Assignment 4Assignment 4Posted Thursday October 23rd, due Tuesday November 4th.
The goal of this assignment is to give you practice in designing part of an experiment, in this instance using the "Truth Value Judgment Task" described in Stephen Crain's paper "Language Acquisition in the Absence of Experience" (pp.382-391).
In the paper, Crain describes a couple of experiments in which he tested children's knowledge of a constraint on the interpretation of "referring expressions" such as 'Big Bird' or 'the frog'. This constraint rules out certain interpretations of sentences like:
In both of these examples 'he' and 'John' cannot refer to the same person.
Your task here is to design some experimental materials to test a closely related constraint, this time involving the interpretation of pronouns (like 'him', 'her', 'it', 'them', 'you').
In (2) the order of the name and the pronoun has been switched from the sentences in (1). In (2a) it is still impossible for 'John' and 'him' to refer to the same person, just like (1a). However, in (2b) it is possible for 'John' and 'him' to refer to the same person, in contrast to (1b). Ignoring some details that are irrelevant here, the generalization is that a pronoun cannot co-refer with a preceding noun phrase in the same clause, but it can co-refer with a preceding noun phrase in a different clause. Therefore, the reason why coreference is fine in (2b) is that the pronoun 'him' is in an embedded clause, and is therefore not in the same clause as 'John'.
Using the Truth Value Judgment Task, design sample stories that can be used to test whether young children know (a) that co-reference is impossible in sentences like (2a), and (b) that co-reference is possible in sentences like (2b).
Give examples of three stories/scenarios that could be used to test each of (a) and (b).
Pay attention to the factors that Crain warns us need to be carefully controlled in experiments of this kind (e.g. "plausible denial").