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Performance factors in subject-auxiliary inversion by children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Mineharu Nakayama
Mineharu Nakayama*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut and Connecticut College
*
U-145, Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06268, USA.
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Abstract

Children's reported copying-without-deletion errors, like ‘Whose is that is?’, have often been interpreted as the result of a non-adult rule of subject–aux inversion. By contrast, this study presents a performance account of these errors and supports this account by investigating what factors impede children's performance. Using an elicitation task, 16 test sentences were evoked from 16 3- to 5-year-old children. In particular, errors appeared (1) when the subject NP contained a relative clause, (2) when the relative clause had an object gap, and (3) when the relative clause was long. Since errors occurred in response to some sentence types and not others, and the children who made copying-without-deletion errors produced at least four correct responses, these results were interpreted as support for the performance account.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 1987 , pp. 113 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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Footnotes

*

Part of this paper was presented at the 10th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. I would like to offer special thanks to Stephen Grain, Cecile McKee, Paul Gorrell, Janet Dean Fodor, Howard Lasnik, and anonymous JCL reviewers for their comments and assistance. Also I am very grateful to all of the participants and teachers at the Child Laboratories at the University of Connecticut and Jack'n Jill Day Care Center & Kindergarten in Chaplin, Connecticut.

References

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