Social factors in the acquisition of a new word order

Abstract

Present syntax acquisition tasks are not optimal for studying how children learn a new syntactic constraint and generalize it in sentence production. To address this issue, this study modified Akhtar’s production task where novel word orders were learned, so that it was more socially natural. Three- and four-year-old children were tested in this new task and the role of input factors was assessed. The new task was more effective at eliciting the novel word order, but the role of input factors differed from earlier studies. To trace the source of these differences, the study manipulated the social features directly in a second experiment. The results suggest that social knowledge contextualizes the influence of input factors in syntax acquisition.