When grammar wins over sense: children's judgments of extraposed relatives

A sentence judgement task was used to test 4- to 5-year-old children's knowledge of coreference possibilities for extraposed relatives. The overall pattern of children's performance in the first experiment reported here is similar to that of a control group of adult subjects and is consistent with knowledge of the linguistic constraints that restrict extraposition in the adult grammar. Performance on a follow-up experiment argues against a nongrammatical explanation of the results of the first experiment. Children's performance on the judgement task shows that they are capable of abstracting away from the pragmatics of the immediate situation in making judgments and can be construed as evidence that children construct mental representations for the sentences they judge in which an NP over NP S structure is constructed for relative clauses at a level distinct from the surface structure string. The comparative lack of response patterns found in some previous work is discussed in the context of models of sentence processing.