Helen Goodluck

Competence and processing in children's grammar of relative clauses ☆

Abstract We report two toy-manipulation experiments investigating 4–5-year-old childrens interpretations of relative clauses. In the first experiment we show that the frequency with which relatives modifying the matrix direct object are interpreted as referring to the matrix subject is sensitive to the nature of the material in the relative. Animacy of the relative direct object leads to an increase in subject coreference errors for relatives; a similar effect of animacy was not found for infinitival complements. We propose that such errors arise when the childs sentence processor is taxed. In our second experiment we compare childrens interpretations of relatives to their interpretations of temporal participial complements. Children eschewed coreference between the complement and the object of a passive prepositional phrase in the case of temporal participials but not in the case of relatives. We interpret this result as evidence that children are capable of analyzing relatives as constituents of the NP node, and hence that this node is recursive in their grammars. We discuss the results of both experiments in the context of a two-stage parsing model, arguing that our data fit a picture of childrens linguistic abilities in which the 4-year-old has a sophisticated competence grammar and a parsing mechanism of essentially the same structure as the adults. We compare our approach to a number of other approaches to childrens relative clause interpretations in the literature, arguing that these alternatives are too structure-specific and can lead to underestimations of the childs competence grammar. We conclude that our analysis is compatible with a picture of acquisition in which the childs competence grammar of relatives is not qualitatively different from the adults.

A reevaluation of the basic operations hypothesis

Some recent work in language acquisition has emphasized the importance of linguistic theory to our understanding of the data from child language. In their paper, “Transformations, Basic Operations and Language Acquisition”, Mayer, Erreich and Valian propose that certain data from child language reflects the analysis of syntactic movement rules as a combination of two “basic operations”: copying and deletion. Errors of the type in (1 ),

Specificity, context and the learnability of grammar: a commentary on Stemmer

Stemmer wishes to demonstrate that there is a possible learning procedure whereby the child uses information provided from the speech environment (discourse context) to learn structure-dependent linguistic rules. The procedures for learning that Stemmer details concern the acquisition of a structure-dependent rule for passive sentences. The rules Stemmer’s learner hypothesizes will accommodate the fact that there is a rectangular relationship between the subject and object position of an active sentence, such as ’Bill kicked Tom’, and (respectively) the by-object and surface subject position of its passive equivalent, ’Tom was kicked by Bill’, and will permit structurally varied and complex elements to occupy the NP positions in the active and passive sentences. Stemmer proposes the rules are posited by the learner on the basis of contextually supported information concerning the meaning of the predicates and NPs in active and passive sentence and other sentence types that give clues to the internal structure of NPs. The fact that such a learning procedure can be specified is taken by Stemmer to diminish the case for an innate syntactic component of linguistic ability. My main problem with Stemmer’s proposals is that I do not see what it is in the environment that provides the child with the concepts that are encoded in his rules, such as the rule Rl, repeated here,

Children's knowledge of prepositional phrase structure: An experimental test

A test of prepositional phrase structure in 4- to 6-year-old childrens language is reported. Childrens productions of PP and verb-particle sequences were elicited. Children produced pronominal and full NP objects of sequences corresponding to PPs and verb-plus-particle in the adult grammar. Prepositions freely took both pronominal and full NP objects (“Hes jumping over it.” “Hes jumping over the table”). In particle verb constructions, pronominal objects were placed immediately after the verb in all but a few cases (“Hes pushing it over”not “Hes pushing over it”). With full NP objects, the preference was to place the verb after the particle (“Hes pushing over the table”). These facts support an analysis in which if the child constructs a PP-over-P—NP structure for prepositional phrases but not for verb-particle sequences, and follows adultlike rules for these structures.

Interpreting relatives: grammatical vs psycholinguistic strategy

Previous studies have indicated that the child’s first words are produced in extremely limited behavioural contexts. The present paper will present data drawn from a longitudinal study of 4 mother-infant dyads which is aimed at elucidating the origins of this phenomenon of early context-bound word use. In particular, the hypothesis that this type of word use is a consequence of the child observing the mother using words in limited routine contexts will be examined. The implication of these results for theories of early word meaning acquisition will be discussed.