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Asymmetry in children's comprehension of raising*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

JINSUN CHOE  and
WILLIAM O'GRADY
JINSUN CHOE*
Affiliation:
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
WILLIAM O'GRADY
Affiliation:
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
*
Address for correspondence: Jinsun Choe, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies – Graduate School of Education, 107 Imun-ro Dongdaemungu, Seoul Seoul 130–791, Republic of Korea. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper investigates English-speaking children's acquisition of raising constructions (e.g. John seems to Mary to be happy) and finds an asymmetric effect of NP type on their comprehension: an improvement in performance is observed when a lexical NP is raised across a pronominal experiencer (e.g. John seems to her to be happy) compared to when a pronoun is raised across a lexical NP experiencer (e.g. He seems to Mary to be happy). These results are consistent with a processing-based approach to intervention effects, which reduces children's difficulty with raising to a performance limitation, rather than a grammatical deficit.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 752 - 765
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was funded by the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (BCS-1227232). We would like to thank Kamil Deen, Bonnie D. Schwartz, Shinichiro Fukuda, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments, as well as the audience at the WCCFL (2013) and GALA (2013). All errors remain ours.

References

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