Variables and Values in Children’s Early Word-Combinations

Anat Ninio

doi:10.2478/plc-2014-0009

Abstract

Abstract A model of syntactic development proposes that children’s very first word-combinations are already generated via productive rules that express in syntactic form the relation between a predicate word and its semantic argument. An alternative hypothesis is that they learn frozen chunks. In Study 1 we analyzed a large sample of young children’s early two-word sentences comprising of verbs with direct objects. A majority of objects were generated by pronouns but a third of children’s sentences used bare common nouns as objects. We checked parents’ twoword long sentences of verbs with objects and found almost no bare common nouns. Children cannot have copied sentences with bare noun objects from parents’ two-word long sentences as frozen chunks. In Study 2 we raised the possibility that children’s early sentences with bare nouns are rote-learned ‘telegraphic speech’, acquired as unanalyzed frozen chunks from longer input sentences due to perceptual problem to hear the unstressed determiners. To test this explanation, we tested the children’s speech corpus for evidence that they avoid determiners in their word-combinations. The results showed that they do not; in fact they generate very many determiner-common noun combinations as two-word utterances. The findings suggest that children produce their early word-combinations of the core-grammar type by a productive rule that maps the predicate-argument relations of verbs and their semantic arguments to headdependent syntax, and not as frozen word-combinations. Children mostly learn to use indexical expressions such as pronouns to express the variable semantic arguments of verbs as context dependent; they also employ bare common nouns to express specific values of the arguments. The earliest word-combinations demonstrate that children understand that syntax is built on the predicate-argument relations of words and use this insight to produce their early sentences.

Highlights

In a recent study it was found that parents’ two-word utterances expressing the three core syntactic relations, namely, the subject-verb, verb-objectThe special advantage of pronouns and proper nouns in parental two-word utterances expressing core grammar is that they make the relative role of the two words – the verb and the nominal – transparent
The characterization of children’s two-word speech as ‘telegraphic speech’ is well-accepted, the claim that children produce bare nouns as complements of verbs should be checked on large samples in order to make generalization possible
We shall compare children’s direct objects to parents’ objects in short verb-object sentences in a large corpus of child-directed speech, asking whether it is likely that children learn their sentences with bare common nouns from parents’ input sentences as frozen chunks

Summary

Introduction

In a recent study it was found that parents’ two-word utterances expressing the three core syntactic relations, namely, the subject-verb, verb-objectThe special advantage of pronouns and proper nouns in parental two-word utterances expressing core grammar is that they make the relative role of the two words – the verb and the nominal – transparent. Pronouns and proper nouns are very special type of words in that the only way they can function in sentences is to refer to some entity (Reboul, 2001) When they accompany a word with the semantics of a verb, always encoding a complex event such as an action, it is obvious that the referential word must indicate some entity that serves as the semantic associate of the event depicted, such as its actor or object. In Study 1 we shall examine the earliest verbobject combinations generated by a large sample of English-speaking children. The first study will closely examine a large sample of English-speaking children’s earliest and shortest verb-direct object combinations. We shall compare children’s direct objects to parents’ objects in short verb-object sentences in a large corpus of child-directed speech, asking whether it is likely that children learn their sentences with bare common nouns from parents’ input sentences as frozen chunks

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Methods

Results