mcdaniel e cairns 1991 the processing and acquisitions of control structures by young children

7/27/2019 McDaniel e Cairns 1991 the Processing and Acquisitions of Control Structures by Young Children

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DANA MCDANIEL AND HELEN SMITH CAIRNS

THE PROCESSING AND ACQUISITION OFCONTROL STRUCTURES BY YOUNG CHILDREN

In order to interpret a sentence involving control, the hearer mustidentify a referent for the phonetically null element PRO. It is, therefore, of interest to investigate how children acquire this ability.This paper reports some data that we have obtained on the acquisition of control principles by young children. This work is part of alarger research project including investigation of the development of thebinding principles. We have some suggestions about the relationshipbetween processing and the acquisition of control that are very tentative, but we think quite promising.

Our work has dealt with control in both complement and adjunctclauses. We are following an analysis of control such that there is a rulein Universal Grammar indicating that PRO is controlled by the closestc-commanding NP. We are aware of the fact that there are controlstructures that are problematic for this analysis. We adopt it, however,because it is a plausible account of the structures we are studying -within the constraints of UG. We feel that it is impossible to trace thedevelopment of an aspect of grammar unless our conception of thataspect of grammar is informed by a linguistic analysis. Should otheranalyses appear to be more plausible in the future, then they should berequired to provide an account of our developmental data.The rule that PRO is controlled by the closest c-commanding NPleads to object control in the case of VP attached complements, such as(1), and to subject control for S attached adjuncts, such as (2).1(1) Cookie Monster tells Grover to jump over the fence.(2) Cookie Monster touches Grover after jumping over thefence.

The typical finding is that children perform correctly on the complements at a fairly early age. (Although Tavakolian (1981) has reportedsome subject control errors in complements among very young children, and difficulty with exceptional verbs such as 'promise' is wellknown.) The adjuncts are a different story, however, producing errors313

Lyn Frazier and Jill de Villiers (eds.), Language Processing and Language Acquisition,313-325. 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.


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of interpretation (from the point of view of the adult) until early schoolage. Hsu et al. (1985), based on a series of act-out tasks, havedemonstrated a developmental sequence in the acquisition of control inadjuncts that goes like this. First, the child lacks the rule for controlbased on c-command and uses a strategy to determine the controller ofPRO. The most primitive strategy is to select the subject (the wellknown first noun strategy), followed by a Minimal Distance Strategy,which results in the selection of the object as controller. Next, the childdevelops the rule for control, but erroneously attaches the adjunctclause to the VP, so the rule, correctly applied, yields object control.Hsu et al. distinguish between children who are using an object strategyand those who are basing object control on VP attachment by presenting sentences such as (3).

(3) Cookie Monster stands near Grover after jumping over thefence.The strategy users will select the closest NP, Grover, as the controller,but the more advanced children select Cookie Monster, since the objectof the preposition does not c-command PRO. Next is a transitionalstage during which the child begins to attach the adjunct to the S, butdoes not do so reliably, so mixed responses are observed, with somechildren vacillating between subject and object control. Finally, thechild reliably attaches to the S and exhibits essentially adult-likebehavior. This developmental sequence has been verified by a numberof experimental studies and also by a small longitudinal study conducted by Hsu and Cairns (to appear).Two aspects of the Hsu et al. (1985) work and analysis troubled us.First, the claim that the children initially lack the c-command rule forcontrol suggests that for a period the child has a non-human grammar,since we are assuming that the rule is part of UG. Such a state of affairswould force us to a developmental view of the acquisition of universalprinciples. We, however, view Pinker's Continuity Hypothesis as beinga more restrictive, and, hence, a more a priori attractive hypothesis.This is precisely because it does not admit grammars for children thatare unconstrained by adult grammatical principles.

The second problem with the work of Hsu and her colleagues is thatall the experiments required the children to act out their interpretationof the relevant sentences. One aspect of this problem is that enactmentstrategies essentially intervene between the child's interpretation of the


