Angela Grimm

Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language

The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabruck in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshopdeveloped fromthe observation that childrens production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.

Production and comprehension of sentence negation in child German

The acquisition of sentence negation has been well-studied since the late seventies (Clahsen 1988; de Villiers and Tager Flusberg 1975; Déprez and Pierce 1993; Dimroth 2009; Drozd 1995; Hamann 2000; Meisel 1997; Penner, Tracy, and Weissenborn 2000; Stromswold and Zimmermann 2000; Wode 1977). Independent of the language to be acquired, negation particles, for example no and not in English, belong to the fi rst elements children produce in the early multiword stage (e.g., Wode 1977). It has been argued that already three-yearolds use negation elements target-like with respect to semantic and syntactic properties (cf. Clahsen 1988 for German). In contrast to the extensive research on the production of negation, to date few studies have investigated children’s comprehension of negated sentences. Moreover, to our knowledge studies have not looked at production and comprehension of sentence negation in the same children, thus leaving open the question of whether there is an asymmetry in the acquisition path between both modalities. Taking as a starting point the traditional assumption that comprehension precedes production (cf. Clark 1993), we would predict that at age three children have no diffi culty understanding negated sentences. On the other hand, it has been claimed that production may precede comprehension. This position has received support for example from fi ndings on the acquisition of binding