There Began to Be a Learnability Puzzle

Abstract

One of the fundamental puzzles language learners must solve is the mapping of a string of words onto a particular (correct) syntactic structure. In this article, I examine the problem of how learners should resolve the ambiguity presented by a string that could have either a raising or a control structure. I provide both logical and empirical arguments against the view that children should be biased to assume that such a string has a control structure. Instead, I propose two families of cues, based on a psycholinguistic experiment with adults, which can be used in a probabilistic manner to parse an ambiguous string and to categorize raising and control verbs.

Children Seem to Know Raising: Raising and Intervention in Child Language

“…Many studies of adult sentence processing have demonstrated that the processing difficulty of object relatives is mediated when the relative clause head is an inanimate NP (e.g., the movie that the director watched _) (Mak, Vonk, & Schriefers, 2002, 2006Traxler, Morris, & Seely, 2002;Traxler, Williams, Blozis, & Morris, 2005). Furthermore, similar results have been reported from the acquisition study by Kidd et al (2007), which found that 3-and 4-year-old children were better at correctly repeating object relatives containing inanimate head nouns, compared to those with animate head nouns.…”

“…Previous research on sentences like (2b) has shown conflicting results so far, some claiming children's good comprehension (e.g., Becker, 2006), while others arguing for the opposite (e.g., Hirsch, Orfitelli, & Wexler, 2008). Let us first consider the studies that claim to have found good comprehension of seem sentences without an experiencer.…”

“…First and foremost, further investigation is necessary to examine children's comprehension of raising sentences without an experiencer phrase (e.g., John seems to be short). As things now stand, the results are controversial in that some studies claim delayed acquisition (e.g., Hirsch, Orfitelli, & Wexler, 2008), while others claim no delay (e.g., Becker, 2006). However, as noted in Section 2.1, each of the previous studies raises methodological concerns that need to be addressed before any definitive conclusion can be drawn.…”

“…In fact, this possible confound was noted in Becker (2006), where a TVJT was conducted that respected the distinction between appearance and reality. One story described a white dog appearing purple under a purple light.…”

“…In summary, the attempts by Becker (2004Becker ( , 2006Becker ( , 2007 and Hirsch et al (2008) to test comprehension of the raising sentences without an experiencer phrase are marred by a number of methodological concerns, that call into question their validity.…”