The notion of pseudo-licensing gives rise to the interesting question what results would come out if the ERIC/Acting Out task was to be carried out with *hoeven + pseudo- licenser test items. For instance:

Would children indeed be inclined to accept such utterances? To actually carry out such an experiment, however, the young age of the subjects to be tested will be a problematic factor. The spontaneous speech data show that headshaking and nee (no, non-quant.) as pseudo-licensers in general have ceased to occur at the age of three. In order to test children's judgments of such sentences, the experiment would thus have to be carried out with very young subjects. As became clear from pilot testing with a two year old child (cf. Note 8 in Chapter 3, the ERIC task is too difficult for children younger than three.

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