Deep and surface structure in children's sentence learning

Case-relations and verb

“…But Shafto suggested this result could be due to attention directed more to the semantic features of nouns (e.g., animate vs. inanimate) than to the semantic relation between a verb and a noun, thus obscuring Instrumental and Objective case-relations. Ehri (1974) showed that 11 year-old children can remember Agentive and Objective case-relations better than Instrumental case-relation.…”

“…Research about the mental representation of sentences have provided inconsistent results concerning this question. On the one hand, it was indicated in some studies that the ease with which case-relations in mental representation are recognized (Shafto, 1973) and memorized (Ehri, 1974) differs depending on the case-relation. Shafto performed a task in which subjects must classify sentences into four categories according to the semantic relation between the noun and the whole sentence, and found that Agentive and Experiencer were learned faster and more accurately than Instrumental and Objective case-relations.…”