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PROCESSING AND ACQUISITION OF CONTROL STRUCTURES 315sentence and the datum that demonstrates that interpretation. Further,an act-out task only illustrates one interpretation of a sentence. Indeveloping grammars (indeed, in any grammar) there may be multiplepossible interpretations, while one is preferable. This is one reason whylinguists do not use enactment tasks when investigating the grammars ofadults. Instead, they elicit from informants judgments regarding thegrammaticality and referential properties of sentences of interest. Judgments are the best way we know of to evaluate an individual's competence. Enactment tasks are more appropriate if one wishes to obtaininformation about performance strategies and preferences.Since we are concerned with questions of competence, rather thanperformance, we decided to attempt to elicit linguistic judgments fromthe children in our studies. We developed a procedure for givingchildren training and practice in making the kind of judgments weneeded. The procedure involves seeing each child two times forpractice in giving judgments. During the first session, the linguistengages the child in dialogue about the nature of language, the fact thatpeople speak different languages, etc., and gives the child practice injudging the well-formedness of sentences. In the second session there ismore dialogue about the nature of language and practice reporting onthe referential properties of sentences. Then, in a third session, childrenare asked to judge the sentences of interest. The interviews have a veryinformal tone of engaging the child in conversations about language (aswith an adult informant). The children do very well with this task. Theylike being able to assist us in a scientific investigation. We present theirparticipation to them as an important and serious enterprise, not as agame. The methodology is reported in full in McDaniel and Cairns(1987).We have done several studies using this methodology. The onereported here involved 20 children between the ages of 3: 9 and 5: 4.We elicited judgments regarding sentences relevant to the developmentof both binding and control and also asked them to act the sentencesout (before they judged them) so that we would be able to compare actout and judgment responses. The full report of this study is given inMcDaniel, Cairns, and Hsu (1990, forthcoming). We are also currentlytwo-thirds through a longitudinal study involving a group of fourteenchildren who were 4: 1 through 4: 10 at the beginning of the year.

Among the sentences we gave the children for judgment and act-outwere control sentences such as (1) and (2). A major finding is that there


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are children (usually very young) who lack control in such sentences.That is, they tell us that anyone can be jumping over the fence in (1)and (2); hence, for these children PRO is not controlled. In our firststudy, there were two children who lacked control in both complementsand adjuncts and three more who had control in the complement, butnot in the adjunct. (No one had acquired control in the adjunct beforethe complement.) Everyone of these five children acted out all six ofthe adjunct sentences using the object as the actor. Another sevenchildren apparently had control, reporting that Grover had to be thejumper in both (1) and (2) and acting the sentences out accordingly.A crucial point here is that if we were only relying on act-outevidence, the children who have object control of PRO would havebeen indistinguishable from those who lack control, yet have an enactment strategy indicating a preference for an interpretation identifyingthe object as the subject of the adjunct clause verb. We also observedchildren in the mixed and adult stages of development, their act-outresponses comporting with their judgments in almost every instance.The stages are further verified in our other studies. In our currentstudy, we are not using an act-out task, but we do get information aboutthe children's preferred interpretation by their first answer to thequestion "Who would jump over the fence?". We have also added asentence such as (3) and have verified Hsu's finding that object controlchildren do tend to shift to subject control for these sentences.We consider our most important finding in this range of data to bethat there is a stage, previously unattested as far as we know, duringwhich children lack control. Below, we will give our analysis of thestructural representations generated by the various developing grammars. The major point here is that during the period in which childrenhave no control, they will behave as though they are violating thec-command rule for control. This is an erroneous interpretation, however, for they cannot violate the rule for control if they do not have arequirement for control. Rather, these children have no controller forPRO (for them it is free) and they have a strategy to determine itspreferable referent. This analysis is quite in concert with Pinker'sContinuity Hypothesis. As we will show below, we have an account ofwhy these children lack control, and this account is consistent with theclaim that every developing grammar is constrained by UG, i.e. is apossible human grammar.Before presenting our analysis, we make precise two distinct aspects


