A Corpus Study on the Item-based Nature of Early Grammar Acquisition.

This paper explores the item-based nature of child language acquisition by examining data from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000). Two studies are explicated: the first uses pooled data from several children, and the second follows a single child longitudinally. The results show that the learning of the complex construction consisting of a main clause followed by an infinitival compliment, e.g. I want to play, center around a single verb, want, even though other candidate verbs exist in the children’s vocabulary. We provide empirical evidence to show that children initially learn grammar via itembased units and gradually break down complex constructions as units into smaller pieces in a process that leads towards the organization of language into the abstract categories consistent with a fully competent adult grammar.

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