and derived word orders, OVS, VOS, OSV and SOV (Abdul-Raof, 1998). However, all the participants in this study preferred the basic word order of Arabic SVO even though they could use any different word order to convey IS. Their answer to the question, “What do you see on the screen?” was, “Mickey Mouse is holding an apple.” with basic word order SVO. There was only one child in this study, a 4-year-old, who used a derived word order OVS. His answer to the same question was “An apple is being held by Mickey Mouse” using the passive voice. This demonstrates that languages with freer word order still show the same tendencies as those with rigid word order, such as German and

Spanish. Abdul-Raof (1998) proposed that word order does not affect the preference in the use of new and given information and explained that this preference is related to the discourse environment. A speaker can choose which word order is the most appropriate to produce old and new referents. In more rigid word order languages, such as English, children as young as two- and-a-half are very sensitive to the use of word order to indicate elements of IS, compared with freer word order languages, such as German, Cantonese, and Turkish. This sensitivity is related to their rigid word order SVO. In languages with freer word order, children may be less sensitive to word order markers, such as those used to mark agent-patient in relation to information structure, than other markers, such as animacy and case marking. In those languages, speakers have the ability to move the NP around, creating derived word orders for communication purposes. Children who speak those 35 35 languages take much longer to acquire and comprehend the different word orders their language allows (Chan, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2009; Leischner, Weissenborn, & Naigles,

2016). Arabic might reflect this, since most of the children preferred the basic word order of Arabic SVO to mark IS. Other explanations for this tendency to produce the given information first are related to the processing load (Clark, Haviland, & Freedle, 1977). Some people usually take more time processing certain sequences compared to others. Adults and 6-year-olds process the information with much less time and more ease than younger children due to more mature processing abilities to handle similar amount of processing loads. They may prefer to produce the old-before-new word order for the reason that it is easier to produce old referents since they had previous access to it (Narasimhan et al., 2015). In this experiment, the information was already shown to them in a previous picture; because of this familiarity, they need less processing time. Supporting this view, Clifton and Frazier (2004) also argued that younger children at age four prefer the production of new-before- old because it is easier for them to produce. The children’s tendency to produce the new-before-given information might also be related to the to the idea introduced by Baker and Greenfield (1988), which is that children at one-word and two-word stages tend to produce the most important elements in the situation, focusing on those that are new. They omit the non-informative element of the discourse, the old one, in order to avoid the uncertainty that occurs when the situation shows novelty and alternatives. Baker and Greenfield (1988) explaind that children tend to first express the word that they believe is unique, even if the other element in the situation is part of the child’s vocabulary. Children at age 5 still treat the word based on its importance, not based on its syntactic structure; this seems reversed from the tendencies of older children. This might be extended to the tendency to produce new- before-old that Arabic children show. When producing two sets of information, 4-year- 36 36 olds prefer to first produce the most informative object (the new object) before the non- informative one (the old object), because it is more important to them.

4.2. Information Structure and the Use of Definite Determiner Both groups of children and adult speakers of Arabic are not sensitive to the use of the determiner to mark old-versus-new information. Even though studies with English children show that children start to acquire determiners as early as one year of age (Baker & Greenfield, 1988), children in this study did not use the determiner to mark the given information. Participants who used the determiner used it to label both the new and the old referents. Even though all studies on the Arabic determiner argued that adult speakers of Arabic use the Arabic determiner to mark old information, no Arabic study in the literature links the use of the determiner to the child’s use of the language. Perhaps this is because when children start to use determiners, they may use them incorrectly (Baker & Greenfield, 1988). Children may treat the given information as new when labeling it with the article (Clark & Clark, 1977). The incorrect way of using determiners is perhaps related to the what is called egocentrism (Maratsos, 1976) which describes children who lack the ability to differentiate between their thoughts and those of others (Heo, Han, Koch, & Aydin, 2011). Even children at age five still have not mastered the use of determiners to label old and new referents (Baker & Greenfield, 1988). Even though they know that “the” refers to a specific element and “a” and “an” refer to non-specific ones, they lack mastery of the proper use of the determiner to label given and new information (Bloom & Lahey, 1978). This explanation, however, does not clarify why adult speakers of Arabic did not use the determiner to label the old referent. To date, scholarship on the use of determiners concludes that old information in a discourse is always definite. However, these studies tested this hypothesis from a grammatical point of view. The present study, however, is 37 37 experimental and controlled, which means that the environment is not totally natural. The participants who did not use the determiner at all might be treating every picture as a new one, so they did not label any information with the determiner. Others who used the definite determiner to label both objects used it randomly. Also, children might be treating every object as a new one because they are telling the helper what they see on the screen. They may be under the impression that the object is new to the helper, because they have been told that she cannot see what is on the screen. Additionally, the participants might treat each object as one independent piece of information, as manifested in responses where children produced two fully complete sentence: “An apple is being held by Mickey and an egg is being held by Mickey.” I believe that both children and adults need a natural communication situation in order to target the use of the determiner to label old-versus-new information. Further investigation of the use of word order to mark new-versus-old information in Arabic may determine if the children’s shift from new to old results from an input. If so, are children at age six more sensitive to the input compared with children who are 1 or 2 years younger? Future studies on Arabic information structure may use a natural less-controlled environment to test the use of determiners to mark new-versus-old information. This will also provide evidence of how the Arabic determiner works in adult and children’s use of the language.

