Children are in control

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(93)90021-M

Cognition

Volume 46, Issue 1, January 1993, Pages 1-51

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(93)90021-M Get rights and content

Abstract

We argue on the basis of recent experimental results that modular principles of universal grammar (UG) play a continuous role in the first language acquisition of control. Our results involve both comprehension and production data from 108 3- to 8-year old children who are acquiring English. The results provide evidence against the hypothesis that there is a “stage” at which children do not know fundamental grammatical principles of control, or fail to apply the basic structural analysis relevant to control. We suggest that previous proposals for this hypothesis have been misled by (1) attention to only one aspect of the knowledge of control, namely choice of antecedent in comprehension of the embedded null subject in these structures and (2) misinterpretation of the nature of the principle by which children overgeneralize the choice of object as antecedent in control structures. Although the new results do replicate delay in acquisition with the unique subject- control verb “promise”, they suggest that this delay is caused by a need to integrate modular principles of UG with language-specific principles by which the lexicon and syntax (constituent structure and case) are related. The overgeneralization of choice of object as antecedent is shown to reflect a continuous principle of syntactic minimality.

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Se seleccionó a 15 sujetos con enfermedad de Parkinson medicados y a 15 controles emparejados en edad y en años de escolarización. Se diseñó una batería de pruebas específicas para el experimento que evaluaban 3 dominios diferentes (motor, lingüístico y visuoespacial) y 2 tipos de capacidades computacionales distintas (sensible e insensible al contexto).
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Intact grammar in HFA? Evidence from control and binding
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Citation Excerpt :
We turn now to double-complement subject control (promise) for which there was a varied performance, especially in the HFA children and their language-matched control group with estimated mean probabilities correct of .70 and .77, respectively. First of all, our finding supports all the studies that have tracked this construction's development in TD children (e.g. Hsu et al., 1989; Cohen Sherman and Lust, 1993; Eisenberg and Cairns, 1994). The promise sentences proved exceptionally difficult for only a proportion of our HFA group.
This study contributes original results to the topical issue of the degree to which grammar is intact in high-functioning children with autism (HFA). We examine the comprehension of binding and obligatory control in 26 HFA children, mean age = 12;02, compared with two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children: one matched on non-verbal mental age (MA), mean age = 9;09, and the other on verbal MA, mean age = 8;09. On the binding task, our HFA group showed a good performance on reflexives on a par with TD matched children, in line with recent reports of intact knowledge of reflexive binding in higher but not lower-functioning children with autism. Their comprehension of personal pronouns was somewhat poorer, with no difference observed between the groups, again supporting the existing literature. Results on the control task, which probed mastery of syntactic relations never previously examined in autism, revealed that both HFA children and the two matched TD groups were at ceiling on single-complement subject control (try) and object control (persuade). However, a considerably poorer attainment on double-complement subject control (promise) was present equally in the HFA group and the verbal MA-matched TD group but not in the non-verbal MA-matched group. Performance on promise correlated with age only in the verbal MA-matched group, whilst in HFA it correlated with general cognitive and language abilities.
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Control in Mandarin-speaking children's early naturalistic production
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Citation Excerpt :
Our focus is complement control, therefore, other types of control (e.g. adjunct control) will not be explored in this paper. Children's comprehension of control has been extensively studied (e.g. Adler, 2006; Broihier and Wexler, 1995; Cairns et al., 1994; Chomsky, 1969; Sherman and Lust, 1993; Eisenberg and Cairns, 1994; Goodluck, 1981, 2001; Goodluck et al., 2001; Hsu et al., 1985; Kirby, 2009; Maratsos, 1974; McDaniel et al., 1991). English-speaking children generally understand complement control sentences (with verbs such as ask, tell, want, and try) by age 3–4; however, they have problems interpreting sentences with the verb promise (e.g. Sherman and Lust, 1993; Eisenberg and Cairns, 1994; Kirby, 2009; Maratsos, 1974).
The present research uses longitudinal production data from four monolingual Mandarin-speaking children under age 2 to investigate the acquisition of complement control in Mandarin Chinese. The main purpose of the research is to explore whether control is available to Mandarin children in early language development and to capture the emergence of control structures in child Mandarin. Our analysis of the data obtained in 145 weekly or biweekly audio- and video-taped sessions demonstrate that children produce control sentences as early as before 2. They have produced control sentences with a variety of control verbs. A scrutiny of the way in which these control sentences are used and what children do and do not do in some contexts reveals that properties of control in adult grammar also surface in early control sentences. Children's early control sentences respect structural constraints such as the generalized control rule and the overtness requirement on object control. They never omit matrix objects in object control structures. Early control sentences also suggest differences from two superficially similar structures, i.e. the serial verb construction and coordination, in various aspects. Young children's control sentences exhibit universal as well as language-specific properties of development. We take such findings as cross-linguistic evidence for early child control and for the continuity view of language acquisition.
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One traditional view of the time course of language acquisition holds that a child's difficulties in learning her language are due to general processing, memory or conceptual limitations. As the child's cognitive capacities expand, so do her abilities to use her already-acquired grammar or to recognize additional properties of her soon-to-be native language. Recent work in the study of child language, however, has discovered the existence of a number of characteristic stages, transitions between which are best described in the terms of linguistic theory proper. These stages are surprising under a view of language acquisition according to which developmental delay derives from general cognitive limitations, which cannot characterize difficulties explicable only in language-specific terms. At the same time, current linguistic theories so severely restrict the variation among possible human grammars that there remains little reason why there should be any learning problem at all or characteristic developmental stages. In this paper, I propose that these two views can be reconciled. I show that children's difficulties with a wide range of syntactic constructions, which are indeed best defined in linguistic terms, should nonetheless be derived from limitations on the child's ability to deal with processing load and formal representational complexity. I suggest however that this can be done only in the context of a particular view of syntactic representation, one which is articulated in the terms of the formal system of tree adjoining grammar (TAG). I demonstrate how precisely those difficulties that children experience in the acquisition of relative clauses, adjectival modification, control constructions, raising, wh-questions and the obligatoriness of finite inflection can be traced to the complexity associated with one of the TAG combinatory operations, adjoining. This proposal relates this apparently disparate set of constructions in a novel way and provides us with a new type of explanation for the time course of syntactic development in terms of the complexity of formal grammatical devices.
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2018, Journal of Child Language
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^☆: The research reported here was supported in part by a Dissertation Award to the first author from the College of Human Ecology, Cornell University, and by a National Science Foundation Grant BNS 7825115 to the second author. Preparation of this manuscript was supported by the Massachusetts General Hospital Neuropsychology Laboratory under NIH Grant 00942.

