A long way to long-distance movement: A study on the acquisition of factive islands

Factive islands have been argued to be a late acquired phenomenon (de Villiers et al. (1998). Acquisition of the quantificational properties of mental pedicates. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), <i>Proceedings of the 22nd Boston University conference on language development.</i> Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press), but existing experimental studies have focused on a very limited number of factive verbs and report variation between verbs. Seventy monolingual Romanian-speaking children (split into two age groups: 5-year-old and 7-year-old children) and 15 adults took part in a comprehension task, which tested the (un)availability of adjunct extraction from the clausal complements of both cognitive and emotive factive verbs. The results show that only at age 7 do children begin to observe the restrictions imposed by factive islands, regardless of the sub-type of factive verb, even though they do not reach full mastery of the phenomenon at this age.