Abstract
Judgments of the acceptability of correct, word order reversed, and semantically anomalous sentences were elicited from 2- and 3-year-old children in a game played with hand puppets. All of the sentences used were simple imperatives and each child was asked to correct those he called “wrong”. Performance on the judgment task was correlated with each child's mean length of utterance and with his comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences. Only the linguistically most advanced children were able to make a significant number of appropriate judgments and corrections of reversed word order imperatives. Less developed children could appropriately judge and correct semantically anomalous but not incorrect word order imperatives. The importance of semantic as opposed to syntactic factors in children's judgments of the acceptability of sentences is stressed.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anglin, J. (1970).The Growth of Word Meaning. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Bever, T. G., Mehler, J. R., and Valian, V. V. (in press). Linguistic capacity of very young children. In Bever, T. G., and Weksel, W. (eds.),The Acquisition of Structure. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.
Brown, R. W. (in press).A First Language: The Early Stages. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Brown, R. W., Fraser, C., and Bellugi, U. (1964). Explorations in grammar evaluation. In Bellugi, U., and Brown, R. W. (eds.).The Acquisition of Language, Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Develop. 29: 79–92.
Brown, R. W., Cazden, C., and Bellugi, U. (1969). The child's grammar from I to III. In Hill, J. P. (ed.),Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 28–73.
Bruner, J. S. (1966). On cognitive growth II. In Bruner, J. S., Olver, R. R. and Greenfield, P. M. (eds.),Studies in Cognitive Growth. Wiley, New York, pp. 30–67.
de Villiers, J. G., and de Villiers, P. A. (1971). Development of the use of word order in comprehension. Unpublished manuscript, Harvard University.
Gleitman, L. R., Shipley, E. F., and Alloway, B. (1970). The emergence of the child as grammarian. Technical Report X, Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute.
Maclay, H., and Sleator, M. (1960). Responses to language: judgments of grammaticalness.Intern. J. Amer. Linguist. 26: 275–282.
McNeill, D. (1970). The development of language. In Mussen, P. H. (ed.),Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology, Vol. I, Wiley, New York, pp. 1061–1161.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
This research was supported in part by PHS Grant HD-02908 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Roger Brown is the principal investigator.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
de Villiers, P.A., de Villiers, J.G. Early judgments of semantic and syntactic acceptability by children. J Psycholinguist Res 1, 299–310 (1972). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067785
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067785