ABSTRACT

The wanna facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: Wanna is grammatical in certain contexts (Who do you want PRO to play with?) but not others (Who do you want who to play with you?). On a standard analysis, “contraction” to wanna is blocked by some empty constituents (WH-copies) but not others (PRO). All empty constituents are inaudible, so it has been unclear how restrictions on them could be learned. Children’s reported knowledge of the wanna facts (Crain & Thornton, 1998) has therefore been attributed to a principle of Universal Grammar (UG). In two experiments, we demonstrate that children’s use of wanna is not in fact adultlike and that error rates are modulated by the frequency of the embedded verb (play). These results suggest that if there is a UG principle, children appear not to know that it is relevant, raising important questions about what learning mechanisms enable children to circumvent the input’s apparent poverty.

摘要

本想事实是刺激（POS）问题的一个典型的贫困：想在某些情况下（语法你要跟谁PRO一起玩？），而不是其他人（你要跟谁谁跟你玩吗？）。在标准分析中，想要“收缩”是由一些空白要素（WH副本）阻止的，而不是其他要素（PRO）。所有空的成分都是听不清的，因此目前尚不清楚如何学习对它们的限制。儿童报道的知识想因此事实（克雷恩和桑顿，1998）已被归因于普遍语法（UG）的原则。在两个实验中，我们证明孩子使用的想实际上并不像成人，错误率是由嵌入动词（play）的频率调制的。这些结果表明，如果存在UG原则，则儿童似乎不知道它是否相关，从而引发了有关以下问题的重要问题：哪种学习机制可以使儿童规避投入的明显贫困。