‘Children Are Nice to Understand’: Surface Structure Clues for the Recovery of a Deep Structure

An experiment tested understanding by children of sentences of the type ‘John is easy to see’. It was found that correct interpretation of this structure is a late acquisition (after age 6). Youngest children usually interpreted the surface structure subject as being the actor or deep subject. Only children above mental age 6:8 were able to recover deep structure correctly. Using ‘new’ (nonsense) adjectives in conjunction with the test structure, it was found that older children made use of transformations so that they only needed to hear a new adjective once in a single differentiating frame in order to assign correct interpretations to sentences where that adjective was the only clue for the recovery of the proper deep structure. The problem of test–retest consistency in language acquisition tasks is also discussed.