Syntactic and Pragmatic Factors in Children's Comprehension of Cleft Constructions

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of it-clefts and wh-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are prese...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language acquisition 2018-07, Vol.25 (3), p.284-314
Main Authors: Aravind, Athulya, Hackl, Martin, Wexler, Ken
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Auditory Stimuli
Children
Children & youth
Cleft constructions
Comprehension
Correlation
Decision Making
Elementary School Students
English
English language
Grammar
Language Acquisition
Language Patterns
Language Processing
Language Research
Licensing
Parsing
Pictorial Stimuli
Pragmatics
Preschool Children
Reaction Time
Sentences
Syntactic structures
Syntax
Syntax pragmatics interface
Task Analysis
Truth
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Description
Summary:We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of it-clefts and wh-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts, where children behave adultlike both in their evaluation of the truth of cleft sentences and in their response-time patterns. When the pragmatic requirements on cleft use were not satisfied, children succeeded only on some types of clefts. However, they did not uniformly show difficulties with infelicitous object clefts; rather, success correlated with the amenability of the structure to a word-order-based parsing strategy. We argue that children fail to build an adultlike representation for infelicitous clefts across the board, but pressures to carry out the task lead them to adopt interpretive means outside of what is licensed in adult grammar.
ISSN:1048-9223
1532-7817
DOI:10.1080/10489223.2017.1316725