^☆☆: A version of this paper was first presented in October 1988 at the 13th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.

^∗: We thank Professor James Gair, John Bowers and Steven Pinker and Drs. David Caplan and Karin Stromswald for insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper; Joyce Nelsen for invaluable assistance in data collection, transcription and scoring; and Gita Martohardjono, Kweeock Lee and Nancy Gabriel for information regarding Indonesian, Korean and French, respectively. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for detailed comments.

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Children are in control☆,☆☆

Abstract

Linguistic Inquiry

Control in Montague grammar

Linguistic Inquiry

The maturation of syntax

On the content of empty categories

Grammatical relations

The theory of grammatical relations

Grammatical relations

A structural theory of predication

The syntax and semantics of predication

Control and complementation

The concepts of topic and subject in first language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese

Child Development

Topics in the syntax and semantics of infinitives and gerunds

Local and long distance control

The acquisition of syntax in children from 5 to 10

On binding

Linguistic Inquiry

Lectures on government and binding

Some concepts and consequences of the theory of government and binding

Language and problems of knowledge: The Managua lectures

Acquisition of structural restrictions on anaphora

Meaning and form in children's judgment about language

Children's knowledge about pronouns: A study of the “truth value judgment task”

Frequency analysis of English usage: Lexicon and grammar

Kinds of markedness

Acquisition of null subjects and control in some Sinhala adverbial clauses

Papers and Reports on Child Language Development

A review of some Piagetian concepts

The structural sources of verb meanings

Language Acquisition

Linguistic principles in children's grammar of complement interpretation

Getting the dative alternation

MIT Working Papers in Linguistics

Knowledge and obedience: The developmental status of the binding theory

Linguistic Inquiry

The syntax of lexical word formation

The development of structural principles related to complement subject interpretation

Control and coreference in early child language

Journal of Child Language

The development of grammars underlying children's interpretation of complex sentences

Cognition

Pro drop in Chinese: A generalized control theory

Grammatical and cognitive interactions in the study of children's knowledge of binding theory and reference relations

On certain differences between French and English

Linguistic Inquiry

Type-driven translation

Linguistic and Philosophy

The invariant core of language

Theoretical Linguistic Research

On the constituency of infinitives

Language

Language and experience: Evidence from the blind child