Crain S., Thornton R. Investigations in Universal Grammar. A Guide to Experiments on the Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics

MIT Press, 1998. — 350 pp.This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammar, a theory of the human faculty for language. The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Elicited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Judgment task, a comprehension task. Their methodologies are designed to overcome the numerous obstacles to empirical investigation of children's language competence. They produce research results that are more reproducible and less likely to be dismissed as an artifact of improper experimental procedure. In the first section of the book, the authors examine the fundamental assumptions that guide research in this area; they present both a theory of linguistic competence and a model of language processing. In the following two sections, they discuss in detail their two experimental techniques.The Modularity Matching ModelConstraints and Universal Grammar
The Poverty of the Stimulus
Models of Language Development
Continuity versus Input Matching
The Competing Factors Model
Competing Tasks: Reaction Time Studies
Competing Tasks: The Act-Out Task
9 Competing Tasks: Imitation
Judgment Tasks and Competing Fadors
Context and Competing Factors
Language ProcessingThis
Extralinguistic Knowledge
When Principles and Preferences Collide
Performance Errors
Methodological Preliminaries
The Elicited Production Task
Elicited Production
Eliciting Relative Clauses
Asking Questions: The" Ask/Tell" Problem
Structure-Dependence
Wanna Contraction
Long-Distance Questions and the Medial-Wh
Why Children Make Good Subjects
Summary of Designs
The Truth Value Judgment Task
Truth Value Judgments
Backward Anaphora
Fundamentals of Design: Principle C
What's Wrong with This Picture?
Strang Crossover
Strongest Crossover
Principle B
Following Up on Principle B
Sets and Circumstances
Discourse Binding
Universal Quantification
Donkey Sentences
A Potential Drawback of the Task
Resolving the Dilemma: Control Sentences
Resolving the Dilemma: Varying the Context