Acquiring basic word order: evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure.
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.
Akhtar
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Psychology Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. nakhtar@cats.ucsc.edu
D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary