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lable at ScienceDirect
Lingua
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua
0024-3841/$ – see front matter
2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2009.10.006
de Villiers et al., 1994; De Vincenzi, 1991; Friedmann et al., 2009; Friedmann and Novogrodsky, 2004; Ha° kansson and
Hansson, 2000; McKee et al., 1998; Roth, 1984; Sheldon, 1974; Tavakolian, 1981). Other structures that involve Whmovement,
including object topicalization and Wh questions, also show a similar pattern of late acquisition of object
movement comprehension (Adraga˜o, 2005; De Vincenzi, 1991; de Vincenzi et al., 1999; Friedmann et al., 2009; Friedmann
and Lavi, 2006; Jakubowicz and Gutierrez, 2007; Tyack and Ingram, 1977).
All these structures involve Wh movement, which is movement of a phrase to the beginning of the clause. However,
phrasal movement by itself cannot be the source of the problem for two reasons: first of all, not all types of phrasal
movements are acquired late (for example, movement of the argument of unaccusative verbs from object to subject position
is acquired before the age of 2 years, Costa and Friedmann, 2009; Friedmann, 2007; Lorusso et al., 2005; Snyder et al., 1995).
Moreover, describing the problem in terms of a generalized failure in Wh-movement is not accurate either, because some
structures that involve Wh-movement are understood by children at these ages (subject questions, subject relatives, and
certain types of object relatives, Friedmann et al., 2009).
To restrict the generalization to the types of Wh-movement structures that are problematic, one should consider the
difference between subject movement and object movement. Subject and object relatives differ with respect to the
position from which the phrase hasmoved. As seen in (1), in subject relatives the movement is from the embedded subject
position, and in object relatives the movement is from the embedded object position. The original position is marked by
underlining.
As a consequence, when the object moves, it crosses the subject (the girl crosses the boy in (1b)), but when the subject
moves, no crossing of another argument takes place (as seen in (1a)). We will refer to the crossing of an argument over
another as a ‘‘crossing dependency’’.1 Friedmann et al. (2009) suggest that crossing dependencies are the origin of the
problem in young children’s comprehension of object relatives and objectWhquestions. This account can be taken as simply
restricting the types of Wh-movement structures that will be problematic for children, or as suggesting a configuration that
is difficult for children, independently of Wh-movement. Thus, in the current study we take this generalization one step
further and ask whether other types of crossing dependencies, which do not involve Wh-movement, also cause similar
difficulties in comprehension.
Coordinated sentences like The scientist tested the boy and smiled are a good testing ground for detecting whether crossing
dependencies are indeed problematic in general – they do not involve Wh-movement, but they do involve a crossing
dependency. We assume that these structures involve movement of the subject of the second conjunct across the object of
the first conjunct – as suggested in analyses involving Across-the-Board (Burton and Grimshaw, 1992; McNally, 1992) or
sideward movement (Colac¸o, 2005; Nunes, 2004; see 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。