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On the acquisition of syntax in Tamil: a comment on Garman (1974)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Barbara Lust  and
Julie Eisele
Barbara Lust*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
Julie Eisele
Affiliation:
Cornell University
*
Department of Human Development and Family Studies, New York State College of Human Ecology, Cornell University, Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4401, USA.
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Abstract

Garman (1974), reporting on twenty Tamil children aged three to five, postulated a linguistic strategy and two prelinguistic strategies to explain the results of a question-picture choice task involving sentences with embedded and subordinate clauses. In a reanalysis of his data, we identify four processing strategies and show that some of Garman's findings are better explained not as the outcome of prelinguistic strategies but as an artefact of the experimental design. In fact the data provide evidence of a grammatical sensitivity which is consonant with a sensitivity – demonstrated in recent language-acquisition studies – to the branching direction of the language being acquired.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , February 1991 , pp. 215 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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Footnotes

*

This paper was prepared with the partial support of National Science Foundation grant 8318983. We thank James Gair for consultation on the Tamil language.

References

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