In two studies, we investigated the relation between information structure and argument omission in German child language in order to quantify to what extent the subject–object hypothesis (i.e., subjects are omitted more often than objects) is influenced by discourse pragmatics. Twenty four children took part in an elicited production study in which they produced transitive subject–verb–object and object–verb–subject sentences. Both constructions are instances of a topic-comment information structure. The results showed that 3;6 year-old children omitted subjects and objects alike when the arguments assumed topics status and were placed in utterance-initial position. In a second study, we then assessed whether a model of language learning implemented with a recency bias (resulting in learning from the end of utterances) would produce similar omission rates of initial arguments. The model was found to be sensitive to the frequency with which both word orders occurred in the input: initial objects were omitted more often than initial subjects, the pattern found in German caregiver speech. The results suggest that argument omission is heavily influenced by information structure and that a subject–object asymmetry per se does not exist.

中文翻译：

---

重新审视主客体不对称：研究信息结构在儿童论证遗漏中的作用的实验和计算方法

在两项研究中，我们调查了德语儿童语言中信息结构和论点遗漏之间的关系，以量化主客体假设（即主语被遗漏的次数多于宾语）在多大程度上受语篇语用学的影响。24 名儿童参加了一项引出式生产研究，他们生产了及物主语-动词-宾语和宾语-动词-主语句子。这两种结构都是主题评论信息结构的实例。结果表明，3;6 岁儿童在论点假定主题状态并处于话语初始位置时，都省略了主语和宾语。在第二项研究中，然后，我们评估了以新近偏差（导致从话语的结尾学习）实施的语言学习模型是否会产生类似的初始论点遗漏率。发现该模型对输入中两个词序出现的频率很敏感：初始对象比初始主题更频繁地被省略，这种模式在德语护理人员的讲话中发现。结果表明，论据遗漏在很大程度上受信息结构的影响，并且主客体不对称本身并不存在。