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5.2.1.1 Tasks

The child group took part in 3 truth-value judgment tasks (TVJ; Crain and Mc-

Kee 1985; Gordon 1996) and 2 sentence judgment tasks (McDaniel and Cairns,

1_{In order to maintain an equal number of children in all of the groups, the assignment to a condition} could not be truly random.

2_{It might be argued thatwantandneedare not the best verbs for examining raising-to-object struc-} tures, due to their “W-verb” status. That is, raising verbs comprise B(elieve)-raising and W(ant)-raising verbs (Postal,1974), and the inclusion of the latter in the class of RO verbs has been contested. Note, for instance, the constrast between active and passive forms of B-verbs (a) and W-verbs (b).

a. Neil believes Suki to have a job / Suki is believed to have a job b. Neil wants Suki to have a job / *Suki is wanted to have a job

However, both verbs still pass the diagnostics for raising verbs used by_{Davies and Dubinsky}(₂₀₀₄; see examples (₂₆)–(₃₀) in Chapter₃). More importantly, both verbs are perfectly acceptable in the RO utterances that will be used as stimuli for the current experiment.

3_{A pilot study in which children received test items from each of the 4 verbs indicated that 4- and 5-} year-old children do not have the attention span necessary to complete all test and filler items necessary for all 4 verbs.

1996). The TVJ tasks are described in detail below; the sentence judgment tasks will be presented in Chapter ₇.

For the TVJ tasks, children heard stories and saw them acted out with small figurines. For the sentence judgment tasks, children were shown pictures and heard a small descriptive vignette related to each picture.

After each story or vignette, the child listened to a puppet make a comment about the story or picture. For both types of tasks, the child was asked to reward the pup- pet for his correct (or grammatical/semantically felicitous) comments, and to punish him (i.e., provide him with a less attractive reward) for his incorrect (or ungrammat- ical/semantically anomalous) comments. The child rewarded the puppet by “feeding” him a plastic orange, and punished him by “feeding” him a plastic piece of lettuce.

5.2.1.2 Test Items

Both the “want/ask” group and the “need/tell” group received the same number of test items. Within each task, half the test items had a target positive answer, while the other half had a target negative answer. Children received a total of 6 test items for each task (half RO and half OC).4 _{Test items appear in the Appendices.}

Both humans and animals were presented as characters in the test items for Ex- periments 2–4. However, the animals that appeared were portrayed as having human qualities (e.g., talking, doing homework, running errands, etc.).

In both tasks, children were asked to support their negative responses by explaining why the puppet was wrong, and in the sentence judgment tasks, they were also asked to provide a “better” (grammatical or semantically felicitous) version of utterances that they labeled bad/silly (ungrammatical or anomalous).

4_{The one exception to this rule was the passive test (Experiment 3), in which children received 3 test} items total.

5.2.1.3 Fillers

Both “want/ask” and “need/tell” groups received the same set of filler items for each task. Fillers were used in the data analysis to check for a positive or negative response bias. Although the story or vignette for each filler item remained the same, the child was presented with the filler prompt with a target answer different from their last given answer (that is, if they had previously answered “right”/“okay”, the next filler would have a target answer of “wrong”/“silly”, and vice versa).

Fillers also served as a check that children were paying attention to the task. Since fillers were “easier” than test items—and should thus be no trouble to the children taking part in the experiment—children who got an excessive number of fillers incorrect were likely either not to have been paying attention to the task, or not to have understood it. Children received a total of 5 filler items for each task.5 Any child who got 3 out of 5 fillers wrong on more than one task was excluded from the analysis; however, out of all the child participants, only 1 child got 1 of the fillers wrong; all others performed perfectly on filler items.

Filler items appear in the Appendices.

5.2.1.4 Experimental Sessions

For the most part, children took part in the 5 experimental tasks during two sessions. For some participants (N = 7),6 _{these sessions were separated by a week or more, but} for the majority of subjects (N = 25), both sessions took place on the same day, with a short break between them. A handful of exceptional subjects within these 25 did not seem to tire or lose interest in the tasks, and thus took part in all 5 tasks during one long block session.

5_{Once again, the passive test (Experiment 3) was an exception to this rule: children received 2 fillers} items in this task. A child would have been excluded from the study if they got both fillers wrong.

Before the first TVJ task and the first sentence judgment task, children were provided with 4–5 warm-up/practice items, to act as a training session. For those children who completed both sessions on different days, the second TVJ and sentence judgment task were also preceded by such a warm-up. However, for those children who completed both sessions on the same day, I simply asked children what they should do when the puppet “got something wrong” and when he “got something right,” to make sure they remembered how the task worked.

To maintain focus and interest on the part of the subjects, experimental tasks were alternated, such that a TVJ task was followed by a sentence judgment task. Children always received a TVJ task first, on the assumption that learning the reward/punishment task would be easier when not compounded by the difficulty of learning how to give sentence judgments. Experiments 2 (basic active RO and OC) and 5 (semantic anomaly) always took place during the same session, as did Experiments 4 (embedded passive) and 7 (grammaticality judgment), but the order in which each subject participated in these two sessions was pseudo-randomly assigned. Experiment 3 (matrix passive) always took place during the first session, in order to complete the “longer half” first, and maintain children’s attention during the second session.

Children seemed to have no difficulty alternating between TVJ and sentence judg- ment tasks, though some did express a preference for the TVJ tasks (e.g., “I like the stories better!”).

All experimental sessions with children were video-taped for later analysis.