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PROCESSING AND ACQUISITION OF CONTROL STRUCTURES 317of processing that will enter into our account. First is the act ofprocessing that produces a representation of a sentence for a child toact on. To produce such a representation the processor will make useof linguistic knowledge (syntactic and semantic) and will be constrainedby whatever limitations exist for the processing system. The representation is then acted upon in whatever manner is requested. In our studiesit is either enacted or its grammatical and referential properties arereported. As Otsu's (1981) work suggests, if a processor is unable toproduce an appropriate representation of a sentence, the relevantgrammatical constraints cannot be operative. In his studies, he accounted for children's apparent violation of universal linguistic principles by demonstrating that they were unable to process the relevantstructures. It is this sort of account of developmental phenomena, as wehave mentioned, that allows us to maintain the Continuity Hypothesis.There is also another aspect of processing that will interest us here. Werefer to the strategies that the child uses to interpret a sentence forwhich the grammar does not provide a unique interpretation. This is theaspect of processing that allows a child to decide, for example, if PROis free, what its preferred referent will be. The "First Noun" and"Minimal Distance" strategies are processing strategies of this lattertype. To make things easier to say, we propose to adopt the followingterminology: We will refer to the first type of processing as "processing"and the latter as "interpretive strategies."Turning now to our analysis of the data, there are two questions thatmust be addressed. The first is why children initially do not havecontrol in their grammars, and the second is why children do notcorrectly attach the adjunct clause when they do develop control. Wewill address them in turn.Recall that we assume that the rule determining the controller ofPRO is that the controller is the closest c-commanding NP if there isone and that this rule is part of UG. Given these assumptions, alongwith the Continuity Hypothesis, children's grammars should correctlydetermine the controller of PRO as soon as they correctly analyze theconstruction. This means that if the clause containing PRO is subordinated to a higher clause as a complement or as an adjunct, thegrammar should require control. Since young children do not appear tohave PRO controlled in these cases, we suggest that in the representation generated by the processor the two clauses are coordinated, ratherthan one being subordinate to the other.2 In this way, no NP in the first


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318 DANA McDANIEL AND HELEN SMITH CAIRNSclause c-commands PRO, so that PRO will have arbitrary reference (asis true of the adult control rule). This is similar to Tavakolian's (1981)Conjoined Clause Hypothesis and to Lebeaux's (this volume) accountof the acquisition sequence. Our claim raises three questions. First,what are the details of the coordinate structures under discussion?Second, what limits the representation? Is it the result of a limitation ofthe grammar or of the processor? And, third, what causes the changefrom coordination to subordination?Turning first to the construction, the second clause of the coordinatestructures in question would contain an empty subject and an untensedverb. Assuming that the empty subject is PRO, the requirement that itbe ungoverned is met. However, the child's grammar is then apparentlyallowing an untensed verb to appear in a solitary clause. This is notnecessarily ruled out by UG. In some languages, the subjunctive, whichis untensed, may stand on its own. Further research could help tospecify the children's exact analysis of these constructions and to testthe accuracy of the Conjoined Clause Hypothesis in general. We havenoted that in correcting the ungrammatical practice sentence "Wasclimbing the tree" several children gave the sentence "Climbing thetree." It would be interesting to ask the children who do not havecontrol whether sentences like "Climbing the tree" and 'To climb thetree" are grammatical. It is possible, however, that children would allowthese constructions only as part of a coordinate structure. There arealso constructions that would test the Conjoined Clause Hypothesis.The proposed analysis predicts that children who have only coordination should find wh-movement out of such constructions impossible.That is, a sentence like "Who did John tell Mary to hit?" should beungrammatical for them, since extraction is out of one part of aconjunction. In addition, such children should not have ExceptionalCase Marking, since this could obtain only in a structure of subordination. They should, therefore, find sentences like "John wants Mary toleave" ungrammatical (since Mary is without Case) or they wouldmisanalyze the sentence (possibly making Mary part of the higherclause and PRO the subject of the lower clause).We now turn to the question of why children's representations areinitially limited to coordination. Assuming the Continuity Hypothesisand that X-Bar Theory is part of UG, subordination should be availableto the child at the outset. There are two possible explanations for thislimitation, one related to the processor, the other to the grammar. It is


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PROCESSING AND ACQUISITION OF CONTROL STRUCTURES 319

well known that coordinated representations are easier to process thansubordinated ones. The former involves little more than the sequentialprocessing of each member of the coordinate. Subordination, on theother hand, involves holding the first clause open so that the secondclause can be embedded into it. It is likely that such processing skillsrequire time and adequate memory resources to develop. I f the processor is unable to produce subordinated representations, then the childcannot take advantage of their availability in the grammar. Anotherpossibility is that the grammar will not yet generate subordinatestructures because the lexical and semantic preconditions for suchstructures are not yet met. In order to know that a clause is subordinateto another clause, something must be known about the nature of thesemantic link between them. I f sub-categorization restrictions, in thecase of complements, and the nature of subordinating conjunctions, inthe case of adjuncts, are not part of the child's lexical knowledge, thesemantic link will be ignored and the subordinate structure will not berequired. We do not mean to suggest that these two accounts areentirely unrelated, since it is known that the processor responds to thesemantics of connectors and to the sub-categorization properties ofverbs in its operation.Turning now to the question of why representations change fromcoordinated to subordinated, there are two possible accounts. A purelyprocessing account would simply suggest that as the limitations on theprocessor are relaxed developmentally, full subordinated structures areproduced in response to the grammatical requirements. A purelysemantic account would suggest that as the semantic links are madeavailable by increased lexical knowledge, subordination will follow. Wethink that a combination of these two explanations is most plausible.For subordination to begin, both the processing and the semanticconditions must be met. The child's processor must achieve sufficientmaturity to allow it to respond as the semantic pre-requisites forsubordination are met. It is reasonable to assume that this will happenfirst with complementation, as the semantic relation between verbs andtheir complements are very salient and learned quite early. Subordination for the adjuncts must await the lexical distinction between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. It seems quite plausible thatthe relation between a subordinating conjunction and an adjunct ismore subtle than that between a verb and its complement. Controldevelops in complements before it develops in adjuncts, then, simply


