Visiting Relatives in Italy

  • Stephen Crain
  • Cecile Mckee
  • Maria Emiliani
Chapter
Part of the Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics book series (SITP, volume 10)

Abstract

Not so long ago, a story was told about the course of language acquisition. The story goes like this. A child begins with a simple grammar and gradually extends it to include more and more complex syntactic constructions. When presented with a sentence that he or she cannot analyze, the child will systematically assign it a structural analysis consistent with the current grammar, but not necessarily consistent with the adult grammar. That is, instead of being merely perplexed by sentences beyond their grammatical knowledge, children sometimes supply incorrect interpretations of them, at least if the sentences are presented in contexts which are open to an incorrect construal. The experimental technique of presenting sentences in intentionally ambiguous contexts was applied in several studies, leaving a great many disparities between child and adult grammars for researchers of language acquisition to explain.

Keywords

Noun Phrase Relative Clause Language Acquisition Matrix Clause Child Language 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1990

Authors and Affiliations

  • Stephen Crain
  • Cecile Mckee
  • Maria Emiliani

There are no affiliations available

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