ABSTRACT

Experimental studies show that children have greater difficulty with wh-extraction from object position than subject position, arguably an intervention effect (e.g., Relativized Minimality). In this study we provide additional evidence of a S/O asymmetry in A’-dependencies from a novel source—sluicing. The results of our first comprehension study show that English-speaking 3–6-year-olds obey the “identity condition” on sluicing—that is, they disallow interpretations in which the elided verb or arguments are distinct from their antecedent. Importantly, our results also show a subject > object asymmetry and thereby support syntactic theories of sluicing that posit a fully articulated (but unpronounced) TP at the ellipsis site from which the wh-phrase has been extracted, e.g., Someone wrote this paper, but I don’t know who <_ wrote this paper>, as opposed to certain semantic/pragmatic theories that posit no such structure. Our second comprehension study investigates the role of animacy. We find that children’s comprehension of object sluices, but not subject sluices, improves significantly when there is a mismatch in animacy features. Our results are incompatible with models that are solely frequency based but rather provide evidence for structure-based intervention effects. We conclude that subject > object asymmetries can be found even in instances in which the intervener is not overt, such as sluicing, and that [animacy] may be a feature involved in the computation of intervention.

摘要

实验研究表明，与对象位置相比，儿童从对象位置提取白血球的难度更大，可以说是一种干预效果（例如，相对简约）。在这项研究中，我们提供了另一种证据，即新颖的闸门A'依赖性的S / O不对称性。我们的第一项理解研究的结果表明，讲英语的3-6岁孩子在听课时遵守“身份条件”，也就是说，他们不允许解释所忽略的动词或论点与其先行词有所区别。重要的是，我们的结果也表明一个主题>对象的不对称性，从而支持泄水是断定从该省略号网站充分阐述（但不发音）TP的句法理论WH-句话已经被提取，例如，有人写过这篇论文，但是我不知道谁是《写这篇论文》，这与某些没有这种结构的语义/语用理论相反。我们的第二项理解研究调查了动画性的作用。我们发现，当动画功能不匹配时，儿童对目标水闸而非主题水闸的理解将显着提高。我们的结果与仅基于频率的模型不兼容，但为基于结构的干预效果提供了证据。我们得出的结论是，即使在干预者并不公开的情况下（如水闸），也可以发现主题>对象的不对称性，并且[animacy]可能是干预计算中的一个特征。