Publication . Costa, João; Loureiro, João; Departamento de Linguística (DL); Centro de Linguística da UNL (CLUNL); Universidade NOVA de Lisboa; Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Universitat de Girona
This article presents an experiment on children’s sensitivity to two phenomena associated with V-to-I: morphology and word order. It is shown that children are highly sensitive to morphology, but accept ungrammatical sentences in which verb and adverb are in the wrong order. These results on children’s accuracy contrast with those reported for production. An analysis is proposed for explaining this asymmetry, discussing the notion of trigger in acquisition.
