Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T08:43:51.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

15 - Judgments of Acceptability, Truth, and Felicity in Child Language

from Part III - Experimental Studies of Specific Populations and Language Families

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Rosalind Thornton
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Get access

Summary

Researchers who study child language have a range of tasks available to them for assessing children’s linguistic knowledge and development.Research findings have shown that sentence acceptability tasks are extremely challenging for children younger than 6 years of age. Pre-school children who are ”metalinguistically aware” can succeed, but most children require the addition of contextual support to demonstrate the intended meaning of the sentence. Instead, many experiments opt for truth-value judgment tasks which can be used successfully with children as young as 3 years old. Truth-value judgment tasks can also incorporate a check on children’s interpretation of the test sentence. Two new tasks, the felicity judgment task and the ternary judgment task, have evolved recently to assess children’s pragmatic inferences. The efficacy of the ternary judgment task has not yet been demonstrated but the felicity judgment task has been used reliably, and can reveal the source of children’s decisions, by presenting explicit alternatives as the basis of the child’s decision.

Keywords

sentence acceptability tasktruth-value judgment taskfelicity judgment taskternary judgment taskcompetenceperformancepresuppositionmetalinguistic judgmentchild language
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 394 - 420
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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.)

References

Ambridge, B., Pine, J., Rowland, C., & Young, C. R. (2008). The effect of verb semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children’s and adults’ graded judgments of argument structure overgeneralization errors. Cognition, 106, 87–129.Google Scholar
Barner, D., Brooks, N., & Bale, A. (2011). Accessing the unsaid: The role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference. Cognition, 118, 84–93.Google Scholar
Borer, H. & Wexler, K. (1987). The maturation of syntax. In Roeper, T. & Williams, E., eds., Parameter Setting. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 123–172.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1982). Evaluating competing linguistic models with language acquisition data: Implications of developmental errors with causative verbs. Quaderni di Semantica, 3, 5–66.Google Scholar
Brown, R., Fraser, C., & Bellugi, U. (1964). Explorations in grammar evaluation. In. Bellugi, U. & Brown, R., eds., The Acquisition of Language (Monograph of the Society of Research in Child Development, 29). Lafayette, IN: Society for Research in Child Development, pp. 79–92.Google Scholar
Chierchia, G., Crain, S., Guasti, M. T., Gualmini, A., & Meroni, L. (2001). The acquisition of disjunction: Evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicatures. In Do, A. H.-J., Domínguez, L., & Johansen, A., eds., Proceedings of the 25th Boston University Conference on Child Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 157–168.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Crain, S. (1982). Temporal terms: Mastery by age five. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 21, 33–38.Google Scholar
Crain, S. (1991). Language acquisition in the absence of experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14, 597–612.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S., Koring, L., & Thornton, R. (2017). Language acquisition from a biolinguistic perspective. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 81, 120–149.Google Scholar
Crain, S. & McKee, C. (1985). Acquisition of structural restrictions on anaphora. In Berman, S., McDonough, J., & Choe, J.-W., eds., Proceedings of the 16th North East Linguistic Society. Amherst, MA: GLSA, pp. 94–110.Google Scholar
Crain, S. & Thornton, R. (1998). Investigations in Universal Grammar: A Guide to Experiments on the Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Crawford, J. (2012). Developmental perspectives on the acquisition of the passive. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut.Google Scholar
Davidson, D. (1984). Radical translation. In Davidson, D., ed., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 125–139.Google Scholar
De Villiers, J. & de Villiers, P. (1974). Competence and performance in child language: Are children really competent to judge? Journal of Child Language, 1, 11–22.Google Scholar
Foppolo, F., Guasti, M. T., & Chierchia, G. (2012). Scalar implicatures in child language: Give children a chance. Language Learning and Development, 8, 365–394.Google Scholar
Fukuda, S., Goodall, G., Michel, D., & Beecher, H. (2012). Is magnitude estimation worth the trouble? In Choi, J., Hogue, E. A., Punske, J., Tat, D., Schertz, J., & Trueman, A., eds., Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, pp. 328–336.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. R., Gleitman, H., & Shipley, E. (1972). The emergence of the child as grammarian. Cognition, 1, 137–164.Google Scholar
Hamburger, H. & Crain, S. (1982). Relative acquisition. In Kuczaj, Stan A. II, ed., Language Development, Syntax and Semantics, vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 245–274.Google Scholar
Hochberg, J. (1986). Children’s judgements of transitivity errors. Journal of Child Language, 13, 317–334.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Katsos, N. & Bishop, D. V. M. (2011). Pragmatic tolerance: Implications for the acquisition of informativeness and implicature. Cognition, 120, 67–81.Google Scholar
Lasnik, H. & Crain, S. (1985). On the acquisition of pronominal reference. Lingua, 65, 135–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenneberg, E. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
McDaniel, D. & Cairns, H. S. (1990). The child as informant: Eliciting linguistic intuitions from young children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 19, 331–344.Google Scholar
McDaniel, D. & Cairns, H. S. (1996). Eliciting judgments of grammaticality and reference. In McDaniel, D., McKee, C., & Cairns, H. S., eds., Methods for Assessing Children’s Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 233–254.Google Scholar
McDaniel, D., Cairns, H. S., & Hsu, J. R. (1990). Binding principles in the grammars of young children. Language Acquisition, 1, 121–139.Google Scholar
McDaniel, D., Cairns, H. S., & Hsu, J. R. (1990/1991). Control principles in the grammars of young children. Language Acquisition, 1, 297–335.Google Scholar
McDaniel, D. & Maxfield, T. (1992). The nature of the anti-c-command requirement: Evidence from young children. Linguistic Inquiry, 23, 667–671.Google Scholar
Noveck, I. A. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition, 78, 165–188.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pinker, S. (1984). Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Renans, A., Romoli, J., Makri, M. M., Tieu, L., de Vries, H., Folli, R., & Tsoulas, G. (2018). The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1), 103. DOI:10.5334/gjgl.531Google Scholar
Skordos, D. & Pappafragou, A. (2016). Children’s derivation of scalar implicatures: Alternatives and relevance. Cognition, 153, 6–18.Google Scholar
Smith, C. L. (1980). Quantifiers and question answering in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 30, 191–205.Google Scholar
Theakston, A. (2004). The role of entrenchment in children’s and adults’ performance on grammaticality judgment tasks. Cognitive Development, 19, 15–34.Google Scholar
Thornton, R. (2017). The truth value judgment task: An update. In Nakayama, M., Su, Y. C., & Huang, A., eds., Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In Honor of Stephen Crain. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 13–39.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×