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

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 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 non-target contexts.