Children’s difficulty with raising: A performance account

Abstract

This article explores English-speaking children’s acquisition of raising structures with an experiencer (e.g., John seems to Mary to be happy). We review and address previously unnoticed issues in the methodologies of existing studies testing the acquisition of raising, thus providing a more reliable picture of children’s abilities with respect to raising. We then present three experimental studies, which reveal that children’s purported difficulty with raising is significantly reduced when the experiencer is fronted to the beginning of the sentence (e.g., To Mary, John seems to be happy) and when the experiencer is pronominal (e.g., John seems to her to be happy). While the acquisition of this construction has been argued to be delayed due to grammar-internal reason, we propose an alternative account that attributes the difficulty to a performance limitation, responsible for intervention effects observed in a variety of other structures.