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION

This study investigates the use of word order and the determiner to mark information status in adult and children speakers of Saudi Arabic. The methodology of this study was adapted from Narasimhan and Dimroth (2008). A total of 54 adults and children were recruited and comprised three different age groups of native speakers of Saudi Arabic (4-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults). This study supports prior research on information structure and word order preference in the field of language acquisition. All the three groups of participants varied significantly in their preference of ordering “old” versus “new”. The 4-year-olds prefer the ordering of new-before-old, the 6-year-olds, similar to adults, prefer the ordering of old-before-new, but not yet fully adult-like in the degree of preference. Both children and adult speakers of Saudi Arabic do not use the determiner to label the old-versus-new referent. Different proposed explanations for this tendency for the preference of new- before-old and old-before-new might be related to the processing load where older children and adults find old-before-new easier to process compared to new-before-old. Another explanation might be related to the language development. When the child grows older his/her language becomes more adult-like and their preference of word order also starts to mirror the adult’s preference. Children speakers of free word order languages, such as Arabic, are less sensitive to the use of word order to indicate elements of IS because they take much more time to acquire and comprehend the derived word orders of their language. Arabic shows similar preference for word order as rigid word order languages do. The no interaction between information structure and the definite article of Arabic might be related to egocentrism where the child do not differentiate between the old and 39 39 the given information when labeling it with the article. It also might be related to the current experiment since it is a controlled experiment. The participants may need more natural environment in order to investigate their use of the determiner. Different dialects of Arabic may have different syntax structures when marking information status, which provides opportunities for further research. For instance, one could investigate the use of word order to mark information status in both adults and children who are native speakers of these various dialects. Furthermore, another study could utilize a methodology that creates a natural conversation between the experimenter and the participant to investigate how children and adults use the determiner to label information status. Finally, research could explore the use of word order to label old- versus-new, focusing on children ages 4 to 8 to determine if there is a specific age at which a child starts to fully shift from new-old to old-new and when he/she starts to be exactly adult-like when producing the old-new referent.

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APPENDICES

APPENDIX A: CONSENT FORM (ADULTS) 48 48

Information Structure in Adult Language Main Researcher: Mashael Semsem Consent Form for Participation 06-22-2018

By reading the information provided in this form and explained to me by the main researcher of this study, I should be able to decide wither or not to participate in this free study conducted by Mashael Semsem who a graduate student in California State University – Fresno. This study is a master’s degree thesis. The Chair of this thesis is Professor Jidong Chin, graduate coordinator at California State University-Fresno. This study is audio recorded. By reading the information below, I should also agree or deny being audio recorded during the procedure of this study. The main researcher in this study will explain the details of this study and what should be done during the procedures. The description of this study should make you decide wither or not to participate in this study. The Description and the Procedure of the Study: This study is conducted to understand how the language of children and adults works. It also helps to show the differences and the similarities between different languages in information structure. During the procedure, you will be shown a picture of objects that is familiar in daily life in a laptop screen. The examiner will ask what do you see on the screen and you will tell what you are seeing on the screen. The experiment will not take more than 20 minutes of your time. The experiment will be audio recorded by a microphone connected to a computer. The audio recordings will be analyzed in the purpose of this study. Risks: There is no risk predicted for this study. Benefits: There are no direct benefits for this study. It just will help to better understand how the adult and the children’s language work. The Costs: There is no cost for participating in this study. Payment: This study is completely free. The participants will not be paid to participate in the study. Ending your Participation in this Experiment: You can withdraw from participating in this experiment at any time you want even after starting the procedure. Privacy: The sound recordings will be kept confidential and saved in a folder in a computer sealed with password. It can only be accessed by the departments related and responsible for researches in California State University – Fresno such as the Human Research committee. Other Questions: 49 49

