Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-7nlkj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-29T07:51:56.586Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The development of infinitives from three to five*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Sarita L. Eisenberg  and
Helen S. Cairns
Sarita L. Eisenberg*
Affiliation:
Teachers College, Columbia University
Helen S. Cairns
Affiliation:
Queens College and the City University of New York
*
Box 160, Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 West 120 Street, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study investigated the form of infinitival sentences produced by young children and their knowledge of the control properties of this sentence form. Twenty-five children between the ages of 3;7 and 5;4 participated in a story completion task designed to elicit infinitive sentences and in an act-out comprehension task. Although the infinitive form was productive for even the youngest children in this study, development of this form was not complete even for the five-year-olds, nor did any child demonstrate adult knowledge of control. In addition, two competing claims regarding order of acquisition (that of Limber, 1973, and Hyams, 1985) were evaluated.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , October 1994 , pp. 713 - 734
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

The study reported here is based on a doctoral dissertation completed by the first author at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. We appreciate the cooperation of Mrs Karen Schwinger, director of the Scribbles Nursery School in Mountain Lakes, NJ, and of the parents and children who participated in our study. We thank Dr Dana McDaniel for her comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

References

REFERENCES

Bloom, L. (1970). Language development: form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Tackeff, J. & Lahey, M. (1984). Learning to in complement constructions. Journal of Child Language 11, 391–406.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bowerman, M. (1973). Early syntactic development: a crosslinguistic study with reference to Finnish. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Cairns, H. S., McDaniel, D., Hsu, J. R. & Rapp, M. (1990). The interpretation of sentences containing pronominal elements by young children. Minisminar, American Speech–Language–Hearing Association Convention.Google Scholar
Chomsky, C. (1969). The acquisition of syntax from 5 to 10. Cambridge, MA: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, S. (1989). The development of infinitives by three, four and five year-old children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, City University of New York.Google Scholar
Goodluck, H. (1981). Children's grammar of complement subject interpretation. In Tavakolian, S. L. (ed.), Language acquisition and linguistic theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Goodluck, H. (1986). Developing grammars: language acquisition and linguistic theory. In Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. (eds), Language acquisition: studies in first language development (2nd edn). Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Hsu, J. R., Cairns, H. S. & Fiengo, R. W. (1985). The development of grammars underlying children's interpretations of complex sentences. Cognition 20, 25–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hyams, N. (1985). The contribution of core and peripheral grammar to the acquisition of complex sentences. Paper given at Boston University Conference on Child Language.Google Scholar
Limber, J. (1973). The genesis of complex sentences. In Moore, T. E. (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
McDaniel, D. & Cairns, H. S. (1990). The processing and acquisition of control structures by young children. In Frazier, L. & de Villiers, J. (eds), Language processing and language acquisition. Boston: Kluwer.Google Scholar
McDaniel, D., Cairns, H. S. & Hsu, J. R. (1991). Control principles in children's grammars. Language Acquisition 1, 297–336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menyuk, P. (1969). Sentences children use. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Reinhardt, T. (1976). The syntactic domain of anaphora. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Tavakolian, S. (1977). Structural principles in the acquisition of complex sentences. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar