Evan Kidd

Publications

Displaying 1 - 4 of 4
  • 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.
  • Kidd, E., & Bavin, E. L. (2002). English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: Evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31(6), 599-617. doi:10.1023/A:1021265021141.

    Abstract

    Children must possess some ability to process input in a meaningful manner to acquire language. The present study reports on data from an experiment investigating 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking children's understanding of restrictive relative clauses manipulated for embeddedness and focus. The results of the study showed that English-speaking children acquire right-branching before center-embedded structures. Comparisons made with data from Portuguese-speaking children suggest general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development, and with respect to English, a “clause expansion” approach to processing in development
  • Kidd, E., Bavin, E. L., & Rhodes, B. (2001). Two-year-olds' knowledge of verbs and argument structures. In M. Almgren, A. Barreña, M.-J. Ezeuzabarrena, I. Idiazabal, & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), Research on child language acquisition: Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Child language (pp. 1368-1382). Sommerville: Cascadilla Press.

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