Children’s comprehension of NP embedding

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How do children learn to interpret structurally complex noun phrases? NPs embedded inside other NPs are not accessible to predication, so that in a sentence with a subject NP containing a PP modifier such as The cup on the table is green or The dog with the bone is blue, the adjectival predicate has scope over the highest but not the embedded nominal referent (Arsenijevic & Hinzen 2012). We used a coloring task to examine children’s comprehension of sentences containing these complex NPs, comparing PP modifiers (locative and comitatives) to coordinated NPs (The cup and the table are green), where both referents are accessible. Three- to five-year-old children were highly accurate with control and coordinate sentences, and performed well with locative PPs, but were not different from chance level for comitative sentences, which many children treated as coordinates. That children differentiate between coordinate and locative sentences provides evidence that children have early access to the syntax-semantics of complex nominals. The contrast between locatives and comitatives suggests that comprehension is not merely guided by subject agreement (since the agreement patterns are the same for both types of PP-modified subjects), and that children still need to learn the lexical semantics of prepositions. Diachronically, languages with comitative modifiers evolve into language with comitative coordination (Haspelmath 2007). Thus, we propose that these error patterns for comitative prepositions can be explained by the assumption that children’s errors align with the direction of systematic language change.