ABSTRACT

The present study is designed to investigate whether children’s difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children’s comprehension of StSR with seem and Spanish-speaking children’s comprehension of StSR with parecer ‘seem,’ a configuration never before tested in this language. Spanish parecer is ambiguous between a functional verb, which does not select an experiencer argument, and a lexical verb, which requires an overt experiencer (e.g.. In the first part of this study, we consider the hypothesis that the experiencer argument of seem may induce intervention effects even when it is not overtly produced and find support for this claim—English-speaking children perform poorly on StSR both when the intervening experiencer is overtly expressed and when it is implicit; Spanish-speaking children, on the other hand, only perform poorly on StSR with lexical parecer but do well on StSR with functional parecer. These results are in line with intervention accounts. The second part of this study aims to investigate whether these intervention effects are rooted in children’s grammatical or processing deficits. Results from a verbal processing task suggest that for a group of children—those who perform at chance or above on the StSR task—comprehension of sentences with an intervening experiencer is modulated by processing capacity. However, for those who consistently obtain a non-adult-like interpretation of StSR, processing capacity does not positively correlate with their performance. We hypothesize that, for this group, the difficulty is instead grammar-based.

摘要

本研究的目的是调查儿童的受试者自养（StSR）困难是否是由于干预作用引起的。我们检查与讲英语的儿童STSR的理解似乎和讲西班牙语的儿童STSR的理解与parecer “似乎”的配置从来没有在这种语言测试之前。西班牙parecer是一种功能性动词，不选择一个体验者的说法，和这样的动词，这就需要有一个明显的体验者（如之间暧昧。在这项研究的第一部分，我们认为这一假设的体验者的说法似乎即使不是很明显地产生干预效果，也可能会引起干预效果，并且可以为这种主张寻求支持。英语的儿童在干预性经验者的公开表达和隐性表达时都表现不佳。另一方面，讲西班牙语的孩子仅在使用词法Parecer的StSR上表现较差，而在使用功能Parecer的StSR上表现良好。这些结果与干预措施相符。本研究的第二部分旨在调查这些干预效果是否源于儿童的语法或加工缺陷。口头处理任务的结果表明，对于一群儿童，即那些偶然或在StSR任务上表现出色的儿童，其对句子的理解能力受处理能力的调节。但是，对于那些始终获得非成人式StSR解释的人来说，处理能力与其表现并没有正相关。我们假设，对于这个群体，难度是基于语法的。