One of the longest running debates in acquisition involves how and when children acquire adult knowledge of structures involving A-movement. In English, comprehension of verbal passives like (1) is delayed until as late as 6 or 7 years old (Hirsch and Wexler 2006). This delay is widespread, occurring in Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan and Altaic languages as well as Indo-European ones. Certain other A-movement structures, including Subject-to-Subject Raising (StSR) utterances such as (2), have also been noted to be delayed in English and Dutch-acquiring children (Hirsch, Orfitelli & Wexler 2008 and references therein).

(1)    Bill was kicked (by Karen).

(2)    Bill {seems/appears} (to Karen) to be wearing a hat.

However, it is clearly not the case that children are delayed in acquiring A-movement tout court, contra the original proposal of Borer and Wexler (1987). In the active voice, subjects are merged within the verbal domain and then undergo A-movement outside of it (e.g. Koopman and Sportiche 1991), yet children have no difficulties correctly placing the subject outside the VP (Stromswold 1996). More recent experimental work shows that children have a mastery of Subject-to-Object Raising from as young as 3 years old (e.g. Kirby 2010). Finally, in certain languages, most famously Sesotho (Demuth 1989), the verbal passive is purported to be acquired early.

This talk presents new data from a series of seven experimental studies on the acquisition of StSR in English. Based on these data, I propose the Argument Intervention Hypothesis (AIH), a theory independent version of the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (Hyams and Snyder 2005): children are delayed in acquiring exactly those structures which require A-movement across an intervening argument; namely, those which seem to violate Relativized Minimality (RM, Rizzi 1990) or a similar alternative formulation. I then discuss several substantial theoretical and typological predictions made by this account, for both syntax and acquisition.

References

Borer, H. and K. Wexler. 1987. The maturation of syntax. In T. Roeper and E. Williams (eds.)

Parameter Setting. 123-172. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Demuth, K.  1989.  Maturation and the Acquisition of the Sesotho Passive.  Language 65, 56-80.

Hirsch, C. and K. Wexler. 2006. Children’s passives and their resulting interpretation. In K.U. Deen, J. Nomura, B. Schulz, and B.D. Schwartz (eds.) The Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition­—North America, 125-136.

Hirsch, C., Orfitelli, R. and K. Wexler. 2008. The acquisition of raising reconsidered. In A. Gavarro and M J. Freitas (eds.) Proceedings of the Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Hyams, N., and W. Snyder. 2005. Young children never smuggle: Reflexive clitics and the universal freezing hypothesis. Paper presented at 30^th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, November 2005.

Kirby, S. 2010. Semantic scaffolding in L1A syntax: Learning raising-to-object and object control.

Proceedings of the 2009 Mind-Context Divide Workshop, 52-59. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.

Koopman, H. and D. Sportiche. 1991. The position of subjects. Lingua 85(1), 211-258.

Stromswold, K. 1996. Does the VP-internal subject stage really exist? Paper presented at BUCLD 1996.