ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the syntactic aspects of competence. It addresses what determines the difficulty of different syntactic constructions. The chapter presents some evidence that young children have difficulty coping with complex syntax. The problem of recoverability also affects children. Three main points are made in this section: First, children entering grade school are far from possessing the syntactic competence they will have as adults. Second, mastery of a syntactic construction is acquired in stages, with very heavy semantic support being essential in the early stages. Third, children acquire control of a construction before they learn all the restrictions on its use, with the result that they sometimes apply it inappropriately. A variety of studies suggest that clauses, both in the surface structure of a sentence and also in the deep structure, are treated as psychological units during comprehension. Constructions that embed one sentoid are another is a major source of syntatic complexity.
