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ERIC Number: EJ1184646
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 31
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1048-9223
EISSN: N/A
Syntactic and Pragmatic Factors in Children's Comprehension of Cleft Constructions
Aravind, Athulya; Hackl, Martin; Wexler, Ken
Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, v25 n3 p284-314 2018
We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts, where children behave adultlike both in their evaluation of the truth of cleft sentences and in their response-time patterns. When the pragmatic requirements on cleft use were not satisfied, children succeeded only on some types of clefts. However, they did not uniformly show difficulties with infelicitous object clefts; rather, success correlated with the amenability of the structure to a word-order-based parsing strategy. We argue that children fail to build an adultlike representation for infelicitous clefts across the board, but pressures to carry out the task lead them to adopt interpretive means outside of what is licensed in adult grammar.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Massachusetts (Boston)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A