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Davies and Dubinsky(2004) claim that semantic restrictions are much stricter on clauses embedded under OC verbs than on those embedded under RO verbs. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that colloquial adult usage might not support this claim. More specifically, adults—when speaking metaphorically or playfully—often allow an OC verb like “ask” or “tell” to embed an inanimate subject in the lower clause. If adults allow (and produce) such utterances with a regular enough frequency, this “anomalous” speech will comprise a piece of children’s input. More importantly for the current experiments, however, it is unfair to hold children accountable for a semantic restriction that does not necessarily hold for adult speakers.

Thus, in Experiment 6, adult semantic restrictions on clauses embedded under RO and OC verbs were tested.

7.4.1 Method

Adults were presented with a pen-and-paper questionnaire including semantic anomaly judgments. They were instructed that after each sentence, they should indi- cate whether that sentence was “okay” or “weird” for English as it is normally spoken.

Test items for the adult task were nearly identical to those appearing in Experiment 5, with the following exceptions:

• proper NPs were changed when they reflected characters common in children’s media,

• adults did not receive a pre-stimulus vignette, so some extra context was provided when the lack of context which children received might have made the test item unclear, and

• adults received all test items from both the “want/ask” and the “need/tell” condi- tions.

Test items that were changed for reasons of characters or context are marked with ∆ in (₈₄) below.

Test items alternated with filler items which included want, ask, need, and tellin single-clause frames. Both test and filler items appear in Appendix F.

(84) Adult semantical anomaly judgment test items

a. The boy wanted the cake to be chocolate

b. The girl wanted the coat to fit well ∆

c. She wanted the key to open the door (but didn’t know if it was the right key) ∆

d. # Ernie asked the music to stop playing

e. # The girl asked the trees to be tall

f. # The boy asked the ball to fall back down

g. The teacher needed the books to weigh less

h. The cat needed the bed to be shorter

i. The author needed the pen to write (but there was no ink in it) ∆

j. # Ella told the toys to be smaller ∆

k. # The girl told the soup to have carrots in it

l. # Bert told the car to drive faster

7.4.2 Results

Table 7.6: Adult Anomaly Judgments

Class Verb Predicate % “Weird”

RO want . . . the cake to be chocolate 7.1

. . . the coat to fit well 0.0

. . . the key to open the door 7.1

need . . . the books to weigh less 28.6

. . . the bed to be shorter 50.0

. . . the pen to write 7.1

OC #ask . . . the music to stop playing 78.6

. . . the trees to be tall 85.7

. . . the ball to fall back down 92.9

#tell . . . told the toys to be smaller 78.6 . . . told the soup to have carrots in it 92.9 . . . told the car to drive faster 57.1

Although it results in a loss of information to do so, we can collapse these results and present the data in terms of adults’ predicted and actual responses. These appear in Table7.7as percentages of “OK” and “weird” responses, and in Table7.8as proportions. For ease of comparison, Table _7.9 presents the adult and child responses by verb class as proportions.

Table 7.7: Anomaly: Predicted and Observed Adult Responses (%)

Type Item predicted observed

OK weird OK weird

RO . . . wanted [the cake to be chocolate] 100 0 83.35 16.65 OC . . . asked [the music to stop playing] 0 100 19.03 80.97

Table 7.8: Anomaly: Adult Responses (Proportions)

Type Item predicted observed

OK weird OK weird

RO . . . wanted [the cake to be chocolate] OC . . . asked [the music to stop playing]

Table 7.9: Anomaly: Observed Adult and Child Responses (Proportions)

Type Item adults 4-year-olds 5-year-olds

OK silly OK silly OK silly

RO . . . wanted [the cake to be chocolate] OC . . . asked [the music to stop playing]

As expected, adults were more likely to judge the OC utterances as anomalous than they were the RO utterances, indicating that OC verbs are stricter in their semantic restrictions on embedded clauses than are RO verbs.

However, it should be explicitly noted that neither were RO utterances accepted, nor were OC utterances rejected, across the board by participants. In fact, one RO utterance (The cat needed the bed to be shorter) was judged as anomalous by fully 50% of adult participants, and one OC utterances (Bert told the car to drive faster) was judged as acceptable by roughly 43% of adult participants. Only one RO utterance (The girl wanted the coat to fit well) was judged as acceptable by 100% of participants, and no single OC utterance was rejected by all participants.

Moreover, anomaly judgments seem to be linked with particular verbs, rather than simply with a class as a whole: the want utterances were, overall, judged as more acceptable than the need utterances.

This data indicates that the utterances comprising children’s input—that is, the set of utterances from which children must extract the syntactic rules relevant to RO and OC verbs—is not nearly as neat as previous literature may have indicated. More precisely, semantic anomaly seems to exist on a spectrum, rather than as a dichotomy, and the phenomenon of this messy input must certainly contribute to the challenge of learning these verbs.

As a comparison, Table7.10 presents both adults’ and children’s responses to the semantic anomaly items as percentages. The child data is presented by age group, as well as pooled.

Table 7.10: Adult and Child Anomaly Judgments by Item

% “Weird”

Class Verb Predicate Adult 4 5 Child

RO want . . . the cake to be chocolate 7.1 12.5 0.0 6.25

. . . the coat to fit well 0.0 50.0 25.0 37.5

. . . the key to open the door 7.1 50.0 12.5 31.3

need . . . the books to weigh less 28.6 50.0 62.5 56.3

. . . the bed to be shorter 50.0 37.5 75.0 56.3

. . . the pen to write 7.1 62.5 75.0 68.8

OC #ask . . . the music to stop playing 78.6 87.5 50.0 67.9

. . . the trees to be tall 85.7 87.5 87.5 87.5

. . . the ball to fall back down 92.9 75.0 75.0 75.0 #tell . . . told the toys to be smaller 78.6 62.5 87.5 75.0 . . . told the soup to have carrots in it 92.9 62.5 87.5 75.0 . . . told the car to drive faster 57.1 87.5 87.5 87.5

It is difficult to know exactly what to make of the comparative data. On the one hand, since the adult system comprises children’s input, it is important to compare the judgments of adult and child speakers. On the other hand, however, because the adult system isnotall-or-nothing (as the literature has essentially assumed), no neat predictions or hypotheses can be made or tested—at least, not with any sort of statistical precision. At the very least, I would argue that what we see in the table above is the begin- nings of adultlike appreciation of the semantic restrictions inherent to these verbs. As with adults, there is no perfect agreement among children as to which utterances were acceptable and which not; also like adults, however, children show a stronger tendency to reject inanimate subjects embedded under OC verbs than under RO verbs.

Moreover, between the ages of 4 and 5, there appears to be some development in the direction of the adult system: for instance, 4-year-olds perform at chance on both

want the coat to fit welland want the key to open the door, but most 5-year-olds correctly accept these as felicitous. Likewise, almost half the 4-year-olds incorrectly accepted tell the soup to have carrots in it as felicitious, but far fewer 5-year-olds did.

On the other hand, the 5-year-olds did not perform in a more “adultlike” way

across the board; for instance, they tended to incorrectly reject theneed items as a group more often than 4-year-olds did. Moreover, while 4-year-olds correctly rejected ask the music to stop playing, 5-year-olds were at chance on this item.

Since children (like adults) do not perform in a categorical way on one utterance type versus another, and since development on adultlike semantic knowledge about these verbs is non-monotonic, there must be factors influencing children’s performance beyond the verb classes. In the style of Becker (2006), future research should attempt to tease apart what lexical and syntactic cues sway adults in their judgments on semantic anomaly with RO and OC utterances.