Abstract for Giulia Bencini's talk

Early abstraction in child language production: Evidence from structural priming
Giulia Bencini (Hunter College, CUNY)
February 14, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

How abstract are children's early sentence representations? I propose that children's knowledge is more abstract and adult-like than some recent accounts have posited and that children's apparent lack of productivity is often due to task demands. I will present data from a structural priming experiment aimed at investigating young children's early sentence-level representations. Consistent with an early abstraction account, 3-year-olds produced descriptions using the structure modeled in the prime - the passive - even though they seldom produce the passive (and, in some accounts, are thought to have no grasp of it).