Child Relativized Minimality and Grammaticality Judgement

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Grammaticality judgments are key to generative linguistic theory, revealing grammatical constraints.
• Acceptability is multifactorial and quantifiable, unlike grammaticality.
• Relativized Minimality (RM) in acquisition suggests children may have stricter RM constraints than adults.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between grammaticality and acceptability in child language acquisition.
• To determine if children assimilate Relativized Minimality (RM) violations and object relative clauses in their grammaticality judgments.
• To explore potential differences in how children and adults process linguistic constraints.

Main Methods:

• An experiment was designed to elicit grammaticality judgments from children.
• The experiment targeted object relative clauses and classic RM violations.
• Preliminary results were collected from 6-year-old Catalan-speaking children.

Main Results:

• Children's grammaticality judgments for object relatives and RM violations were not parallel.
• RM violations were rejected more frequently than object relative clauses.
• This suggests children can differentiate between these linguistic structures.

Conclusions:

• Children's linguistic knowledge differentiates between structural complexity and grammatical violations.
• Grammaticality judgments can reveal nuanced differences in child language processing.
• Findings challenge the notion that children uniformly assimilate all complex structures as errors.