This article tests the hypothesis that young children have a maturational difficulty with A-chain formation that makes them unable to represent unaccusative verbs in an adultlike fashion. We report the results of a test of children's performance on the genitive-of-negation construction in Russian, which, for adults, is an ''unaccusativity diagnostic,'' since genitive case is allowed to appear on the underlying direct object argument of unaccusatives as well as on direct objects of standard transitive verbs within the scope of negation. We show that although Russian children know the properties of the construction, they have notable difficulty using it with unaccusative verbs. Since the input evidence for genitive of negation with unaccusative verbs is quite robust, we interpret our results as support for the hypothesis.Studies of early language acquisition help us understand the biological roots of language. For example, the growing body of work that reveals extremely early knowledge of many properties of language (e.g., Wexler 1996, Crain and Thornton 1998, and references therein) is particularly interesting in light of debates over the ''poverty of the stimulus'' and the nature of Universal Sergey Avrutin conducted an informal pilot experiment for the project reported here and participated in the earliest discussion of this work. We wish to thank him for his invaluable assistance and encouragement. Ron Fein collected preliminary data relevant to our experiment and was an active participant in the early stages of this work. We are grateful for his contributions to this project. Marina Shatskaya and Alexei Semenov persuaded the directors of two Moscow kindergartens to let us conduct our experiment on their premises. We are grateful to them for their energetic efforts on our behalf; we are also grateful to the staff of these kindergartens for their helpfulness and good-natured tolerance of the disruptions we caused. For helpful advice and discussion, we wish to thank Hagit Borer,
This article presents two questionnaire experiments that investigate the processing complexity of a variety of nested constructions in Japanese. The first experiment demonstrated that embedded structures containing a direct object NP in the most embedded clause were more complex than comparable nested structures that lacked an object NP in the most embedded clause. The second experiment demonstrated that a construction consisting of a relative clause embedded within a sentential complement is less complex than the reverse embedding, consisting of sentential complement embedded within a relative clause. These results are discussed in terms of the syntactic prediction locality theory (Gibson 1998).* 1. SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY. It has long been observed that structures with nested syntactic dependencies are difficult to process (Chomsky 1957, 1965, Yngve 1960, Chomsky & Miller 1963, Miller & Chomsky 1963, Miller & Isard 1964.1 For example, the English sentences in 1 are associated with increasing processing complexity.(1) a. 2 A sentence like 1c is said to be doubly nested/center-embedded, because a second S′ (who John met yesterday) interrupts the subject-verb dependency in the first S′ (the photographer took). Ex. 1a, which includes no nested dependencies, is the easiest to process. A structure like 1b, which contains one nested structure, is more complex (Hakes et al.
Structural reanalysis is generally assumed to be representation-preserving, whereby the initial analysis is manipulated or repaired to arrive at a new structure. This paper contends that the theoretical and empirical basis for such approaches is weak. A conceptually simpler alternative is that the processor reprocesses (some portion of) the input using just those structure-building operations available in first-pass parsing. This reprocessing is a necessary component of any realistic processing model. By contrast, the structural revisions required for second-pass repair are more powerful than warranted by the abilities of the first-pass parser. This paper also reviews experimental evidence for repair presented by Sturt, Pickering, and Crocker (1999). We demonstrate that the Sturt et. al. findings are consistent with a reprocessing account and present a self-paced reading experiment intended to tease apart the repair and reprocessing accounts. The results support a reprocessing interpretation of Sturt et. al.'s data, rendering a repair-based explanation superfluous.
This paper uses new evidence from elicited production experiments to establish that Romanian children do not omit either direct or indirect object clitics at a significant rate. The results reported for the acquisition of indirect object clitics are particularly significant in that, for the first time, it is possible to demonstrate the similarity between the acquisition of direct and indirect object clitics in Romanian and, arguably, for other languages that pattern with Romanian in the relevant respects. Furthermore, our findings receive a natural explanation if it is assumed that two conditions must be met for children to produce clitics. First, children's grammars must not be constrained by any relevant grammatical constraints, such as the Unique Checking Constraint (Wexler 1998, 2003). Second, children must be able to produce utterances of the length required by the clitic constructions. (137words)
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