Aspects of the acquisition of object control and ECM-Type verbs in European Portuguese

Abstract

We investigate the acquisition of sentential complementation under causative, perception, and object control verbs in European Portuguese, a language rich in complement types, including the typologically marked inflected infinitives. We tested 58 children between 3 and 5 years of age and 24 adults on a sentence completion task. The results support two main hypotheses concerning children’s initial biases in representing complement structure. The first pertains to argument structure—a verb selects only one internal (propositional) argument (Single Argument Selection Hypothesis), the other to syntactic structure—propositional complements are complete functional complements (Complete Functional Complement Hypothesis). These initial biases lead children to avoid raising-to-object and object control structures, in favor of finite complements and inflected infinitive complements, the latter appearing in both target and nontarget contexts.