Facilitation and practice in verb acquisition.
This paper presents a model of syntax acquisition, whose main points are as follows: Syntax is acquired in an item-based manner; early learning facilitates subsequent learning--as evidenced by the accelerating rate of new verbs entering a given structure; and mastery of syntactic knowledge is typically achieved through practice--as evidenced by intensive use and common word order errors--and this slows down learning during the early stages of acquiring a structure. The facilitation and practice hypotheses were tested on naturalistic production samples of six Hebrew-acquiring children ranging from ages 1;1 to 2;7 (average ages 1;6 to 2;4 months). Results show that most structures did in fact accelerate; the notion of 'practice' is supported by the inverse correlation found between number of verbs and number of errors in the earliest productions in a given structure; and the absence of acceleration in a minority of the structures is due to the fact that they involve relatively less practice.
Keren-Portnoy
Tamar
T
School of Psychology, University of Wales Bangor, Gwynedd, UK. t.keren-portnoy@bangor.ac.uk
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D020557:Neurolinguistic Programming; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014706:Verbal Learning