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Syntactic distinctions in child language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, E10–105, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-Mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

This paper presents a study of young children's understanding of a constraint on English word order, which is that pronouns and proper names cannot be modified by prenominai adjectives. For adults, this is a syntactic constraint: adjectives can only precede nouns, and pronouns and proper names are lexical Noun Phrases (NPs). In two analyses, the spontaneous speech of 14 one- and two-year-old children was studied. These analyses show that even in children's very first word combinations, they almost never say things like big Fred or big he. Some non-syntactic theories of this phenomenon are discussed and found to have serious descriptive problems, supporting the claim that children understand knowledge of word order through rules that order abstract linguistic categories. A theory is proposed as to how children could use semantic information to draw the noun/NP distinction and to acquire this restriction on English word order.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 343 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Kathryn Bock, Melissa Bowerman, Susan Carey, John Macnamara, and Steven Pinker for their comments, suggestions, and encouragement. This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

References

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