Abstract
How does a child acquire a rule for a potentially infinite domain? For instance, in (1) the “what” is connected to a position three verbs away:
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(1)
what did John say that Mary wanted Jim to see
It is reasonable to suppose that such an expression is extremely rare and perhaps unavailable to a child until she is fairly old. This has, in fact, been the assumption in the rather sparse acquisition literature on the subject (Roeper et al., 1985). It has recently become very clear, however, that children have some knowledge of long-distance (LD) rules by the age of three. We have found (with the help of Mari Takahashi) that in the Brown (Adam) corpus, there were sixteen instances of long distance wh-movement in 3 and 1/2 years of recordings (a rather small number). However several of them occurred in the early three year-old age range:1
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De Villiers, J., Roeper, T., Vainikka, A. (1990). The Acquisition of Long-Distance Rules. In: Frazier, L., De Villiers, J. (eds) Language Processing and Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3808-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3808-6_10
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