Reconstruction Effects in Child Language

A central question in the study of language acquisition is how children develop a grammar consisting of abstract syntactic representations and computations. Especially problematic are grammatical operations not apparent in the surface form of children’s input, like reconstruction, the mechanism by which a syntactically moved constituent is interpreted in its pre-movement position. Reconstruction effects vary across syntactic environments, creating a complex system for language-learners to acquire. Nevertheless, the current study reveals that four-year-old children have adult-like knowledge of reconstruction, despite lacking direct evidence for it. Moreover, in cases where children appear to differ from adults, their differences are best attributed to their distinct parsing mechanisms, and not disparities in competence. An example will help illustrate reconstruction effects. As noted above, reconstruction is available in structures where a constituent has undergone syntactic movement, as in wh-questions. For example, in (1), the wh-phrase which book is associated with two structural positions: its surface position at the beginning of the sentence, and a reconstructed position as the object of the verb: