Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:38:42.026Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The overgeneralization of non-finite complements to finite contexts: The case of decide*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2007

AMANDA J. OWEN  and
LAURENCE B. LEONARD
AMANDA J. OWEN*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa
LAURENCE B. LEONARD
Affiliation:
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
*
Address for correspondence: Amanda J. Owen, Department of Speech Pathology & Audiology, 121-A WJSHC, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, 52245, USA. tel: 319-335-6951. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Current views on the acquisition of PRO can roughly be divided into two areas: lexical and syntactic accounts. We present data on one verb, decide, that yields data that not only differs from the data for other similar verbs with the same children, but does not lend itself easily to either type of account. Data from a sentence elicitation task conducted with 20 typically-developing children (4 ; 0–7 ; 11), along with 3 case studies illustrate that children may not be assigning a referent for PRO in an adult-like manner for particular verbs. Instead they may be overgeneralizing the use of non-finite complements to finite contexts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , August 2007 , pp. 545 - 570
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bock, K. & Levelt, W. (1994). Language production: Grammatical encoding. In Gernsbacher, M. A. (ed.) Handbook of psycholinguistics, 945–84. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bresnahan, J. (Writer) (1991). Picnic [Motion Picture]. In Gagne, P. R. (Producer). USA: Weston Woods.Google Scholar
Burgemeister, B. B., Blum, L. H. & Lorge, I. (1972). Columbia Mental Maturity Scales. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.Google Scholar
Cairns, H. S., McDaniel, D., Hsu, J. R. & Rapp, M. (1994). A longitudinal study of principles of control and pronominal reference in child English. Language 70(2), 260–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, G. N. (1990). Intuitions, category, and structure: Comments on McDaniel and Cairns. In Frazier, L. & de Villiers, J. (eds) Language processing and language acquisition, 327–33. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, C. S. (1969). The acquisition of syntax in children from 5 to 10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Sherman J. & Lust, B. (1986). Syntactic and lexical constraints on the acquisition of control in complement sentences. In Lust, B. (ed.) Studies in the acquisition of anaphora, Vol. 1, 279–308. Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Cohen, Sherman J. & Lust, B. (1993). Children are in control. Cognition 46, 1–51.Google Scholar
Diessel, H. & Tomasello, M. (2001). The acquisition of finite complement clauses in English: A corpus-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 12(2), 97–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunn, L. & Dunn, D. (1997). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, 3rd ed. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Services.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, S. L. & Cairns, H. S. (1994). The development of infinitives from three to five. Journal of Child Language 21, 713–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Francis, W. N. & Kucera, H. (1982). Frequency analysis of English usage: Lexicon and grammar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Goodluck, H., Terzi, A. & Chocano, Díaz G. (2001). The acquisition of control cross-linguistically: Structural and lexical factors in learning to licence PRO. Journal of Child Language 28, 158–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hsu, J. R., Cairns, H. S., Eisenberg, S. & Schlisselberg, G. (1989). Control and coreference in early child language. Journal of Child Language 16, 599–622.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hsu, J. R., Cairns, H. S. & Fiengo, R. W. (1985). The development of grammars underlying children's interpretation of complex sentences. Cognition 20, 25–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jackendoff, R. & Cullicover, P. W. (2003). The semantic basis of control in English. Language 79, 517–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kidd, E., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2005). The acquisition of complement clause constructions: A sentence repetition study. In Clark, E. V. (ed.) Constructions and acquisition: Proceedings of the 2004 Stanford child language research forum, 50–59. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
McCully, E. A. (1984). Picnic. New York: Harper & Row Publishers.Google Scholar
McDaniel, D., Cairns, H. S. & Hsu, J. R. (1991). Control principles in the grammars of young children. Language Acquisition 1(4), 297–335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nippold, M., Hesketh, L., Duthie, J., Moran, C., Gillon, G. & Anderson, J. (2003). Expository discourse in children, adolescents, and adults. Invited seminar presented at the Annual Convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, November 2003. Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
Owen, A. J. & Leonard, L. B. (2006). The use of finite and nonfinite sentence complements by children with SLI and their typically developing peers. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49(3), 548–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tavakolian, S. L. (1977). Structural principles in the acquisition of complex sentences. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Werner, E. O. H. & Kresheck, J. D. (1974). Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test, 2nd ed. DeKalb, IL: Janelle Publications, Inc.Google Scholar
Wexler, K. (1992). Some issues in the growth of control. In Larson, R. K., Iatridou, S., Lahiri, U. & Higginbotham, J. (eds) Control and grammar, 253–95. Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Williams, K. T. (1997). Expressive Vocabulary Test. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service, Inc.Google Scholar