Children's knowledge of prepositional phrase structure: an experimental test

A test of prepositional phrase structure in 4- to 6-year-old children's language is reported. Children's productions of PP and verb-particle sequences were elicited. Children produced pronominal and full NP objects of sequences corresponding to PPs and verb-plus-particle in the adult grammar. Prepositions freely took both pronominal and full NP objects ("He's jumping over it." "He's jumping over the table"). In particle verb constructions, pronominal objects were placed immediately after the verb in all but a few cases ("He's pushing it over" not "He's pushing over it"). With full NP objects, the preference was to place the verb after the particle ("He's pushing over the table"). These facts support an analysis in which if the child constructs a PP-over-P--NP structure for prepositional phrases but not for verb-particle sequences, and follows adultlike rules for these structures.