Doctoral Dissertation Research: Intervention Effects in the Acquisition of Raising

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Sentences like (i) the boy seems to the girl to be happy are unusual because the subject the boy is understood as being associated with the adjective happy despite the two being distant from each other. Such sentences are referred to as 'raising' sentences because this association is thought to arise from movement of the subject (raising) from a location closer to the adjective. Compare this to (ii) it seems to the girl that the boy is happy, where the subject occurs in its original (unraised) position. Previous research has shown that children have difficulty understanding raising sentences like (i), but not an unraised sentence like (ii). This dissertation research investigates whether the source of difficulty might be reduced to a processing factor referred to as 'intervention' -- the presence of a noun phrase (the girl) intervening between the subject and the location from which it moved. Intervention effects have been observed in many structures that involve such moved elements, including object relative clauses, object wh-questions, etc. The goal of this dissertation is twofold. First, it corrects previously unnoticed flaws in current methodologies, and thus provides a better picture of children's abilities with respect to raising. Second, it offers an explanation for children's difficulty with raising that draws on a phenomenon (intervention) that generalizes across multiple constructions, thereby reducing the observed difficulties with raising to a more general facet of human language processing. The results of this work will allow us to evaluate and compare three different theories that have been proposed to explain intervention effects in the fields of language acquisition and adult sentence processing.Five experiments will be conducted to investigate how children?s comprehension is affected by (i) the presence of an intervening noun in raising structures, (ii) the type of intervening noun (lexical/pronominal), and (iii) the position of the subject (raised and unraised). This dissertation is interdisciplinary in bringing together three different subfields: acquisition, syntax and processing. Furthermore, the approach adopted in this dissertation has the potential to be extended to a variety of additional populations such as L2 learners of English and speakers of other languages that permit raising across another noun phrase.