The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of verb-argument structure: an alternative account.

This study investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Valian (1991) claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames because they do not require a direct object argument. Children who understand this distinction are expected to produce a lower proportion of transitive verb utterances early in development in comparison with later stages of development and to omit direct objects much more frequently with mixed verbs (where direct objects are optional) than with transitive verbs. To test these claims, data from nine children aged between 1;10.7 and 2;0.25 matched with Valian's subjects on MLU were examined. When analysed in terms of abstract syntactic structures Valian's findings are supported. However, a detailed lexical analysis of the data suggests that the children were not selecting argument structure on the basis of syntactic complexity.

[1]  L. Bloom.  Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars , 1970 .

[2]  Gary M. Olson,et al.  DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES IN MEMORY AND THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE , 1973 .

[3]  R. Brown,et al.  A First Language , 1973 .

[4]  M. Braine.  Children's First Word Combinations. , 1976 .

[5]  L. Bloom,et al.  Semantics of verbs and the development of verb inflection in child language , 1980 .

[6]  Michael P Maratsos,et al.  Initial verbs of yeso questions: A different kind of general grammatical category. , 1983 .

[7]  Steven Pinker,et al.  Language learnability and language development , 1985 .

[8]  Jill de Villiers,et al.  Learning how to use verbs: lexical coding and the influence of the input , 1985, Journal of Child Language.

[9]  Nina Hyams,et al.  Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters , 1986 .

[10]  Virginia Valian.  Syntactic categories in the speech of young children. , 1986 .

[11]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  The Child Language Data Exchange System: an update , 1990, Journal of Child Language.

[12]  P. Bloom.  Subjectlees sentences in child language , 1990 .

[13]  B. MacWhinney.  The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk , 1992 .

[14]  A. Bryk,et al.  Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. , 1991 .

[15]  M. Tomasello.  First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development , 1994 .

[16]  Virginia Valian.  Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children , 1991, Cognition.

[17]  LouAnn Gerken,et al.  The metrical basis for children's subjectless sentences , 1991 .

[18]  Beth Levin,et al.  English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation , 1993 .

[19]  Kenneth Wexler,et al.  On the grammatical basis of null subjects in child language , 1993 .

[20]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Twenty-Five-Month-Old Children Do Not Have a Grammatical Category of Verb. , 1993 .

[21]  J. Pine,et al.  Syntactic categories in the speech of young children: the case of the determiner , 1996, Journal of Child Language.

[22]  Virginia Valian,et al.  Young children's imitation of sentence subjects: Evidence of processing limitations. , 1996 .

[23]  Kenneth Wexler,et al.  The development of inflection in a biologically based theory of language acquisition. , 1996 .

[24]  J. Pine,et al.  Slot and frame patterns and the development of the determiner category , 1997, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[25]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs , 1997, Journal of Child Language.

[26]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Young children's productivity with word order and verb morphology. , 1997, Developmental psychology.

[27]  J. Pine,et al.  Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category , 1998 .

[28]  S. Allen.  Categories within the verb category: learning the causative in Inuktitut , 1998 .

[29]  J. Pine,et al.  Subject–verb agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: what low error rates hide , 1998, Journal of Child Language.

[30]  Letitia R. Naigles,et al.  Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use , 1998, Journal of Child Language.