How Preschool Children Understand Missing Complement Subjects

Abstract

MARATSOS, MICHAEL P. How Preschool Children Understand Missing Complement Subjects. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1974, 45, 700-706. Preschool children's comprehension of the missing subject of infinitival complement clauses was investigated in 2 studies. In the first, use of a surface-structure minimal-distance principle of the type outlined by C. Chomsky was distinguished from use of a semantic-role principle. Preschool children acted out sentences in which the use of the 2 principles would lead to different results. The results strongly favored their having adopted the semantic-role principle. In the second study, situational relations among lexically unspecified actors were also found inadequate to explain preschool children's performances. The hypothesis adopted was that as children use contextual information to interpret the reference of missing complement subjects, they relate this interpretation to semantic-role relations among the lexically specified deep-structure noun phrases of the main clause.