The role of pronouns in young children's acquisition of the English transitive construction.
Two studies investigating the linguistic representations underlying English-speaking 2 1/2-year-olds' production of transitive utterances are reported. The first study was a training study in which half the children heard utterances with full nouns as agent and patient, and half the children heard utterances with both pronouns (i.e., He's [verb]-ing it) and also full nouns. In subsequent testing, only children who had been trained with pronouns and nouns were able to produce a transitive utterance creatively with a nonce verb. The second study reported an analogous set of findings, but in comprehension. Together, the results of these 2 studies suggest that English-speaking children build many of their early linguistic constructions around certain specific lexical or morphological items and patterns, perhaps especially around particular pronoun configurations.
Childers
J B
JB
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. jane.childers@trinity.edu
Tomasello
M
M
D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D015144:Southeastern United States