The extragrammaticality of the acquisition of adjunct control

ABSTRACT Previous research on 4–6-year-olds’ interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like John called Mary before running to the store. Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children’s errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by comparing children’s behavior on two truth value judgment tasks: a high-demand task, with a true/false judgment based on event ordering, and a low-demand task, with a true/false judgment based on the color of an item. Children’s behavior is more adultlike on the low-demand task, suggesting that children’s interpretations may be influenced by extragrammatical factors. Implications are discussed for children’s behavior in previous studies and for the role of the linguistic input.