Much work on children's PP attachment ambiguity resolution has demonstrated that children ca... more Much work on children's PP attachment ambiguity resolution has demonstrated that children can use syntactic and semantic cues for sentence comprehension when the cues appear before structural ambiguities arise, but not when the cues appear after an ambiguity has been resolved (the 'kindergarten-path effect'). The present study extends this line of research to fillergap dependency processing and investigates to what extent syntactic and semantic cues guide adults' and children's comprehension of Japanese and English ...
This paper reports an experimental study on children's relative scope interpretation of negation ... more This paper reports an experimental study on children's relative scope interpretation of negation and because-clauses. Conducting an experiment with a truth-value judgment task, we found that both children and adults exhibit a bias to interpret because-clauses outside of negation. This pattern contrasts with children's non-adult-like biases in negative sentences involving covert scope-shifting operations (e.g., QR, reconstruction), which have been extensively reported in the literature. Children's adult-like behavior in sentences with negation and because-clauses indicates that these non-adult-like biases cannot solely be attributed to difficulties with negation.
According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through... more According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition contend that child language matches the input, with nonadult forms being simply less articulated versions of the forms produced by adults. This paper reports several studies that provide support for the theory of Universal grammar, and resist explanation on experience-based accounts. Two studies investigate English-speaking children’s productions, and a third examines the interpretation of sentences by Japanese speaking children. When considered against the input children are exposed to, the findings of these and other studies are consistent with the continuity hypothesis, which supposes that child language can differ from the language spoken by adults only in ways that adult languages can differ from each other.
Covert Downward Entailment in Child English and Japanese
... Experimenter 1: “Now, let's see what will happen!” (Acting out each of the three characte... more ... Experimenter 1: “Now, let's see what will happen!” (Acting out each of the three characters: Pooh decides not to eat anything, because what he wanted to eat washoney. Bunny Rabbit, on the other hand, happily eats a carrot. ...
Much work on children's PP attachment ambiguity resolution has demonstrated that children ca... more Much work on children's PP attachment ambiguity resolution has demonstrated that children can use syntactic and semantic cues for sentence comprehension when the cues appear before structural ambiguities arise, but not when the cues appear after an ambiguity has been resolved (the 'kindergarten-path effect'). The present study extends this line of research to fillergap dependency processing and investigates to what extent syntactic and semantic cues guide adults' and children's comprehension of Japanese and English ...
This paper reports an experimental study on children's relative scope interpretation of negation ... more This paper reports an experimental study on children's relative scope interpretation of negation and because-clauses. Conducting an experiment with a truth-value judgment task, we found that both children and adults exhibit a bias to interpret because-clauses outside of negation. This pattern contrasts with children's non-adult-like biases in negative sentences involving covert scope-shifting operations (e.g., QR, reconstruction), which have been extensively reported in the literature. Children's adult-like behavior in sentences with negation and because-clauses indicates that these non-adult-like biases cannot solely be attributed to difficulties with negation.
According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through... more According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition contend that child language matches the input, with nonadult forms being simply less articulated versions of the forms produced by adults. This paper reports several studies that provide support for the theory of Universal grammar, and resist explanation on experience-based accounts. Two studies investigate English-speaking children’s productions, and a third examines the interpretation of sentences by Japanese speaking children. When considered against the input children are exposed to, the findings of these and other studies are consistent with the continuity hypothesis, which supposes that child language can differ from the language spoken by adults only in ways that adult languages can differ from each other.
Covert Downward Entailment in Child English and Japanese
... Experimenter 1: “Now, let's see what will happen!” (Acting out each of the three characte... more ... Experimenter 1: “Now, let's see what will happen!” (Acting out each of the three characters: Pooh decides not to eat anything, because what he wanted to eat washoney. Bunny Rabbit, on the other hand, happily eats a carrot. ...
Uploads
Papers by Takuya Goro