1. Another Look at Children's Interpretation of Complements to 'Be Easy.'
- Author
-
Klein, Sharon M.
- Abstract
A study looks at young children's responses to tough movement structures, focusing on complements to "easy." The study examines the development of the two major types of rule usage: primitive and adult, and focuses on the inconsistent fluctuations between the primitive and adult levels. It is proposed that the source of complexity in grammatical constructions for the primitive rule usage group is not a function of an overriding primitive rule, but is in the children's capacity to retreat to their syntactically sanctioned causative analysis in experimental contexts. This finding obscures the understanding of what these children really know about the complement structure of the adjectives in question. It is also found that lexical development plays an important role in the movement of children from one stage to another. (MSE)
- Published
- 1988