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320 DANA McDANIEL AND HELEN SMITH CAIRNSbecause the requirement for subordination is recognized earlier for theformer than for the latter; but neither can take place until the processorreaches some threshold level of maturation.Turning now to the question of attachment, it is clear that the initialcorrect attachment of the complement to the VP is explained by thevery information that triggered subordination in the first place, viz, itsrelationship to the verb. We are assuming that subcategorization information identifies a class of complements that are semantically related tothe verb, hence will always attach to the VP. These might be recognizable as a class since they do not contain a connector and have to inInfl. It is more difficult to recognize the semantic relation between anadjunct and its matrix sentence. Further, attachment of the adjunct isnot determined by the simple realization that it is affiliated with asubordinating conjunction. Our hypothesis is the following. Before theadjunct is construed as a subordinate (hence control) structure, manychildren have adopted an interpretive strategy to determine the referentof PRO. They have, then, an opinion as to what such sentences shouldmean. When the confluence of semantic and lexical developmentsrequires that the adjunct be subordinated, the child selects the attachment site that will result (by the universal principle of control by theclosest c-commanding NP) in the interpretation that (s)he has come toprefer on strategic grounds. Thus, those children who had an objectstrategy will attach the adjunct to the VP, so that the controller of PROwill be the object. Children who had a subject strategy, on the otherhand, will correctly attach the adjunct to the S, so that the subject willbe the closest c-commander of PRO. (Such children will, of course,never go through an object controlled or mixed grammatical stage.)Children who had no strategy or who had a strategy preferring either ofthe internal NPs to an outside referent might attach the adjunct toeither the S or to the VP, or allow both possibilities. Such childrenwould never go through an object controlled stage, but would moveimmediately to a mixed grammar. The existence of all these differenttype of grammars based on interpretive strategy is plausible from ourinvestigations. In our first study, all the children without control inadjuncts had an object strategy. In our subsequent investigations, wealso found children without control who had a subject strategy or whochose the subject or object with equal frequency, but never chose areferent outside the sentence. In addition, in our current longitudinalstudy, we have observed children without control who did not acquire


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PROCESSING AND ACQUISITION OF CONTROL STRUCTURES 321control, but appeared to change their strategy. Thus, we have demon-strated that children without control adopt a variety of strategies. Wehave also found two pilot subjects who, within a month, moved fromno control with an apparent subject strategy to a grammar with adultcontrol.According to this account, then, the grammars that children developwith respect to control in adjuncts depends on the interpretive strategythey happened to be using at the time their semantic knowledge becamesophisticated enough for them to realize that the adjunct clause must besubordinate. Some children, those with a subject strategy at this time,will immediately have an adult grammar. Others, those who had anobject strategy, must undergo further development before reaching theadult grammar. These children will pass through the stages from VPattachment to mixed to S attachment. This progression of stages isdiagrammed below.

Object strategyMixed strategySubject strategy

Attachment sequenceVP mixedmixed SS

SWe will not attempt to account for the progression through these stages.Semantic development, involving better understanding of the subor-dinating conjunctions, probably plays a role. In our first study we alsohad sentences with the "in order to" connector, such as (4).

(4) Grover touches Bert in order to jump over the gate.Three children required object control for these, although they hadsubject control for other adjuncts. This suggests that the semantics ofthe connectors are acquired individually. Perhaps the fact that sen-tences with "in order to" contained the morpheme "to" persuaded thechildren to maintain their analysis as analogous to complements. Thiswould suggest that S attachment is associated with a class of lexicallyspecified subordinating conjunctions. The children also could hearsentences with adjuncts where the subject is clearly intended as thecontroller of PRO. Sentences with the adjunct preposed might alsoconstitute positive evidence for S attachment, since complements of theverb do not easily prepose.


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322 DANA McDANIEL AND HELEN SMITH CAIRNSThis account is highly speculative and is not easy to test empirically.Whereas a longitudinal study can determine which stages a child passesthrough, no study can definitively determine that a child has not passedthrough a certain stage. However, if in one interval of a longitudinal

study, a large number of children were observed to move from nocontrol and a subject strategy to adult control, our account would besupported. This is especially true if a large number of children with anobject strategy in the session before they had control were observed topass through the stages before reaching the adult grammar. It would bebest to study both the strategies and the grammatical development of alarge number of children without control. The children should be givenboth an act-out task and asked for judgments at short intervals. We areplanning such a study for the future.

There is another aspect of our data that we would like to discuss,although we are not sure whether it should be understood within atheory of the acquisition of control. During our first study we discovered that many children (12 of the 20, in fact) required the pronounin sentences like (5) to have internal reference.

(5) Grover touches Bert before he jumps over the fence.Further, the identity of the required referent correlated perfectly withthe child's grammar with respect to control of PRO. Thus, if the childwere object controlled, (s)he would insist that "he" had to be "Bert"; theadult children required it to be Grover; and the mixed children wouldallow either. Children who did not have control for PRO thought thatthe pronoun could be free. The children who required a particularreferent for the pronoun in sentences such as (5) were not generallyconfused about pronouns. They knew that the pronoun is free in theanalogous sentence (6).

(6) Grover told Bert that he would jump over the fence.Thus, it appears that this phenomenon is limited to adjuncts and isintimately connected with the child's acquisition of control. In ourcurrent longitudinal study, we have found two such children among 14.

It occurred to us that whatever was occurring in the grammars ofthese children might extend beyond pronouns. We asked some of thechildren in the first study and all the children in the current one forjudgments on the sentences of (7). It turns out that children


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PROCESSING AND ACQUISITION OF CONTROL STRUCTURES 323

(7) Bert hit Cookie Monster before ~ h e Iumped over thefence. Groverwho require pronouns to have a referent in adjuncts find such sentenceseither ill-formed or of uncertain grammaticality ("*" or "??"). It appears,then, that such children have a requirement in their grammar that therebe a referential link between the matrix and adjunct clauses in suchsentences. Either PRO or a pronoun with the appropriate featurescould fulfill this requirement. In either case, the element will becontrolled, although the controller is determined independently. I f thereis no such element, the sentence is ungrammatical.There are certain findings in the literature that suggest our conclusion is correct. Goodluck (in press), Tavakolian (1978), Lust et al.(1986) and others have noticed that children's preference for pronominal reference in unrestricted cases tends to parallel those forcontrol. What these studies have not told us is whether those were onlystrong preferences or whether some grammatical principle requiredrestricted reference. Another supportive study is by Smith and VanKleeck (1986), who gave children ages 3: 6 to 6: 0 an act-out task andan imitation task using the types of construction in question. They wereactually interested in assessing the effect of syntactic complexity on thechildren's performance, rather than in their grammatical knowledge.They selected the construction with PRO in an adjunct clause as acomplex construction, since the interpretation involves finding anantecedent, and used sentences like (7), with an overt subject in theadjunct clause, as the simpler counterpart to the PRO construction.

They expected the sentences with PRO to be more difficult to actout, due to their complexity, but easier to imitate, since they wereshorter. Their results were not as anticipated, however. On the act-outtask they found little difference between the two constructions in thenumber of errors. The most common type of error for the PROconstruction was to choose the wrong controller, which comported withtypical findings. In the construction with an overt subject, the mostcommon error was to eliminate this subject, treating the construction asthough the subject were PRO. Our hypothesis easily accounts for thisotherwise surprising result. The sentences with an overt subject, asopposed to being simple, would have been ungrammatical for many of


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324 DANA McDANIEL AND HELEN SMITH CAIRNSthe children. One solution was to act them out using the closestgrammatical counterpart. The results of the imitation task were asSmith and van Kleeck had expected, the constructions with an overtsubject being more difficult. However, they were surprised to obtain thesame results on a second imitation task in which they controlled forlength. The construction with an overt subject was still the moredifficult. Again, this is a plausible consequence of the ungrammaticalityof such sentences.A goal of our on-going research is to see how pervasive this type ofgrammar is among children. Seven of our longitudinal subjects still lackcontrol in adjuncts, so we hope to be able to trace not only theiracquisition of control, but also their extension of it to other elements inthe adjunct clause. If some children go through such a stage and othersdo not, we need to find out what distinguishes the two types of child. Atthe present time we have few hypotheses about this or about why anychildren have such a restriction at alP

NOTES

I There are some adults who allow either the subject or the object to be the controllerin (2). These adults probably have grammars like those of the children in the mixedcontrol stage described below.2 Greg Carlson (p.c.) has suggested that rather than having a coordinate structure,children might be analyzing the lower clause as an NP. Sentences like (1) and (2) wouldbe interpreted as (i) and (ii) respectively.

