Clausal order and the acquisition of Dutch deverbal compounds

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore how Dutch-speaking children acquire deverbal compounds, particularly in ordering verbs and nouns. Englishspeaking children form compounds like bottle breaker around 5-6 years of age and make noun-verb reversal errors at younger ages. These errors have been attributed to clausal ordering. Dutch allows more variations in clausal ordering, so Dutchspeaking children might acquire deverbal compounds differently from Englishspeaking children. In Study 1, we examined the input to a Dutch-speaking child between 4;8 and 5;2 and her compound acquisition. She heard a variety of clausal orderings, mostly with verbs before objects, and her deverbal compounds were already well acquired. In Study 2, we tested 24 Dutch-speaking preschool children's production and comprehension of novel compounds. They produced many of the same forms as have been reported for English-speaking children, making reversal errors at around the same age. In Study 3, we compared a subset of the Dutchspeaking children with age-matched English monolingual children. We found a slight advantage for the Dutch-speaking children on production but no difference on comprehension. We argue that children's ordering errors with OV-er compounds are not due to clausal word order but to ordering of other complex word forms.

Acquisition of deverbal compounds by French-speaking preschoolers

“…In closing, one possible way in which the present results can be reconciled with previous results from English-and Dutch-speaking children's deverbal compound acquisition (Brisard et al, 2005;Clark et al, 1986;Murphy & Nicoladis, in press;Nagpal & Nicoladis, 2006). It is possible that, in production, children attempt only constructions they feel they know (see Tomasello, 2000, who argues that children tend to generalize conservatively from familiar constructions in creating novel constructions).…”

“…No child produced a construction in the form NV-ant although some produced NV-eur forms; this result shows that the meaning might override frequency, given that the former form was more frequent than the latter in conversational French (see Table 2). In comprehension, they did make subject errors, choosing an interpretation of the compound in line with subject-verb interpretation as often as verb-object, as has been reported for English-and Dutchspeaking children for OV-er compounds (Brisard et al, 2005;Nagpal & Nicoladis, 2006; note that both these studies used similar methodology to the present study). As the children's vocabulary grows, they tend to choose the correct interpretation more often.…”

“…Neither set of these predictions held true in this study. The children made no verb-object reversals in their production (in contrast to both English-and Dutch-speaking children who do make reversal errors in producing deverbal compounds; Brisard et al, 2005;Clark et al, 1986;Murphy & Nicoladis, in press). When children did not produce target forms, they usually produced phrases (as would be predicted by Clark, 1998) and only rarely lexical forms.…”

“…They understand a window breaker to mean a window that breaks something because they so often hear nouns before verbs in phrases. However, there is some evidence that Dutch-speaking children also mis-order novel OV-er compounds at about four years of age, even though Dutch allows many phrasal orderings, including some in which objects precede verbs (Brisard, Laarman, & Nicoladis, 2005). Furthermore, it has been shown that British English-speaking children produce more ungrammatical novel VO compounds than Canadian English-speaking children (Murphy & Nicoladis, in press).…”

Morphological variation in the speech of Frisian-Dutch bilinguals

“…Compounding is a very productive means of word formation in Germanic languages (Booij, 1992(Booij, , 2002Booij & van Santen, 1998, p. 150;Brisard, Laarman, & Nicoladis, 2008;Jackendoff, 2002, p. 250;Lieber, 2005, p. 375). Compound words may typically contain a linking suffix.…”