Input Factors in Early Verb Acquisition: Do Word Frequency and Word Order Variability of Verbs Matter?

Abstract

While simplex verbs show word order variability in main clauses and subordinated clauses in standard German, the verb particle of morphologically complex particle verbs is syntactically less variable: It generally occurs in sentence final position. Acquisition data reveal that telic verb particles appear in German-speaking children’s speech around 14 months of age, even earlier than the first simplex verbs. Using a longitudinal design, we examine whether children’s early preference for telic verb particles can be explained by word frequency and/or word order variability in the ambient language. The analysed data comprises 5,001 utterances from three mothers recorded in eight 1-h home sessions when the children’s ages were 14, 16, 18, and 20 months. While simple input frequency does not influence children’s early verb acquisition, it is shown that the factor ‘word order variability’, i.e. less syntactic variation in the input, favours children’s early acquisition. Thus, it is concluded that children seem to adhere to learning mechanisms that make use of the parental input in a specific way, by taking into account the structural properties of the target language.