Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic acquisition

Abbot-Smith, Kirsten; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1515/tlr.2006.011

Cited by 259 publications

(186 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The representation of object relatives is presumably grouped around a semiabstract or prototypical schema (cf. Abbot-Smith and Tomasello 2006), such as INANIMATE NP-PRONOUN-VERB.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

Brandt

Kidd

Lieven

et al. 2009

Cognitive Linguistics

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103

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In numerous comprehension studies, across di¤erent languages, children have performed worse on object relatives (e.g., the dog that the cat chased) than on subject relatives (e.g., the dog that chased the cat). One possible reason for this is that the test sentences did not exactly match the kinds of object relatives that children typically experience. Adults and children usually hear and produce object relatives with inanimate heads and pronominal subjects (e.g., the car that we bought last year) (cf. Kidd et al. 2007). We tested young 3-year old German-and English-speaking children with a referential selection task. Children from both language groups performed best in the condition where the experimenter described inanimate referents with object relatives that contained pronominal subjects (e.g., Can you give me the sweater that he bought?). Importantly, when the object relatives met the constraints identified in spoken discourse, children understood them as well as subject relatives, or even better. These results speak against a purely structural explanation for children's di‰culty with object relatives as observed in previous studies, but rather support the usage-based account, according to which discourse function and experience with language shape the representation of linguistic structures.

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“…The representation of object relatives is presumably grouped around a semiabstract or prototypical schema (cf. Abbot-Smith and Tomasello 2006), such as INANIMATE NP-PRONOUN-VERB.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

Brandt

Kidd

Lieven

et al. 2009

Cognitive Linguistics

Self Cite

103

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, emergentist accounts (e.g., usage-based approach) assume that children are gradually constructing abstract representations of syntax from their input, and, therefore, there should be graded individual differences between participants [117]. That is, the distribution of individual differences should be unimodal and more variable than that predicted by the formal account.…”

Section: Box 1 Ids In Statistical Learning and Their Relationship Tomentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

Kidd

Donnelly

Christiansen³

2018

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

349

231

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“…While the prototype and exemplar views may be incompatible in their pure forms, they share a sufficiently large number of characteristics to allow for a hybrid model to be formulated which includes both schema-based and exemplar-based representations (Abbot- Smith & Tomasello, 2006;Langacker, 2000). As a hybrid model is not only compatible with usage-based assumptions, but also particularly informative for accounts of language learning and use, it is adopted in the current paper.…”

Section: Implicit Linguistic Knowledge In the Usage-based Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

The perfective past tense in Greek child language

Stavrakaki

Clahsen

2008

J. Child Lang.

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This study examines the perfective past tense of Greek in an elicited production and an acceptability judgment task testing 35 adult native speakers and 154 children in six age groups (age range: 3 ; 5 to 8 ; 5) on both existing and novel verb stimuli. We found a striking contrast between sigmatic and non-sigmatic perfective past tense forms. Sigmatic forms (which have a segmentable perfective affix (-s-) in Greek) were widely generalized to different kinds of novel verbs in both children and adults and were overgeneralized to existing non-sigmatic verbs in children's productions. By contrast, non-sigmatic forms were only extended to novel verbs that were similar to existing non-sigmatic verbs, and overapplications of non-sigmatic forms to existing sigmatic verbs were extremely rare. We argue that these findings are consistent with dual-mechanism accounts of morphology.

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Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic acquisition

Abstract: Abbot-Smith, Kirsten and Tomasello, Michael (2006)

Cited by 259 publications

References 42 publications

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

The perfective past tense in Greek child language

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