THE DEVELOPMENT OF CATEGORIES AT THE SEMANTICS SYNTAX INTERFACE

This work aimed to reveal the thematic and grammatical role categories that are accessible to preschool children, and to determine how access to these categories changes with age. Three experiments explored categories associated with subjects of predicate adjectives and intransitive verbs, and with arguments of actional and experiential transitive verbs. A metalinguistic task was used in which children placed tokens on the objects in a picture according to the role they played in a sentence describing the scene. The results provide evidence for the psychological reality of a number of categorical distinctions. They also show greater salience of semantic categories relative to grammatical categories in young children, as compared with older children and adults, and they provide evidence bearing on theories of the development basis of subject. In particular, they are hard to reconcile with current versions of either Pinker's (1984) bootstrapping or Schlesinger's (1982, 1988) semantic assimilation theories, and a third theory is proposed.