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Subject and agent in emerging grammars: evidence for a change in children's biases*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Edward H. Matthei
Edward H. Matthei*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
*
Cognitive Science Department, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine, CA 92717, USA
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Abstract

This paper presents the results of two experiments which appear to show that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically based system to a syntactic-structural system. The experiments use the constituent repetition paradigm of Read & Schreiber (1982). Subjects were trained to repeat the subject noun phrase in orally presented sentences. Preschoolers, but not second-graders, displayed a tendency to repeat the agentive noun phrase (contained in the by-phrase) in semantically irreversible passive sentences. It is argued that the results provide more evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars, and that the results also provide support for the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic relational basis to a syntactic-structural basis some time between the preschool and early grammar school years.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 295 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the teachers, parents and children at the Verano Preschool and the Turtle Rock Preschool for their cooperation in these studies. Thanks also to J. Billingsley, S. Brown and S. Stelling for their help in running the subjects. Special thanks also go to Bill Batchelder for a number of useful discussions about the statistical analyses. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewer whose comments helped to clarify a number of points in the paper. I, of course, assume full responsibility for errors and infelicities contained herein.

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