Acquiring Viewpoint Aspect One Level at a Time

This paper examines children’s comprehension of viewpoint aspect at three levels: the pragmatic, the morpho-syntactic, and the semantic. Results (1) confirm Berman and Slobin (1994)’s finding that children have not mastered the pragmatic use of backgrounding for viewpoint aspect by five years old; (2) show that children have mastered the mapping of viewpoint aspect onto the morpho-syntax of English by age 3;7; (3) show that children aged 2;6, while they behave at chance levels in the morpho-syntactic task with viewpoint aspect, nevertheless demonstrate comprehension of the semantics of viewpoint aspect as they are carried through the open-class vocabulary.