ABSTRACT
I n the early 1970s, Dan Slobin acquired substantial funding to test the development of language comprehension strategies in several languages-English, Italian, Serbo-Croation, Turkish. This represented the intersection of our interests: his in developing a comprehensive theory of language acquisition, mine in the idea that early stages of acquisition depend on the creation of statistically supported behavioral strategies that short-cut syntactic knowledge. My laboratory’s original nding was in English, based on a set of studies that had children act out simple sentences with puppets (a collaborative study with Jacques Mehler and Virginia Valian). Typical performance data showed that at age 2, children use a simple strategy that focuses primarily on the exact sequence Noun Phrase+Verb, interpreting that as Agent+Verb. By age 3-4, they rely both on a more elaborated analysis of word order and semantic meaning. Thus, at age 2, children interpret declarative and object cleft sentences, along with semantically unlikely sentences above chance: in these constructions, the noun immediately before the verb is in fact the agent. By age 4 their performance depends on two strategies (1):
(1) a. NV(N) = Agent, predicate (patient) b. Animate nouns are agents, inanimate nouns are patients.
