Syntactic Awareness in Children

Abstract

The focus of the present chapter is on the child’s emerging ability to reflect upon the internal grammatical structure of sentences. This we have called syntactic awareness. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section discusses the early work on the development of children’s awareness of the syntactic and semantic properties of sentences; the second examines a number of methodological and conceptual issues raised in recent articles on form awareness in children; and the third briefly considers two closely related research topics—children’s awareness of structural synonymy (the property that two superficially different sentences share the same underlying structural representation), and children’s awareness of structural ambiguity (the property that a given surface string has associated with it two or more underlying structural representations).