THE DEVELOPMENT OF CATEGORIES AT THE SEMANTICS SYNTAX INTERFACE

This work aimed to reveal the thematic and grammatical role categories that are accessible to preschool children, and to determine how acces s to these categories changes with age. Three experiments explored cat egories associated with subjects of predicate adjectives and intransit ive verbs, and with arguments of actional and experiential transitive verbs. A metalinguistic task was used in which children placed tokens on the objects in a picture according to the role they played in a sen tence describing the scene. The results provide evidence for the psych ological reality of a number of categorical distinctions. They also sh ow greater salience of semantic categories relative to grammatical cat egories in young children, as compared with older children and adults, and they provide evidence bearing on theories of the development basi s of subject. In particular, they are hard to reconcile with current v ersions of either Pinker's (1984) bootstrapping or Schlesinger's (1982 , 1988) semantic assimilation theories, and a third theory is proposed .