Children's capacity to correct grammatical violations in sentences

Abstract

Previous studies of children's knowledge of grammatical well-formedness have typically involved eliciting acceptability judgements from children. In the present study, children were expected to employ their tacit knowledge of the rules of grammar to correct sentences containing grammatical rule violations. Two groups of children (mean ages of 5;5 and 6;4) were presented with ungrammatical sentences resulting from either word-order changes or morpheme deletions. The results indicated that both groups of children performed well when presented with ungrammatical sentences containing morpheme deletions; but the performance of both groups was lower for the word-order violations, with the difference between the two types being greater for the 5-year-olds. It is argued that these results reflect differences in the extent to which the two types of rule violations rendered the original sentences meaningless.