The acquisition of the active transitive construction in English: A detailed case study

Abstract

In this study, we test a number of predictions concerning children's knowledge of the transitive Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction between two and three years on one child (Thomas) for whom we have densely collected data. The data show that the earliest SVO utterances reflect earlier use of those same verbs, and that verbs acquired before 2;7 show an earlier move towards adultlike levels of use in the SVO construction and in object argument complexity than later acquired verbs. There is not a close relation with the input in the types of subject and object referents used, nor a close adherence to Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) before 2;7, but both early and late acquired verbs show a simultaneous move towards PAS patterns in selection of referent type at 2;9. The event semantics underpinning early transitive utterances do not straightforwardly fit prototype ( high or inalienable) notions of transitivity, but rather may reflect sensitivity to animacy and intentionality in a way that mirrors the input. We conclude that children's knowledge of the transitive construction continues to undergo significant development between 2;0 and 3;0, reflecting the gradual abstraction and integration of the SVO and VO constructions, verb semantics, discourse pragmatics, and the interactions between these factors. These factors are considered in the context of a prototype for the transitive construction.* Acknowledgements: we would like to thank Thomas and his family for taking part in the study, Jeannine Goh and the army of transcribers at the Max Planck Child Study Centre, Manchester for turning the recordings into analysable data, and the editorial team and anonymous r eviewers for their helpful comments.

How Do Children Restrict Their Linguistic Generalizations? An (Un‐)Grammaticality Judgment Study

“…Finally, although recasts occur frequently for common errors (e.g., hit for *hitted ), some types of overgeneralization error would seem to be too infrequent for sufficient feedback opportunities to occur. For example, a recent dense-database study of the transitive causative construction (Theakston, Maslen, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2012) failed to find a single overgeneralization error of the type observed in Bowerman's (1988) diary study (* He giggled me, *She came it over there and * I'm just gonna fall this on her ). Indeed, Bowerman (1988: 92) characterizes un - prefixation errors as “one-time errors” for which “learners do not have repeated opportunities to observe the way other people express this particular meaning.” For these infrequent errors, the question is not so much how children retreat from the few errors that they produce, but how they generally avoid such errors, while maintaining the capacity to produce novel grammatical utterances using the same productive generalization.…”

The Problems of Transitivity Studies and Its Solution

“…Thus, it will surely have a stronger explanatory power than any other approaches mentioned above. In the future, the cognitive approach's research will be complemented by experimental studies [11].…”

Crosslinguistic Differences in the Encoding of Causality: Transitivity Preferences in English and Japanese Children and Adults

“…For example, Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003) found that only around 23% of all subject-predicates in English child-directed speech were intransitive (defined as utterances with both a subject and single lexical predicate with sub-categories transitive, intransitive & other). Similarly, Theakston, Maslen, Lieven, and Tomasello (2012) found that only around 14% of tokens of transitivity alternating verbs were intransitive. In contrast, Japanese children of a similar age are reported to hear between 52% and 66% intransitive verb uses, depending on exactly which verbs are included (e.g.…”