Abstract
The question of how children learn Function Words (FWs) is still a matter of debate among child language researchers. Are early multiword utterances based on lexically specific patterns or rather abstract grammatical relations? In this corpus study, we analyzed FWs having a highly predictable distribution in relation to Mean Length Utterance (MLU) an index of syntactic complexity in a large naturalistic sample of 315 monolingual French children aged 2 to 4 year-old. The data was annotated with a Part Of Speech Tagger (POS-T), belonging to computational tools from CHILDES. While eighteen FWs strongly correlated with MLU expressed either in word or in morpheme, stepwise regression analyses showed that subject pronouns predicted MLU. Factor analysis yielded a bifactor hierarchical model: The first factor loaded sixteen FWs among which eight had a strong developmental weight (third person singular verbs, subject pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, modals, demonstrative pronouns and plural markers), whereas the second factor loaded complex FWs (possessive verbs and object pronouns). These findings challenge the lexicalist account and support the view that children learn grammatical forms as a complex system based on early instead of late structure building. Children may acquire FWs as combining words and build syntactic knowledge as a complex abstract system which is not innate but learned from multiple word input sentences context. Notably, FWs were found to predict syntactic development and sentence complexity. These results open up new perspectives for clinical assessment and intervention.
Highlights
The question of how children learn Function Words (FWs) is still a matter of debate among child language researchers
We evaluated the fit of a structural equation model (SEM) to determine the degree of adequacy using different adjustment indices: the index square root approximation error of Steiger Lind (RMSEA), the normalized adjustment index (NFI), the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI), the comparative adjustment index (CFI)
When analyzing a subset of the most frequent FWs i.e., eighteen selected FWs in a large corpus of 315 monolingual French children aged 2 to 4, we challenged the lexicalist view, making the hypothesis that FWs are better connected to syntactic development than Content Words (CWs) since these categories do not contribute to the constitution of the lexicon in the same manner
Summary
The question of how children learn Function Words (FWs) is still a matter of debate among child language researchers. Factor analysis yielded a bifactor hierarchical model: The first factor loaded sixteen FWs among which eight had a strong developmental weight (third person singular verbs, subject pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, modals, demonstrative pronouns and plural markers), whereas the second factor loaded complex FWs (possessive verbs and object pronouns) These findings challenge the lexicalist account and support the view that children learn grammatical forms as a complex system based on early instead of late structure building. Exploring whether FWs may be grammatically functional early in the acquisition of language is in line with the bottom-up driven hypothesis Under this assumption, by attending to the recurring phonological, prosodic and distributional characteristics which FWs typically share young children could derive some useful information for (i) segmenting the continuous speech stream into a set of distinct constituents, (ii) discovering the syntactic class of words and phrases. In such learning-based theories, the young child is sensitive to the phonological, prosodic and distributional patterns in language, and relies on general cognitive (not language-specific) mechanisms to generalize these patterns into a full grammar
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