If you have any further questions you can contact the main researcher of this study: Mashael Semsem by telephone: 00966530539196 and e-mail: [email protected]. Authorization: I hereby that I have read and understood all the details of this study and I give Mashael Semsem the permission to record and analyze the audio recording of the experiment for the purpose of this study. I also know that I can withdraw anytime I want from the study. I also received a copy of this document dated and signed with my name. ______Full name (Printed): Date: Signature:

APPENDIX B: CONSENT FORM (CHILD) 51 51

Information Structure in Children Language Main Researcher: Mashael Semsem Consent Form for Participation 06-22-2018

By reading the information provided in this form and explained to me by the main researcher of this study, I should be able to decide wither or not to let my child participate in this free study conducted by Mashael Semsem who is a graduate student is California State University – Fresno. This study is a master’s degree thesis. The Chair of this thesis is Professor Jidong Chin, graduate coordinator at California State University-Fresno. This study is audio recorded. By reading the information below, I should also agree or deny letting my child be audio recorded during the procedure of this study. The main researcher in this study will explain the details of this study and what should be done during the procedure. The description of this study should make you decide wither or not to participate in this study. The description and Procedure of the Study: This study is conducted to understand how the language of children and adults works. It also helps to show the differences and the similarities between different languages in information structure. During the procedure, in a laptop screen, your child will be shown pictures of objects that are familiar in their daily life. The examiner will ask your child what do you see on the screen and your child will tell what he/she is seeing on the screen. The experiment will not take more than 20 minutes of your time. The experiment will be audio recorded by a microphone connected to a computer. The audio recordings will be analyzed to the purpose of this study. Risks: There is no risk predicted for this study. Benefits: There are no direct benefits for this study. It just will help to better understand how the adult and the children’s language work. The Costs: There is no cost for participating in this study. Payment: This study is completely free. The participants will not be paid to participate in the study. Ending your participation in this experiment: You can withdraw your child from participating in this experiment at any time you want even after starting the procedure. Privacy: The sound recordings will be kept confidential and saved in a folder in a computer sealed with password. It can only be accessed by the departments related and responsible for researches in California State University – Fresno such as the Human Research committee. 52 52 Other Questions: If you have any further questions you can contact the main researcher of this study: Mashael Semsem by telephone: 00966530539196 and e-mail: [email protected]. Authorization: I hereby that I have read and understood all the details of this study and I give Mashael Semsem the permission to record and analyze the audio recording of my child and analyze it for the purpose of this study. I also know that I can withdraw my child anytime I want from the study. I also received a copy of this document dated and signed with my name. ______Full name of the parent (Printed): Full name of the child: Date: Signature of the parent:

APPENDIX C: BACKGROUNDS SURVEY 54 54

Background Survey Form

(This information will be kept confidential)

Name: ______Age: ______Date of Birth: ______

I. Personal Data

What is your highest level of education completed? (Please circle):

Some high school high school some college college graduate

Country of origin: ______

Country of current residence: ______

II. Family History

3. Where are the parents/caregivers from?

Mother: ______Father: ______

4. What languages do your parents/caregivers speak?

Mother: ______Father: ______

5. What do your parents do for a living?

Mother: ______Father: ______

6. What is your parents’ highest level of schooling? (Circle one for each)

Mother Father Elementary school elementary school Middle school middle school High school high school College college Grad school grad school

III. Linguistic History 6. What are the language/languages you speak? 55 55

7. At what age did you first begin to learn English?

8. How do rate your proficiency in English? (Circle one) Poor intermediate advanced

APPENDIX D: SUMMARY OF RESULTS (4-YEAR-OLDS)

57 57

APPENDIX E: SUMMARY OF RESULTS (6-YEAR-OLDS) 59 59

APPENDIX F: SUMMARY OF RESULTS (ADULTS) 61 61