Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T06:01:18.908Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Can input explain children's me-for-I errors?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2009

MINNA KIRJAVAINEN ,
ANNA THEAKSTON  and
ELENA LIEVEN
MINNA KIRJAVAINEN*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester, UK
ANNA THEAKSTON
Affiliation:
University of Manchester, UK
ELENA LIEVEN
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
*
Address for correspondence: Minna Kirjavainen, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

English-speaking children make pronoun case errors producing utterances where accusative pronouns are used in nominative contexts (me do it). We investigate whether complex utterances in the input (Let me do it) might explain the origin of these errors. Longitudinal naturalistic data from seventeen English-speaking two- to four-year-olds was searched for 1psg accusative-for-nominative case errors and for all 1psg preverbal pronominal contexts. Their caregivers' data was also searched for 1psg preverbal pronominal contexts. The data show that the children's proportional use of me-for-I errors correlated with their caregivers' proportional use of me in 1psg preverbal contexts. Furthermore, the verbs that children produced in me-error utterances appeared in complex sentences containing me in the input more often than verbs that did not appear in me-for-I errors in the children's speech. These findings are discussed in the context of current explanations for children's case marking errors.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2009 , pp. 1091 - 1114
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

We would like to thank Brian and his family, and Fraser and his family, for their time and patience, the team of research assistants who collected and transcribed the data, and Jeannine Goh for supervising the dense database project. Thanks also to Julian Pine for helpful discussions about the data and to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions. This research was funded by a Max Planck PhD studentship to the first author.

References

REFERENCES

Ambridge, B. & Pine, J. (2006). Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model using an elicited imitation paradigm. Journal of Child Language 33, 879–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloom, L., Hood, L. & Lightbown, P. (1974). Imitation in language development: If, when and why. Cognitive Psychology 6, 380–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Budwig, N. (1989). The linguistic marking of agentivity and control in child language. Journal of Child Language 16, 263–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Budwig, N. (1996). What influences children's patterning of forms and functions in early child language? In Slobin, D., Gerhardt, J., Kyratzis, A. & Jiansheng, G. (eds) Social interaction, social context and language: Essays in honour of Susan Ervin-Tripp, 143–56. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Budwig, N. & Wiley, A. (1995). What language reveals about children's categories of personhood. In Sperry, L. & Smiley, P. (eds) Exploring young children's concepts of self and other through conversation, 21–32. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (1998). The emergent lexicon. Papers from the Regional Meetings, Chicago Linguistics Society 2, 421–35.Google Scholar
Cameron-Faulkner, T., Lieven, E. & Theakston, A. (2007). What part of no do children not understand? A usage-based account of multiword negation. Journal of Child Language 34(2), 251–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Francis, N. & Kucera, H. (1982). Frequency analysis of English usage: Lexicon and grammar. New York: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Aguado-Orea, J. & Gobet, F. (2007). Modelling the developmental patterning of finiteness marking in English, Dutch, German and Spanish using MOSAIC. Cognitive Science 31(2), 311–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoekstra, T. & Hyams, N. (1998). Aspects of root infinitives. Lingua 106, 81–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M., Cymerman, E. & Levine, S. (2001). Language input and child syntax. Cognitive Psychology 45, 337–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuczaj, S. (1976). -ing, -s and -ed: A study of the acquisition of certain verb inflections. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Naigles, L. & Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). Why are some verbs learned before others? Journal of Child Language 25, 95–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pine, J. M., Joseph, K. L. & Conti-Ramsden, G. (2004). Do data from children with specific language impairment support the agreement/tense omission model? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47, 913–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F., Lieven, E. V. M. & Theakston, A. L. (2005). Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model: Why the data on children's use of non-nominative 3psg subjects counts against the ATOM. Journal of Child Language 32, 269–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rispoli, M. (1994). Pronoun case overextensions and paradigm building. Journal of Child Language 21, 157–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rispoli, M. (1998). Me or my: Two different patterns of pronoun case errors. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 41, 385–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rispoli, M. (1999). Case and agreement in English language development. Journal of Child Language 26, 357–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rispoli, M. (2005). When children reach beyond their grasp: Why some children make pronoun case errors and others don't. Journal of Child Language 32, 93–116.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rowland, C. F. & Pine, J. M. (2000). Subject–auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: ‘What children do know?’ Journal of Child Language 27, 157–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schütze, C. T. (1997). INFL in child and adult language: Agreement, case and licensing. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Schütze, C. T. & Wexler, K. (1996). Subject case licensing and English root infinitives. In Stringfellow, A., Cahma-Amitay, D., Hughes, E. & Zukowski, A. (eds) Proceedings of the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. 2, 670–81. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Suppes, P. (1974). The semantics of children's language. American Psychologist 29, 103–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theakston, A. & Lieven, E. V. M. (2008). The influence of discourse context on children's provision of auxiliary BE. Journal of Child Language 35(1), 129–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (2001). The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of verb Verb-Argument structure: An alternative account. Journal of Child Language 28, 127–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (2002). Going, going, gone: the acquisition of the verb ‘Go’. Journal of Child Language 29, 783–811.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (2004). Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax. Journal of Child Language 31, 61–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (2005). The acquisition of auxiliary syntax: BE and HAVE. Cognitive Linguistics 16, 247–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M. & Tomasello, M. (2003). The role of the input in the acquisition of the third person singular verbs in English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 46, 863–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74, 209–253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Vainikka, A. (1994). Case in the development of English syntax. Language Acquisition 3, 257–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wexler, K. (1998). Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: A new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua 106, 23–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wexler, K. (2003). Lenneberg's dream: Learning, normal language development, and specific language impairment. In Levy, Y. & Schaeffer, J. (eds) Language competence across populations: Towards a definition of specific language impairment, 11–61. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Wexler, K., Schütze, C. T. & Rice, M. (1998). Subject case in children with SLI and unaffected controls: Evidence for the Agr/Tns Omission Model. Language Acquisition 7, 317–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar