Abstract for Jeffrey Lidz's talk

Economy, learning and parsing
Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland)
April 27, 2006 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

I examine children's knowledge of two phenomena that are argued to be subject to Economy, which functions as a filter at the LF interface. In the case of Quantifier Raising, we find that 4-year-olds, unlike adults, allow a quantifier to take scope out of a finite clause (Syrett and Lidz 2005, 2006). In the case of reconstruction effects, we find that 4-year-olds differ from adults in the extent to which they force reconstruction of a wh-phrase (Leddon and Lidz 2006). I argue that both of these effects derive from the immaturity of children's parsers. In cases where the grammar generates representations that are filtered out by conditions on well-formed LFs, children's fail to implement the relevant filters. A residue of this effect is found to hold in adults as well.