The acquisition of adjunct control is colored by the task

Abstract

Previous studies on children’s interpretations of PRO in adjunct clauses have found that 4- to 6-year old children exhibit non-adultlike interpretations of adjunct PRO. For sentences with adjunct control, as in John bumped Mary after PRO tripping on the sidewalk, these studies have argued that children’s knowledge is not adultlike. In this paper, we use a new task to reduce the demands involved in making a response. With this task, we find improved performance for sentences with adjunct control. These results suggest that children’s knowledge of adjunct control is adultlike, but has been obscured by the tasks used in previous studies.

Keywords

• adjunct control
• language acquisition
• binding
• anaphora
• task effects