LIN 450 – study questions, part 4
1) What is meant by the term “holophrase”? What is the Informativeness Principle?
2) Can children at the one-word stage understand more than they can say? What is the
evidence?
3) Are children at the two-word stage good at using word order to figure out sentence
meaning? Evidence?
4) In sentence understanding, do children at this stage (three years old or younger) seem
to use the “big rule” or the “little rule” strategy?
5) When do children start using passives? Do they distinguish between be and get
passives? Does comprehension precede production or vice versa? What is the relevance
here of reversible sentences?
6) What is the Canonical Sentence Strategy? Relevance to the acquisition of the passive
construction?
7) What is the Minimal Distance Principle and what is it intended to explain?
8) What does the Minimal Distance Principle predict with respect to promise? How is
this relevant to how young children interpret promise? Or how they interpret easy plus an
infinitive?
9) What do very young children (2.5-3.5 years) seem to know about pronouns? What
about reflexives? What strategy do they apparently use? Is there a good match between
production and perception in the use of pronouns and reflexives?
10) What is the competence/performance distinction and how is it relevant here?
11) In sentences with more than one quantifying term (e.g. every and a), and especially in
those in which the word denoting the larger set is in the subject, what have experiments
shown about children’s understanding of quantifiers?
