Structure Dependence in Grammar Formation

A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to account for language acquisition. At the heart of the problem is the poverty of the stimulus, which underdetermines the hypotheses that children formulate. Generative grammar proposes that the form for expressing rules is innately constrained, and one putative constraint is structure-dependence. The present study subjected this proposal to an empirical test. In the first experiment, yes/no questions—amenable in principle to both structure-dependent and structure-independent analyses—were elicited from thirty 3- to 5-year-old children. A second experiment explored the nature of children's errors in Experiment 1. A third experiment contrasted a structurally-based account of the acquisition of interrogatives with one based on semantic generalization. The results of these experiments support Chomsky's contention that children unerringly hypothesize structure-dependent rules. Moreover, it was found that the rules which children invoke are formally insensitive to the semantic properties of noun phrases—a finding that supports the developmental autonomy of syntax.