Abstract
There is consensus that languages possess several grammatical variants satisfying the same conversational function. Nevertheless, it is a matter of debate which principles guide the adult speaker’s choice and the child’s acquisition order of these variants. Various proposals have suggested that frequency shapes adult language use and language acquisition. Taking the domain of nominal modification as its testing ground, this paper explores in two studies the role that frequency of structures plays for adults’ and children’s structural choices in German. In Study 1, 133 three- to six-year-old children and 21 adults were tested with an elicited production task prompting participants to identify an agent or a patient referent among a set of alternatives. Study 2 analyzed a corpus of child-directed speech to examine the frequency of passive relative clauses, which children, similar to adults, produced very often in Study 1. Importantly, passive relatives were found to be infrequent in the child input. These two results show that the high production rate of rare structures, such as passive relatives, is difficult to account for with frequency. We claim that the relation between frequency in natural speech and use of a given variant in a specific context is indirect: speakers may opt for the less grammatically complex computation rather than for the variant most frequently used in spontaneous speech.
Highlights
Imagine you just got a phone call from one of your neighbors, who lives upstairs
Do the preferred grammatical variants have in common that they are frequent or that they are grammatically less complex than full object relative clauses (ORCs), independent of frequency? In the current study, we investigate to what extent corpus frequencies determine the types of grammatical variants used in nominal modification
Let us turn to the variant of passive relative clause (RC), which requires passive morphology and syntax to be in place
Summary
A total of 133 children between the ages of 3 and 6 were tested. Children were recruited in daycares in the metropolitan XXX area, and all parents gave written consent for their child’s participation in the study. A parental questionnaire ensured that none of the children was bilingual, had signs of language impairment, language delay, or hearing problems. All children were assessed with a standardized language test (SETK for ages 3 to 5, Grimm 2001; TROG-D for age 6, Fox 2006). Eleven children did not perform within the age-appropriate norms and were excluded from the analysis, and another eight children were excluded due to missing 8 or more items (out of 48 test items of our main test). We report results on the remaining 114 typically developing monolingual German-speaking children.
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