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Performance limitations have frequently been invoked as an explanation for children’s language errors and non-adult-like patterns of language use. The general idea is that immature cognitive abilities mask an underlying representational competence; children’s errors stem from an inability to access or deploy that competence. However, the exact cognitive mechanisms that impede performance have rarely been directly specified or measured. Instead, they have been deduced from the ways that changes to the stimuli or context change performance (e.g., Crain & Thornton, 2000; Musolino & Lidz, 2006; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; Valian & Aubry, 2005; Valian, Hoeffner, & Aubry, 1996). The current work delves more specifically into the nature of performance limitations as a source of children’s non-adult-like performance. It examines a well-studied underextension found in children’s production and comprehension of aspect morphology (i.e., the imperfective marker –ing and the simple past/perfective marker –ed) and includes independent assessments of neurocognitive skills that are plausibly connected to appropriate performance with the linguistic elements, above and beyond the needed linguistic competence.
Aspect: a task analysis
Aspect refers to two distinct ways that languages mark the temporal properties of events (the third major way is tense; cf. Comrie, 1976; Klein, 1994; Smith, 1991; Vendler, 1967). Lexical aspect refers to the temporal properties of a predicate: specifically, it refers to the properties conveyed through the meanings of lexical items in the sentence, particularly the verb and its arguments. The primary division for this category centers on whether an event is described as having an inherent endpoint (called telic) or as a state or action that can occur for an indefinite period of time (called atelic). A telic predicate like paint a circle specifies when the event is over, namely, when there is a completed circle. By contrast, an atelic predicate like listen to music describes something that could happen for any arbitrary length of time. Grammatical aspect refers to the perspective that a speaker takes on an event and is conveyed through grammatical means—in English, through verb morphology. The primary division for this category centers on whether an event is described from an external perspective that includes its entirety (called perfective) or from an internal perspective that focuses on the event’s ongoing...