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Acquiring basic word order: evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1999

NAMEERA AKHTAR
NAMEERA AKHTAR
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Abstract

Recent studies indicate that young English-speaking children do not have a general understanding of the significance of SVO order in reversible sentences; that is, they seem to rely on verb-specific formulas (e.g. NPpusher – form of the verb PUSH – NPpushee) to interpret such sentences (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997). This finding raises the possibility that young children may be open to learning non-SVO structures with novel transitive verbs. To test this hypothesis, 12 children in each of three age groups (two-year-olds, three-year-olds, and four-year-olds) were taught novel verbs, one in each of three sentence positions: medial (SVO), final (SOV), and initial (VSO). The younger age groups were equally likely to use the novel (non-English) orders spontaneously as to correct them to SVO order, whereas the oldest children consistently corrected these structures to SVO order. These results suggest that English-speaking children's acquisition of a truly general understanding of SVO order may be a gradual process involving generalization (learning) from examples. The findings are discussed in terms of recent data-driven learning accounts of grammar acquisition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 339 - 356
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to express my gratitude to the directors and teachers of The Granary Childcare Center, A Child's Reflection, Community Children's Center and Neighborhood Childcare Center, and of course to the parents and children who participated. For many hours of data collection and coding, I thank Katherine Wilson, Christine Wilkes, Barton Lynch, David Lippman, and Terry Lien. Many thanks also to Adeel Akhtar, Margarita Azmitia, Maureen Callanan, Christi Cervantes, Kelly Jaakkola, Dom Massaro, Geoff Pullum, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. The research was supported by funds granted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Portions of the data were presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (Washington, DC, 1997) and at the 1997 Stanford Child Language Research Forum.