(i) Cookie Monster tells Grover [about] the jump over the fence.(ii) Cookie Monster touches Grover after the jumping over the fence.

Since the agent of the action nominal is undetermined, the child would interpretreference to be free in (1) and (2). Whereas we feel that this account is plausible, wewill not pursue it here.It may be relevant for our account that languages exist in which parataxis is analternative to subordination in structures of complementation. The paratactic construction is treated as a single sentence in terms of semantics and intonation, but is structurally identical to two separate clauses. Typically, the second clause of the paratacticconstruction lacks an overt subject. Noonan (1985; 55) gives the following examplefrom Lango.(iii) Dako bkbbbi ico bkwJrJ kaiwoman told (3 SG DAT) man sifted (3SG) millet

'The woman said it to the man, [he] sifted millet:(The woman told the man to sift millet (and he did


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PROCESSING AND ACQUISITION OF CONTROL STRUCTURES 325Note that the structure in (iii) is not identical to the one we posit for children, since thesubject of the second clause in (iii) is pro (Lango being a null subject language),whereas in the children's grammars it is PRO. The important point here is that there arelanguages in which complementation can be expressed through parataxis.3 It has also been suggested that these children have a system of switch reference intheir grammars. One problem with this is that children also restrict object pronouns inadjunct clauses (having an object pronoun obligatorily refer to an NP in the higherclause.) Switch reference systems, on the other hand, refer to the relationship betweenthe subjects of the two clauses. However, we plan to investigate this issue further infuture research.

BIBLIOGRAPHYGoodluck, H.: 'Children's interpretations of pronouns and null NP's', in B. Lust (ed.),

Studies in the Acquisition of Anaphora, vol. II: Applying the Constraints, Reidel,Boston, (in press).Hsu, 1. R and Cairns, H. S.: Interpreting PRO: From strategy to structure, Annals of theNew York Academy of Sciences, Linguistics Section, (to appear).

Hsu, 1. R., Cairns, H. S., and Fiengo, R. W.: 1985, The development of grammarsunderlying children's interpretation of complex sentences', Cognition 20,25-48.

Lebeaux, D.: The structure of he acquisition sequence, this volume.Lust, B., Solan, L., Flynn, S., Cross, c., and Schaetz, E.: 1986, 'A comparison of nulland pronominal anaphora in first language acquisition', in B. Lust (ed.), Studies inthe Acquisition ofAnaphora, Vol. I: Defining the Constraints, Reidel, Boston.McDaniel, D. and Cairns, H. S.: 1987, The child as informant: Eliciting intuitions fromyoung children, (unpublished ms.).McDaniel, D., Cairns, H. S., and Hsu, 1. R: 1990, 'Binding principles in the grammarsof young children', Language Acquisition I, 121-139.McDaniel, D., Cairns, H. S. and Hsu, 1. R: Control principles in the grammars of youngchildren, forthcoming.Noonan, M.: 1985, 'Complementation', in T. Shopen (ed.), Language typology andsyntactic description, Volume II: Complex Constructions, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge.

Otsu, Y.: 1981, Universal grammar and syntactic development in children: Toward atheory ofsyntactic development, MIT doctoral dissertation.Smith, C. and Van Kleeck, A.: 1986, 'Linguistic complexity and Performance', Journal

ofChild Language 13,389-408.Tavakolian, S. L.: 1978, 'Children's comprehension of pronominal subjects and missingsubjects in complicated sentences', in H. Goodluck and L. Solan (eds.), Papers in theStructure and Development of Child Language, vol. 4, University of Massachusetts,

Amherst.Tavakolian, S. L.: 1981, The conjoined-clause analysis of relative clauses', in S. L.Tavakolian (ed.), Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory, MIT Press,Cambridge.

mcdaniel e cairns 1991 the processing and acquisitions of control structures by young children

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