On the acquisition of two complex syntactic constructions in Tamil

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Abstract
A test was designed to throw light on how three- to five-year-old Tamil children comprehend two complex sentence types, one of them ambiguous for adult speakers and involving alternating Ns and Vs in surface form (NVNV), the other unambiguous and with clustering Ns and Vs (NNVV). The results indicate that neither of the age groups tested showed adult comprehension of either construction, but apparently relied on certain strategies of perception which are sensitive to features of surface syntactic form rather than to assumed real-world probabilities. The NVNV type yielded the largest proportion of ‘correct’ responses (in terms of the adult model), and also of favoured responses (in terms of syntactic strategies that may be postulated to account for the data); but another relevant variable turned out to be the order in which the constituent structures were probed; probing the internal predicate first enhanced the probability of favoured responses, for both the constructions tested.

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