Grammatical transformations and sentence comprehension in childhood and adulthood

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(66)80023-3Get rights and content

Children and adults verified sentences of four grammatical types—“kernel,” passive, negative, and passive negative—with respect to pictures. The pictures presented situations which were either reversible, in that the object of action could also serve as the subject, or nonreversible, in that the object could not normally serve as the subject. Chomsky's syntactic competence model correctly predicted that passives would take more time to evaluate than kernels, and passive negatives more time than negatives; but semantic and psychological factors are required to explain the finding that syntactically simple negatives took more time than relatively more complex passives. Making sentences nonreversible largely washed out the difference in syntactic complexity between active and passive sentences, making passives about as easy as kernels, and passive negatives about as easy as negatives. It is argued that nonreversibility facilitates comprehension of passive (both affirmative and negative) sentences in that, although the normal subject-object order is reversed, it is still clear which of the two nouns is subject and which object. The syntactic theory also does not account for an obtained interaction between truth value and affirmation-negation. All of the factors considered—syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic—are important in accounting for the performance of Ss as young as six.

References (15)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (298)

  • The roles of the analogy with natural selection in B.F. Skinner's philosophy

    2019, Behavioural Processes
    Citation Excerpt :

    This interpretation of generative grammars was, quite reasonably, taken by psycholinguists to imply that sentences with grammatical derivations involving many formal operations would take longer to comprehend than sentences with derivations involving fewer formal operations. This prediction, however, was tested and fell short of expectations (Slobin, 1966). Almost four decades later, some psycholinguists had become “disenchanted” with this interpretation of generative grammars (Ferreira, 2005).

  • Lessons from the English auxiliary system

    2020, Journal of Linguistics
View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text