The assessment of complex aspects of children's syntactic development can be carried
out in a dialect-neutral fashion. The item types proposed for this purpose encompass
wh-questions, passives, and articles, and test the child's understanding of implicit
grammatical relations, the rules governing syntactic movement, and discourse linking.
We present the rationale for the items and the specific research supporting them,
as well as some suggestions for how to help children who fail on the concepts to gain
a better understanding of them.
KEYWORDS
Implicit information - discourse linking - double wh-questions -
wh-barriers; definite versus indefinite articles - passive - hidden agents - exhaustive
set - singleton answers - medial question
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Thomas W RoeperPh.D.
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003
Email: roeper@linguist.mass.edu