Evan Kidd

Publications

Displaying 1 - 3 of 3
  • Kidd, E. (2004). Grammars, parsers, and language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 31(2), 480-483. doi:10.1017/S0305000904006117.

    Abstract

    Drozd's critique of Crain & Thornton's (C&T) (1998) book Investigations in Universal Grammar (IUG) raises many issues concerning theory and experimental design within generative approaches to language acquisition. I focus here on one of the strongest theoretical claims of the Modularity Matching Model (MMM): continuity of processing. For reasons different to Drozd, I argue that the assumption is tenuous. Furthermore, I argue that the focus of the MMM and the methodological prescriptions contained in IUG are too narrow to capture language acquisition.
  • Kidd, E. (2003). An investigation of children’s sentence processing: A developmental perspective. PhD Thesis, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia.
  • Kidd, E. (2003). Relative clause comprehension revisited: Commentary on Eisenberg (2002). Journal of Child Language, 30(3), 671-679. doi:10.1017/S0305000903005683.

    Abstract

    Eisenberg (2002) presents data from an experiment investigating three- and four-year-old children's comprehension of restrictive relative clauses (RC). From the results she argues, contrary to Hamburger & Crain (1982), that children do not have discourse knowledge of the felicity conditions of RCs before acquiring the syntax of relativization. This note evaluates this conclusion on the basis of the methodology used, and proposes that an account of syntactic development needs to be sensitive to the real-time processing requirements acquisition places on the learner.

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