Abstract
Not so long ago, a story was told about the course of language acquisition. The story goes like this. A child begins with a simple grammar and gradually extends it to include more and more complex syntactic constructions. When presented with a sentence that he or she cannot analyze, the child will systematically assign it a structural analysis consistent with the current grammar, but not necessarily consistent with the adult grammar. That is, instead of being merely perplexed by sentences beyond their grammatical knowledge, children sometimes supply incorrect interpretations of them, at least if the sentences are presented in contexts which are open to an incorrect construal. The experimental technique of presenting sentences in intentionally ambiguous contexts was applied in several studies, leaving a great many disparities between child and adult grammars for researchers of language acquisition to explain.
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Crain, S., Mckee, C., Emiliani, M. (1990). Visiting Relatives in Italy. 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_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3808-6_14
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