THE CHILD AS INFORMANT - ELICITING LINGUISTIC INTUITIONS FROM YOUNG-CHILDREN

In this paper we report an interview technique we have developed to elicit judgments from young children about the well-formedness and referential properties of sentences. Judgments are compared with act-out responses of a group of 20 children ranging in age from 3 years 9 months to 5 years 4 months. We argue that judgment data are more revealing of children's grammars than are traditional performance tasks. © 1990 Plenum Publishing Corporation.