TY - JOUR
T1 - Relatives Children Say
AU - McKee, Cecile
AU - McDaniel, Dana
AU - Snedeker, Jesse
N1 - Funding Information:
This study, begun in 1989 and completed in 1995, was funded by various sources: McKee received support from the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona in 1989-1990. McKee and Snedeker received support from the Royalty Research Fund at the University of Washington in 1994.McKee and McDaniel received support from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9421542) beginning in 1995.We are also grateful to the many folk who helped us with these experiments. First, the children who participated in our study were wonderfully generous with their linguistic data. Second, our collecting and transcribing of these utterances would have taken even longer had we not had the help of the following people: Veronica Carpenter (U.S.M.), Jewel Cripe (U.W.), Kristine Gjer-low-Johnson (U.S.M.), James Lyle (U.W.), Tom Maxfield (U.S.M.), Kelley McDaniel (U.S.M.), Jerry Neufeld-Kaiser (U.W.), and Diane Patterson (U.A.) 1 University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721. 2 University of Southern Maine 04104. 3 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19104. 4 Address all correspondence to Cecile McKee, University of Arizona, Department of Linguistics, P.O. Box 210028, Tucson, Arizona 85721.
PY - 1998/9
Y1 - 1998/9
N2 - In an experiment designed to elicit restrictive relatives clauses, 28 children ranging in age from 2;2 to 3;10 provided a corpus of communicatively appropriate relative clauses. In evaluating this corpus, we found that most children produced mostly adult relative clauses most of the time. Detailed study of these utterances uncovered a few error patterns, which we analyzed in light of several considerations (e.g., the overall frequency of an error type, its distribution across children and items, its relation to the construction under study, and the similarity of the error to what children do elsewhere). Only one error pattern, namely some children's production of inappropriate relative pronouns, is argued to reflect a systematic feature of language development. We conclude that children's ability to represent the syntactic structure of the embedded clause is on target very early.
AB - In an experiment designed to elicit restrictive relatives clauses, 28 children ranging in age from 2;2 to 3;10 provided a corpus of communicatively appropriate relative clauses. In evaluating this corpus, we found that most children produced mostly adult relative clauses most of the time. Detailed study of these utterances uncovered a few error patterns, which we analyzed in light of several considerations (e.g., the overall frequency of an error type, its distribution across children and items, its relation to the construction under study, and the similarity of the error to what children do elsewhere). Only one error pattern, namely some children's production of inappropriate relative pronouns, is argued to reflect a systematic feature of language development. We conclude that children's ability to represent the syntactic structure of the embedded clause is on target very early.
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U2 - 10.1023/A:1024901029643
DO - 10.1023/A:1024901029643
M3 - Article
C2 - 9750313
AN - SCOPUS:0032158885
SN - 0090-6905
VL - 27
SP - 573
EP - 596
JO - Journal of psycholinguistic research
JF - Journal of psycholinguistic research
IS - 5
ER -